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 7/05/99 |
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Oh sure, the manual has some verbiage detailing how you're supposed to me a marine going against all odds to defeat the cyborg enemy in a foreign universe. But who reads the manual? When you get a hot game in the mail before most stores even have it on their shelves, the last thing you're going to do is rtfm. You slap it in the drive, install the puppy, and start fragging. At least that's what you hope when you buy the long anticipated Mac title, Quake 2. Quake 2's box lists its minimum system requirements as a 603e/180 MHz processor and 48 megs of RAM. Trust me, you're better off playing Maelstrom (or at best scaling back to Quake 1) if that describes your computer. Black ties and acceleration cards are required for this party. To check out some software rendering number for a 604e, check the bottom of this article. Even on this processor, a whole generation faster than the minimum sys req, the game was too slow to play in any higher resolution than 340x240. That said, if you have a nice 604e/200 MHz PowerPC with 144 megs of RAM and an eight meg Game Wizard (this review's test machine), you're in business. After installing nearly a third of a gig of gaming zeroes and ones, OpenGL (found on the Quake CD), and the newest Mesa3dfxEngine (not on the CD), Quake is ready to start. I ran into two snags when starting Quake 2. First off, there's the notorious "Black Voodoo" problem, where the screen is so dark you'd think you're wearing shades. I had to back back out of Quake 2 and add this line to the MesaSettings File I'd just installed (actually just a small text file): MESA_3DFX_GAMMA_VALUE 1.74 [See the Saturday section of the 3D Game News page for a post from a reader that needed to set Mesa's Gamma to 4 for some games (MesaTweaker max setting is 2 at the moment - so you'll have to edit the mesasetting file by hand). -Mike] You can attempt to change things using the MesaTweaker, but it was much easier for me just to open up the MesaSettings file in a text editor and add that line. On restart things still looked dark, and I kept setting the gamma value higher and higher while at the same time cranking up the brightness in Quake 2 and my monitor settings. When I finally gave up and started a game, the settings finally registered and it looked like my marine walking through a snowstorm! At any rate, after some trial and error, I got the Mesa libs a'working. I managed to play some single player after getting my gamma settings just right, and my framerates are displayed at the end of this article if you'd like to take a look. Then I went to the console to set up my multiplayer settings. The single player game played great, and the music and graphics were intoxicating. But I've never finished the single player game in Quake 1, and I wasn't going to waste my time with single player here either. It was time to get online! Online Observations -- Where's the browser?!!Right now there's a bit of a void in MacQuake 2: There's no way to browse Quake 2 servers to see what kinds of ping times you'd get when you connected. It takes time for the fact that you pulled the virtual trigger to get to the Quake 2 server and even longer for the fact that r0|-|z|-|4c|< [k001] stepped out of the way of your rocket before it explodes harmlessly against a wall. (If you think your computer just went wild in that last sentence, welcome to the world of "b!ff", strange Creole created by games that uses ASCII "art" to recreate the alphabet. That name equates to Rohshack of clan "cool".) If this ping time is greater than about 300 milliseconds, you're not going to be able to experience a very enjoyable game. Server browsers test what kind of connection you'd have with Quake 2 servers so that you'll know your pings are legit before you join a game. The latest version of Unreal has a server browser built in, and so does WinPC's Half-Life. Now that online play is so important to these games, not to invest the time to create and place a browser of some sort on the game CD is a real disservice. Mind you, I'm not blaming Logicware here. Apparently they were unable to put any third party software on the CD, much less change Quake 2's content from that of the PC version they were porting. I wrote a really quick and dirty Java Quake 2 server browser called L4Q2 for the Mac about a month ago, and when Logicware told me that they were working with Scott Kevill of QuakeFinder Fame, I dropped the ball. Turns out I did so in a big way. Quake2Finder is still nowhere to be seen. I responded to a USENET post from a player asking how to ping games by suggesting that he try out the L4Q2 beta until something more robust comes out. Nate Trost, MacQuake 2's lead programmer, sent this reply to my post:
We would have liked to have included information about a variety of third-party things on the CD itself, but we didn't get the okay for that. Hopefully "in the works" means within the next week or two. I'm going to hack up L4Q2 to return games playing maps that come with Mac Quake 2 this next week in case "in the works" means anything longer. I do apologize to you players that I didn't finish this before the game came out, but I never guessed whatever Nate's talking about would have been delayed beyond the game's release. My hope is that we're getting a Mac browser that parallels the power of WinPC's GameSpy. I can tell you it's easier than pie to hack up a server browser for one game once you've written a browser for another, so expect some sort of shareware to appear soon. Config.cfgAnyhow, I finally found some good games using L4Q2 and joined one. Here is where the second snag hit. When I joined, there was a marine right in front of me. I tried to strafe left, I didn't move, and was fragged into 30,000 pieces. When I'd quit from the console, none of my key mappings were saved. I went back into the Quake 2 options menu and re-entered them. Without thinking about it, I quit and restarted Quake 2 a little later on down the road. The key mappings were gone again, and so was my choice of skin and player name. The best way around this, and something you'd want to learn sooner or later anyhow, is to make your own custom "config file". There's a text file in the baseq2 folder called config.cfg. Open this file up in a text editor like SimpleText and oh, what wonders will unfold. All of the Quake commands are listed here with the keys that go with them. Change these to your liking and rename the file. Mine is called "dude.cfg". Make sure you save this file in the baseq2 folder. When you start a game, bring down the Quake 2 console with the tilde (~) key, and type "exec dude.cfg" and you're off to the races. It's real easy to take this file with you on floppy if you're playing on another person's box and want to be up and running quickly. Finally OnlineOnline was a blast. The Mac Quake 2 net code is solid. I played for quite some time in both capture the flag and plain deathmatch, and had no problems other than the cussed one-button Apple mouse! The weapon models looked great, and the game ran smoothly except that the CD drive would spin up at inopportune times causing lag and once leading to ole Peopleater[mac]'s death. Mike says that the remedy to this problem is to simply remove the CD from the drive. Just remember to perform a recommended installation when installing Quake 2 so that there's no need for Quake 2 to access the CD (though that's what I did, so I still have to wonder why the CD spun up). In brief, however, there are no "Mac considerations" for online play, at least as far as standard deathmatch and CTF (capture the flag) are concerned. Next week when I have some more RAM on my personal box I'll start giving you the low down on other Quake 2 multiplayer modifications. Two more bugsI did have the video go black on me once while playing, so I hit the tilde key and typed "vid_restart" in the invisible console window. The video did restart and I was back. Once, before I made a config file, I tried to change my key configuration after getting fragged in an online deathmatch. After I brought up the Quake options menu, the computer froze up and a "type 10 error" was reported with the infamous restart button. Since I was using the Mesa drivers, I don't know how much of this was Logicware and how much was from Mesa. These bugs were not pervasive, and didn't happen more than once. Final First ImpressionsQuake 2 is exactly what the Mac needs, and has needed for some time. Even though the game has come out a bit later than was scheduled (Logicware's site still proclaimed a Spring '99 release just a few weeks ago), it's still far enough ahead of Quake 3 that we'll get some real use out of the game. And though the minimum system requirements (which are in reality quite a bit higher than what's actually written on the box) aren't as low as some people had speculated/hoped, they are low enough to include many pre-G3 machines. With generic 3dfx drivers on the horizon and low cost Voodoo 1, 2, and even 3 boards available, it's a gamer's market. I do wonder why Activision let the game out with a higher RAM requirement than what comes with a stock iMac (anyone want to hire an assembly programmer?), but with a quick RAM addition, you're ready to play. The game is right solid and is as fun to play as Quake can be. To me, the single player part of the game is more of the same ole same old that we've been served through iteration after iteration of Wolfenstein, DOOM!, Marathon, and Quake. But the graphics are a big improvement, and the available multiplayer mods like Action Quake and Capture the Flag are worth the price of admission. (Tune in in the next few weeks as I do my best to get some of these mods running.) If you like first person shooters, there's a new king on the Mac and that's Quake 2. Thank heavens. Framerates, framerates:
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