quake ii – The Daily SPUF

A Brief History of Glass in Team Fortress

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments glass, map design, quake, quake ii, Team Fortress 2, team fortress classic, TFC

It may seem odd that I’m devoting a whole article to glass, an incredibly common and straightforward building material. Some games let you break it, others let you shoot through it, and many don’t. Within a few minutes of playtime, you’ll probably notice Team Fortress 2 is decidedly in the latter category. Case closed? Not quite, because glass actually has a more checkered history than you’d first expect. It first came to my attention when I started playing Team Fortress Classic and noticed that only one map had glass: Rock2, letting the flag-scoring player watch their pursuers die to toxic gas.… [Continue Reading]

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Quake II RTX – Review

July 20, 2022July 22, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments graphics, lighting, quake, quake ii, ray tracing, RTX

Having recently finished Quake’s expansion packs, I was curious to see where id Software went from there. Imagine inventing the FPS genre, codifying it, and then propelling it into the third dimension within a mere 4-year span. Even more impressively, they’ve gone back and updated Doom and Quake to run perfectly on modern systems. At first, I didn’t think they’d given Quake II the same treatment, before remembering an experimental tech demo I encountered at GDC 2019: Quake II RTX is a “remastering” of the original game that ray traces every single asset. Ray tracing is a unique way of… [Continue Reading]