I’ve always been a Quake fanatic since its release, although I didn’t initially like Quake II because it had a completely different theme from the original Quake, I soon gave in and ended up becoming even more addicted to it, especially with David ‘crt’ Wright‘s Rocket Arena 2 mod (RA2).
I played daily for many hours with friends on LAN for years, and for several reasons we could no longer be together on the same LAN like before, so I had the idea of setting up something online so we could play our beloved Quake II together in 2005, and since it was a game from 1997, the graphics were already quite dated, and certainly wouldn’t attract much attention.
Promos
After searching for projects to improve Quake II‘s graphics, I found Team Blur‘s Quake 2 Evolved project, which was quickly accepted by everyone and was what our newly created Blood Culture clan needed to take off. We became the first Quake 2 Evolved community in the world and soon made headlines in every Quake community that still existed in the world.
Quake 2 Evolved was a project that took all the graphical improvements from Quake III and implemented them in the Quake II Engine. Such as smoke, glow, new models, improved textures, etc. Everything was going great until the team announced that they would abandon the project to focus on a new game called Overdose, which unfortunately was never finished. And since no one was willing to take on the project, I felt obligated to take it on, after all, Blood Culture and I were the most interested. That’s how Quake 2 Evolved Blood Culture came about.
I first finished everything that was incomplete and went much further, doing a complete re-texturing of the entire game including more than 2700 maps, in addition to making all the mods we played 100% compatible, like Rocket Arena 2 itself, which originally had some bugs in it.
In addition, a dedicated server was created exclusively for the Q2E Blood Culture client, a proprietary anti-cheat, and memory improvements and increases to support larger textures and a greater number of bots without crashing. New 3D models were added as well as new sounds and music. It practically became the holy grail of Quake II, with all the best of the best related to Quake II.
Gameplays
The Siamese Twins Bug
But there was an old bug from Quake II that kept happening and ruining games. It was the famous and feared Siamese Twins Bug. A very annoying bug, especially for Rocket Arena 2 players, that had never been solved, or even diagnosed.
The bug consisted of one or more players spawning at the same spawnpoint at the same time, and thus becoming trapped inside each other, to the point where they could look in all directions, turn around and even shoot, but were unable to get out of there. This caused an absurd imbalance with many players on a team losing many players or even more than half at the beginning of the round, destroying the most disputed matches.
IN THIS ARTICLE on LinkedIn have all the details about the bug, the causes, consequences and how I fixed with Q2E Blood Culture.
Quake Hall of Fame
For all my work with the Quake 2 Evolved Blood Culture project and my contributions to the community, I was honored to be listed in PlanetQuake‘s now-defunct Quake Hall of Fame, alongside greats like Maric, David ‘crt’ Wright, Jesterand Gooseman.
Quake II in Java
A somewhat surreal story happened when I became the only active developer of Quake 2 Evolved in 2005 and was very active on the project’s official forum. Among many others, a guy from Sweden appeared who wanted to rewrite the Quake 2 Engine (ID Tech 2) in Java, and I started helping him here and there until I asked him why exactly he wanted to convert an old engine from 1997 to Java? Was it some college project?
He told me it was to create his game. I thought it was strange and advised him to do it with the Quake 3 Engine (ID Tech 3) which was not only much better and more modern, but also had much nicer graphics, and had recently been made available by ID Software.
But he said no, that he needed a very lightweight engine, since the idea was to make the game run on cell phones, and that was why the migration to Java. This only made me even more curious, because I couldn’t imagine anyone playing an FPS like Quake II on a cell phone in 2005. At that time, the term “Smartphone” wasn’t even a thing.
So he told me it was a “Zombie game for kids”. Then I thought, an FPS with the Quake II Engine rewritten in Java, which was a dark, gloomy and scary game, replacing the Stroggos with Zombies for kids to play on a cell phone? It didn’t make much sense to me with the information available at the time.
I helped him with all his questions and we never spoke again.
Many years later, a certain Minecraft appeared, his nickname was Notch.
DVD Forever
ModDB Page
On ModDB you can check the entire development history of Quake 2 Evolved Blood Cultureand more details.
