openQ4 0.14.1

openQ4 0.14.1

Field	Value
Version	0.14.1
Release tag	v0.14.1
Commit	0abaa5c4
Generated	2026-11-11 22:46 UTC
Release scale	override
Version decision	Version override was supplied manually.
Workflow	43108547033
Since	v0.13.2 (compare)

openQ4 0.14.1 replaces the withdrawn 0.14.0 and is the biggest update since 0.13.2. It delivers everything 0.14.0 introduced, from The Awakening and stable shadow mapping to the new interface and Android, then refines, fixes and optimizes all of it toward production quality. It is a big step on the road to 1.0.

Highlights

• 🪐 The Awakening. Play the recovered Quake 4 expansion beside the original campaign from Single Player → Campaign. It is rebuilt on openQ4's own game code and keeps its own saves. You supply the expansion files.
• 🌗 Shadow mapping you can leave on. Quality and Ultra cast soft, stable shadow maps on OpenGL and Vulkan, now cached, steady while you move and cheaper to draw.
• 🖥️ A new interface. Rebuilt menus and settings, the Remastered HUD, weapon wheels, scopes and animated crosshairs, ready for controllers, touch, tall screens and text up to 200 %. Classic is one setting away.
• ⚡ Faster, and instant. Re-tiered presets with smarter Auto-Detect and quicker loading. V-Sync, MSAA, texture quality and most presets now apply without a restart.
• 🔺 Vulkan on Windows is now a supported renderer and the automatic choice for new installs, with OpenGL as the fallback.
• 📱 Android (experimental). A signed ARM64 APK with touch controls, portrait play and a touch layout editor, built on Emile Belanger's port.
• 🎯 Multiplayer. Bots that take orders, quick chat and voice chat, objective markers, demo markers with fast seeking, and inputs that reach the server on time again.
• 🔊 And more. Room reverb as the level designers set it, subtitles and dialogue volume, six new languages, experimental VR and an experimental level editor.

Coming from 0.13.2? Here is what 0.14 brings

0.14.0 was withdrawn soon after release, so most players meet these features for the first time in 0.14.1.

Campaigns

• The Awakening, the expansion Raven Software and Ritual Entertainment never released, which Justin Marshall recovered and published. All 13 maps run on openQ4's own engine and game code; its monsters, weapons and vehicles are rebuilt there, and it never loads the alpha's game DLL. Where the alpha's own code or content stopped something working as designed, openQ4 fixes it: the Valkaryne finale, the beach's death-ray turret, the Pain Lord's weak spot and Retches that could never move are the biggest examples. See the Awakening guide.
• Separate campaigns. Quake 4 and The Awakening keep their own saves and settings; returning to Quake 4, Arena or multiplayer removes the expansion's overrides.

Rendering

• Stable shadow mapping, turned on by the Quality and Ultra presets, with sharp contact shadows that soften with distance. Lower presets keep Quake 4's original shadows. See Shadow Mapping.
• A supported Vulkan renderer on Windows, tested across every stock single-player map and 20 multiplayer maps on NVIDIA and Intel graphics, recovering from driver resets on its own.
• Temporal anti-aliasing that rebuilds a full-resolution image when the scene renders below native resolution, and motion blur that works with it.
• Physically based materials for mods, with reflection probes and light-grid lighting. Stock content looks exactly as before. See PBR materials.

Interface

• The new interface is the default: animated start-up, rebuilt title, pause, loading and settings screens, and the Remastered HUD with Minimal, Competitive and Classic layouts, controller button prompts, and Reduced Motion and Reduced Flashing options.
• Vector weapon wheels and scopes for Marine and Strogg, with live ammo and soft focus around them.

Multiplayer

• Smarter bots that plan safer routes, hear the fight, time item respawns and follow team orders such as everyone follow me. See Giving bots orders.
• Quick chat on D-pad Down or V, and objective markers for flags, assault points and DeadZone zones.

Sound and languages

• Room reverb for every map, as the original game had with EAX hardware: closed doors muffle, hangars boom, and radio chatter stays dry.
• Truer audio: sound variety, stereo width, headphone layouts, radio levels and distance falloff now match the original game.
• German, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish and Ukrainian menus and gameplay text. See Languages.

New platforms and modes

• Android (experimental) on ARM64 phones and tablets with OpenGL ES 3.0, from Emile Belanger's port and GLES renderer.
• VR (experimental) through OpenXR: head-tracked stereo, motion-controller aiming, room-scale movement and comfort options. See the VR guide.

What 0.14.1 refines

The weeks since 0.14.0 went into making those features dependable, fast and finished.

Performance and settings

• Presets re-tiered by frame rate. Each preset now targets a refresh class, so Ultra plays smoothly instead of asking for everything at once; the old everything-on Ultra lives on as Maximum. New Low and Enhanced tiers fill the gaps, and Minimum and Low Power draw no shadows for weak or battery-powered hardware.
• Auto-Detect reads your hardware better: the active GPU, shared memory, resolution and CPU, including render scale on high-resolution screens. Fresh installs use it automatically; existing settings are kept.
• Display changes apply instantly. V-Sync, MSAA, texture quality, window and fullscreen changes and most presets apply to the running game, without a renderer or application restart.
• Quicker loading. Maps load faster in several measured steps, sounds decode in the background, declarations parse a fifth faster and start-up is over a second quicker.
• Smooth on high-refresh screens. Cutscenes, security cameras, third person, ragdolls, debris and spectating move between the game's 60 Hz ticks. The frame cap is steadier and uses less CPU, and a minimized game rests.

Shadows and image quality

• Shadow maps are cached and kept while lights and casters stay still, and drawn directly when a light moves, so they cost less every frame.
• No more shimmer while you walk. Cached shadows and their soft-edge grain stay still under a moving camera.
• The flashlight casts shadows on every preset that draws them, and surfaces light the same with or without a shadow map on OpenGL.
• Temporal AA holds still. The image no longer trembles when nothing moves, and characters and your weapon keep their anti-aliasing in motion.
• Motion blur looks the same at any frame rate, works with temporal AA and no longer smears your weapon.
• Vulkan matured: GPU selection in Settings, safer start-up on multi-GPU systems, a same-launch fallback to OpenGL, driver-reset recovery, mod material support and parity fixes throughout.

Interface

• Settings rebuilt as tabbed pages of the main menu, at most two columns wide, with a Display page that keeps or reverts a change on a countdown.
• Built for every screen. Portrait and tall layouts, text up to 200 %, notch- and system-bar-safe menus and HUD, touch scrolling with inertia, and bound keys drawn as controller or keyboard glyphs.
• Clearer menus. Campaign gets New Game and Chapters pages, Join Game gets Spectate, Demos moves under Multiplayer, pop-ups and pictures are reframed, and menus describe the section you point at.
• Animated crosshairs. Each weapon's original crosshair assembles, kicks, charges and reloads with the weapon. On by default in the new interface.
• The classic interface catches up: its HUD, team modes, Tourney and kill feed follow the Remastered layout, and its menus step with the arrow keys.

Campaigns and Arena

• The Awakening plays through as designed, with repairs across its missions from the opening dropship scene to the final battle, a chaingun turret with heat and its own HUD, and vehicle HUDs in both interfaces.
• Arena regains its ceremony: the match-start camera move and "Fight!", opponent introductions, a real pause menu and best results for every match.
• Saves are sturdier: new saves use a portable format 5, checkpoint pauses are shorter, a save is reported only once it is safely written, and saves made right after a level change load again.
• Campaign demos: record a whole campaign, level transitions included, as one demo.

Multiplayer, bots and demos

• Your inputs reach the server on time again, and prediction and lag compensation no longer correct the same delay twice.
• Bots fight fairer and smarter: they avoid knocking team-mates off walkways, swim to underwater routes, escape napalm and grenades, and recover from knockback.
• Push-to-talk voice chat, with receive volume and per-player mute. See Multiplayer Chat.
• Multi-view demos gain kill, capture and round markers, Auto-Track, and keyframes that make seeking near-instant. mvdRecover saves interrupted recordings, and demos now record at the frame rate you play at.
• Hosting works as set. Create Server's options take effect, the Admin page accepts remote-console passwords, dedicated servers change maps faster, and retail Quake 4 servers are refused with a clear explanation.
• Hardened networking: bounded resources per peer, safer message handling and IPv6 LAN discovery on Windows.

Audio

• Dialogue subtitles in both interfaces, with size, backing and speaker names, plus a separate Dialogue Volume.
• Uninterrupted sound: switching devices or unplugging headphones keeps dialogue and music playing, and loading a save resumes what was playing.

Android and VR

• Android adds portrait play with a thumb-friendly touch layout, a touch layout editor, background saves and multiplayer resume, and has been qualified on a Samsung Galaxy S25.
• VR now runs on Vulkan and native Wayland, supports standing and seated play spaces, smooths each eye with its own temporal AA, lets you point at in-world screens and pauses when the headset comes off.

For mappers and modders

• Experimental level editor. editorExperimental edits brushes, patches and entities in 2D and 3D views, then builds and plays the map in one click. See the level editor guide.
• Collision as Quake 4 wrote it. Vehicle, fly, shot and item clips in maps such as the Convoy and Walker levels and q4dm4 block what they were built to block.
• Recompiled maps keep their AI tactics. dmap and runAAS generate the cover and corner positions Quake 4's enemies use, and dense curved maps compile far faster.
• Better baking: light grids bake correctly at any window size and on large maps, and reflection probes can be captured in game.

Reliability and packaging

• Three code audits and static analysis fixed crash, memory-safety and save-restore defects throughout the engine and game code.
• Content packs: openQ4's own data now ships as a core pack plus separate light-grid and loadscreen packs, so future patch releases can ship as small update archives.
• Current libraries, including SDL 3.4.18, OpenAL Soft, the OpenXR SDK 1.1.65 and the Vulkan headers.

Upgrade Notes

• Install the complete package into a fresh folder. 0.14.1 repacks openQ4's own data, so remove any baseoq4 folder left by an older openQ4 rather than mixing files. Your original Quake 4 installation is still required.
• Your settings and bindings are kept. Reapply your preset in Settings → System to adopt the re-tiered values. A saved renderer choice stays; only fresh installs start on Automatic. A few defaults move once to their new values, such as automatic temporal AA and the Auto speaker layout; anything you change afterwards is kept.
• Saves: new saves use format 5. Supported saves from 0.13.2 (format 3) and 0.14.0 (format 4) still load, but older builds cannot read format 5, so back up your saves if you might go back.
• Prefer the classic look? Set seta ui_retained 0 for the stock screens and HUD. The animated crosshair has its own switch under Settings → Game Options → HUD.
• Existing configurations can bind Quick Chat under Settings → Controls → Weapons and Voice Chat under Settings → Controls → Other.
• Multiplayer needs matching openQ4 0.14.1 clients and servers. Retail Quake 4 1.4.2 clients and servers cannot join openQ4 games, and mods built for the original game DLLs do not load. Multi-view demos record as MVD 1.3.
• Mappers: recompile maps that use vehicle, fly, shot or item clip brushes so their collision records them correctly.
• The Awakening needs your own copy of the expansion content; see Campaigns. The six new languages are text-only and use English voices.
• Android needs Android 7.0 (API 24) or newer on an ARM64 device with OpenGL ES 3.0, plus your own Quake 4 data; see Android setup. The APK keeps the persistent release signature used for 0.14.0.
• macOS: our preview macOS packages target Apple Silicon/arm64. Intel Mac packages are not published, and Rosetta is not supported. They use a Metal bridge around the OpenGL renderer, not a native Metal renderer; platform_backend=native remains comparison-only diagnostic infrastructure. Qualification is tracked in docs/dev/macos-signoff-evidence.md. Signed and notarized builds for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs are offered separately by Mac Source Ports.

Known Limitations

• Vulkan is supported on Windows and remains experimental on Linux and macOS.
• VR is experimental and has not yet been qualified on headset hardware; please report how it runs on yours.
• Android is experimental. It has been qualified on one phone so far, and OpenGL ES does not yet draw every advanced desktop effect.
• The Awakening is built from unfinished alpha content; full playthrough qualification is still in progress.
• The level editor is experimental. Windows ARM64 remains experimental and Linux ARM64 a preview.
• The heaviest scenes do not yet meet every frame-time target we set for 1.0; performance work continues.

The road to 1.0

0.14.1 is a deliberate push toward 1.0: fewer new experiments, and more polish on what already exists. The same engine work now also underpins the rebased openPREY and openD3 projects, which already share fixes with openQ4 in both directions. Together they lay the foundation for a possible future all-in-one idTech 4 project.

Thanks

Thank you to Emile Belanger (emileb) for the Android port and OpenGL ES renderer, Justin Marshall for recovering and publishing Quake 4: The Awakening, Schnapple / Mac Source Ports for the signed macOS builds, and akacross for tireless playtesting and pull requests. Thanks also to everyone who reported issues after 0.14.0, and to id Software, Raven Software and Ritual Entertainment for the games this all stands on.

Questions and feedback are welcome in #openq4 on the DarkMatter Discord.

Content Packs

Pack	Contents	Needed by	Size	Status
pak0.pk4	core runtime content	clients and servers	14.3 MB	new in this release's pack layout
pak1.pk4	light grids	clients	96.4 MB	new in this release's pack layout
pak2.pk4	loadscreens	clients	530.2 MB	new in this release's pack layout

This release changes how openQ4's own content is packed, so it is a full download. Install a full package, and remove any baseoq4 folder left by an older openQ4 first.

A dedicated server needs only pak0.pk4; the light grids and loadscreens are for clients. If openQ4 reports a missing or mismatched pack at startup, download that pack from this release under the same name.

Linux ARM64 Support

Linux ARM64 preview artifacts enabled. First-class publication remains gated on accepted real-hardware native-Wayland SP/MP, dedicated-server, audio, input, display, and package evidence.

macOS Support

macOS packages are a preview for Apple Silicon (arm64) Macs. The build floor is macOS 11, but only current macOS releases have been played on real hardware. The packages are unsigned and not notarized, so macOS asks for approval the first time openQ4.app opens. Intel Macs are not supported.

Windows ARM64 Support

Windows ARM64 packages are experimental. They are built natively for Arm64 and automated tests start the dedicated server, but nothing has started the game client automatically yet, and no real-hardware report has confirmed that the packages run. If the renderer does not start, launch with +set r_renderApi vulkan, and please report the result with the Windows ARM64 issue template.