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v2.5.0 — Weapon blast marks + stencil shadows on full G4 fleet

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@matthewdeaves matthewdeaves released this 06 Jun 10:48
v2.5.0
3941a2e

What's new

Per-weapon blast marks on walls

All weapons now leave the right mark on the surface they actually hit — walls, floors, or ceilings:

  • Rocket — large charred burn mark (burn.tga, 128×128), biggest of the set
  • Grenade — medium scorch mark (reuses scorch)
  • Plasma — blue-white hot scorch (plasma.tga)
  • BFG — sickly-green energy char with tendrils (bfg.tga, 128×128)
  • Railgun — tight punch-through hole + scorch ring (rail.tga)
  • Bullets, blaster, shotgun — unchanged (already worked)

Previous behaviour: explosion events carry no surface normal in the packet, so the old code hardcoded a straight-up projection. Blasts against walls hit nothing and left no mark. Fixed by tracing the 6 cardinal axes from the blast origin and using the nearest solid surface.

Crisp stencil shadows on the full G4 fleet

The G4 machines (mini-g4, quicksilver) previously had blotchy, jagged model shadows because the stencil path that prevents shadow-triangle overlap was disabled — it had been measured at a 60% fps cost. That measurement pre-dated the AltiVec optimisations. Re-benched 2026-06-06:

Machine No stencil Stencil ON Cost
mini-g4 (R9200, 1.25 GHz) 127 fps 108 fps ~15%
quicksilver (R9000 Pro, 733 MHz) 65 fps 65 fps zero

Both G4 machines now get crisp projected stencil shadows identical to the G5 and Intel boxes.

Player models install reminder

The DMG README now clearly explains that baseq2/players/ must be copied from your retail Quake II install alongside the pak files. Without it multiplayer player models will be missing.

Other

  • deploy.sh now preserves baseq2/players/ from rsync --delete — it was being silently wiped on every deploy
  • watchlink: Bonjour .local hostname resolution on 10.3/10.4; watch_host auto in every machine config

Install

  1. Copy everything from the DMG into a folder (e.g. ~/Desktop/quake2/)
  2. Copy your retail pak0.pak, pak1.pak, pak2.pak and players/ folder into baseq2/
  3. Double-click Quake2.app

Retail Quake II is on Steam and GOG. Runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther (G3) and newer — Tiger, Leopard, Lion, through modern Intel macOS.

Verified bench results (1024×768)

Machine fps demo1 fps demo2
mini-g4 (R9200, Tiger) 108 108
quicksilver (R9000 Pro, Tiger) 65 65
imac-g5 @ 1440×900 (R9600, Leopard) 46.8 46.8
Assets 3
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