Loren Petrich's Quake Page

One annoyance of the Marathon series is that its networking was not designed for Internet duty. For that reason, I have taken up Quake, from id Software, which is much more Internet-friendly; I have often played over the Internet from my home, and I seldom have any performance problems.

Though the MacOS Quake community has lagged behind the rest of Quake fandom, there are nevertheless such good resources as Quakeintosh, Quakeitecture, MacQuake Infinity, and JVOX's Boomstick. I have decided to fill in some of the gaps of the available MacOS utilities by creating some of my own:

I have also composed some Quake 2 sky images:

My WADder

My WADder is for composing texture-archive WAD files for Quake 1, and texture-tile WAL files for Quake 2, from image files and Marathon shapes archives. One has to compose a script for it with appropriate WADder commands, but I've included some example scripts for working with shapes-collection image files produced by the Marathon Infinity tool Anvil -- and also Marathon shapes files. I've also included some color tables, both the original Quake ones, and a hacked one for Quake 1 with all the special colors blanked out. Although the scripting may seem awkward, it is nevertheless useful for creating WAD's with the same texture set at different resolutions.

One of my purposes in creating my WADder was to be able to use Marathon-scenario textures in Quake maps. However, I will not archive any Marathon-texture conversions without the permission of the creators of the original textures; in particular, I will not archive conversions of those that had come with the games unless I'm sure it's OK with Bungie. But if anyone wants me to convert their textures and archive them here, I am willing to do so.

WALView

WALView is for viewing and editing Quake 2 wall-texture files, customarily suffixed ".wal". One can edit several at a time, copy into and out of them, and do automatic mipmapping.

My Quake Model Viewer

My Quake Model Viewer is for viewing Quake 1 and 2 model (.mdl, .md2) files, and for trying skins on them. It uses OpenGL, and is intended to be used in conjuction with an image editor; it does not understand the PCX file format that QuakeWorld and Quake 2 use.

My MDL Viewer

My MDL Viewer is for viewing Quake MDL files, used for object and character models, and also for previewing skins for them. It can also read skins in PICT form, and export models in QuickDraw 3D form. It's an older program, one which I have not updated, because on my machine, it has become somewhat unstable.

My Lightwave-to-Quake Translator

  • My Lightwave-to-Quake converter takes a LWO Lightwave-object file and exports a Quake map source file. It will take all that file's polygons and turn them into thin brushes that surround those polygons. It was written at the request of someone who had found Lightwave's modeler very convenient, and who had wanted to use it to make Quake maps with.

    A Simple Test Sky

  • This test sky is intended to illustrate how to make skies/landscapes for Quake 2. It sets the corners of the Quake 2 sky cube to the corners of color space, and interpolates in between. This test sky's arrangement is shown in this PNG image, with the appropriate suffix shown next to each tile:

    For more about how to create Quake 2 skies, check out The PlanetQuake Warehouse and this Gamasutra article.

    Lh'owon Day and Night Skies

  • This Lh'owon Sky Set is an adaptation to Quake 2 of my Lh'owon Landscapes patch for Bungie's game Marathon Infinity, a patch which can be found at the Marathon Archives. More precisely, it is a re-rendering from the original MetaCreations Bryce scene file. It was intended as an alternative to the landscapes in Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity, which I had found to be rather cheesy-looking. Lh'owon itself is the planet that much of the Marathon 2 and Infinity scenarios is set on. However, it follows the basic concept of those two, which is a rocky desert. Here is a panorama-rendered preview:

    Here is some information on how to render with Bryce. All of the six cube faces use the following render settings: 

    Field of View (FOV) = 112.5
Image Size = 256*256
Aspect Ratio = 1:1
Perspective Render
    The FOV value is necessary for correcting for a bug in an old version of Bryce; its intended value is 90 degrees, and the correction is to multiply by 1.25

    And here are some recommended camera angles for each filename-suffix value:
    SuffixX angleY angleZ angle
    ft
    0
    0
    0
    lf
    0
    90
    0
    bk
    0
    180
    0
    rt
    0
    -90
    0
    up
    -90
    -90
    0
    dn
    90
    -90
    0
    To my game-room page.