DarkPlaces

Games: Quake → (DOS, 1996) · Quake Mission Pack No. 1: Scourge of Armagon (Windows, 1997) · Quake Mission Pack No. 2: Dissolution of Eternity (Windows, 1997)

DarkPlaces: a game engine based on Quake’s. It began as a Quake mod and, when id Software released the engine’s source code, LadyHavoc turned it into an engine of its own, which adds modern rendering features, extends QuakeC, the language the game logic is written in, and supports more map and model formats while staying compatible with Quake mods. It runs Quake and its two expansions, The Scourge of Armagon and The Dissolution of Eternity, mods such as Nehahra, Quoth, Arcane Dimensions, or Quake 1.5, and standalone games built with it, such as Nexuiz, Xonotic, Transfusion, or Steel Storm; the game is picked with a command-line option or by renaming the executable. Its features include real-time bump-mapped lighting and shadows, improved with .rtlights files; redesigned smoke, blood, and explosion effects, decals, fog, and skyboxes; replacement textures, JPEG included; Ogg Vorbis audio tracks instead of the CD ones; surround sound up to 7.1; and a server browser. Its latest published release, from 2014, was re-uploaded by the project to GitHub in December 2023, though it advises against it for new projects. Since 2021 it has been developed on GitHub, with Linux x86-64 builds in its continuous integration; the most complete builds, for Windows, Linux, and macOS, are the ones published in Xonotic’s engine packages, though the project points out it has no special relationship with Xonotic.

You needThe files from your own copy of Quake (the id1 folder with its .pak files) and, for the expansions, their hipnotic and rogue folders; standalone games built with DarkPlaces come with their own data. Plus Windows, Linux, or macOS; to build it, GCC or Clang with SDL2 (on Windows, through MSYS2 and MinGW).

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Original studio

id Software

Year

1996

Author

LadyHavoc

Stars

452

Last activity

2026-10-21 · 10 days ago

Latest version

v20140513 · 2023-12-30

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C

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