qengine

About

Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter developed by id Software in which a lone space marine invades the alien Strogg homeworld to end their war against Earth. qengine is a cross-platform retro game engine forked from the Quake II codebase, stripped down to serve as a base for new standalone games rather than to run the original Quake II campaign. It removes Quake II's built-in gameplay code and OpenGL rendering in favor of a single software-rendered client/server package, and remains under active development.

How it differs from the original

Unlike Quake II mods or ports, qengine intentionally breaks compatibility with existing Quake II mods and the base game — most of the original gameplay code and OpenGL support have been removed — though it can optionally load the original Quake II game data if the user owns it.

Getting started

It's built from source with CMake, including a documented cross-compile path for Windows binaries from Linux. Once built, the engine looks for game data in its own assets folder, which can be filled with new content or, optionally, the original Quake II data.

Modding & tools

• Ships with its own map compiler, texture conversion, and packaging tools inherited from the Quake II toolchain.