Incline Quake II enhanced re-release by Nightdive Studios

[Semiurge]

Love it when this happens, never gets old

Too bad that Doom 3 and Quake 4 let go of the infighting tradition.

 

[Ash]

Infighting was the least of those game's treachery/tradition abandonment.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I have started to flash in green everytime I take a hit. It wasn't like that a few levels ago. How do I turn that shit of?

 

[Morenatsu.]

I have started to flash in green everytime I take a hit. It wasn't like that a few levels ago. How do I turn that shit of?

its the power armour

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I have started to flash in green everytime I take a hit. It wasn't like that a few levels ago. How do I turn that shit of?

its the power armour

Only jacket armor from now on then...

 

[Lyric Suite]

Are the expansions included in this?

 

[schru]

Are the expansions included in this?

Yes, they are.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Nice, may actually look into this. I'm usually a purist and couldn't care less about new graphics but AI improvements peak my curiosity.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So i decided to take this for a spin.

First instinct was to shut all the graphic options off lmao. Eventually i settled with playing it without depth of field, motion blur, no texture filtering and no fog but i kept most of the other shit, including the new models.

No sure if it's just me but the music sounds tinnier than i remember it. Modern games seem to love to fuck up the audio whenever chance they get but maybe i'm just being paranoid.

Everything else seems ok though. I guess next time i get the urge to replay Quake 2 i'll try this first for now i just wanted to check it out to see what they did first hand.

 

[schru]

So i decided to take this for a spin.

First instinct was to shut all the graphic options off lmao. Eventually i settled with playing it without depth of field, motion blur, no texture filtering and no fog but i kept most of the other shit, including the new models.

No sure if it's just me but the music sounds tinnier than i remember it. Modern games seem to love to fuck up the audio whenever chance they get but maybe i'm just being paranoid.

Everything else seems ok though. I guess next time i get the urge to replay Quake 2 i'll try this first for now i just wanted to check it out to see what they did first hand.

Do you mean texture smoothing? That should be left on if you want the graphics to be like in the original game, since texture filtering was part of the hardware-accelerated OpenGL-based renderers.

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Crap, any way to make it sound like the original? I don't like tinny shit. Why do they have to fuck up the audio fucking modern nu-shit.

BTW i did play the game with texture filtering on release but the reason i took it off is that the visuals looked sort of fuzzy so i was experimenting to see if i was imagining things or if there's something afoot like with the audio mixing. I also been playing Quake 1 maps for years with texture filtering off and wanted to try it on Quake 2 as well to see how that went.

 

[randir14]

Someone on Steam said the sound is locked to a low sample rate and can't be changed to higher quality 44.1khz even though the original release could through the console. I don't think the music itself was altered though, I downloaded the soundtrack from archive.org and compared it to the remaster's .ogg files and they have identical bitrates and dynamic range.

 

[schru]

Crap, any way to make it sound like the original? I don't like tinny shit. Why do they have to fuck up the audio fucking modern nu-shit.

BTW i did play the game with texture filtering on release but the reason i took it off is that the visuals looked sort of fuzzy so i was experimenting to see if i was imagining things or if there's something afoot like with the audio mixing. I also been playing Quake 1 maps for years with texture filtering off and wanted to try it on Quake 2 as well to see how that went.

Well, the method of filtering may be different, together with mipmaps and such, not to mention that early graphics cards created a different, grainier look in 16-bit colour with dithering and in some cases perhaps also interlacing.

As for sound, it's worth noting that Quake II had support for hardware-accelerated audio with positional sound through Extreme Audio Reality's Interactive Around-Sound system. It seems like it might have been compatible with Sound Blaster and Aureal's A3D cards. This remaster changes the audio renderer, perhaps making up for the lack of support for hardware audio, but either way, it probably shouldn't affect the music.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Maybe i'm just imagining it i'll try it again tomorrow can't crank the audio right now it's kinda late.

 

[schru]

Maybe i'm just imagining it i'll try it again tomorrow can't crank the audio right now it's kinda late.

I do think you're right. Switching between the remaster and the original version, the latter has very full and strong audio, while the former has this typical subdued quality similar to what happens when multi-channel surround mixing is applied to a stereo source.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Damn, there always has to be something.

 

[Semiurge]

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

Q1E music files do have some very low frequency presence, especially in the track "Focus" that has a low rumbling sound in the background that lasts for the whole duration. If the audio files are generally better quality now it's possible that the clearer higher frequencies mask the lower ones, leading to the perception of tinniness. On the other hand, the two official expansions Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity have noticeably tinnier music. Some of the music tracks in the latter even sound out-of-phase, but maybe it's just me.

Someone on Steam said the sound is locked to a low sample rate and can't be changed to higher quality 44.1khz even though the original release could through the console. I don't think the music itself was altered though, I downloaded the soundtrack from archive.org and compared it to the remaster's .ogg files and they have identical bitrates and dynamic range.

If true, this would explain why there's occasional crackling.

 

[schru]

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

Q1E music files do have some very low frequency presence, especially in the track "Focus" that has a low rumbling sound in the background that lasts for the whole duration. If the audio files are generally better quality now it's possible that the clearer higher frequencies mask the lower ones, leading to the perception of tinniness.

They're not, the original used uncompressed CD audio, while the remaster uses OGG files instead, although this normally wouldn't really amount to a perceptible difference. However, Night Dive went with the rumour that Quake's music had pre-emphasis applied to it and should have de-emphasis applied to it, which renders the tracks muffled, so the higher frequencies are considerably less distinct compared to the original version.

 

[schru]

Semiurge, ds, and others interested, here's a comparison of the main theme (Night Dive also mixed up the track titles): https://mega.nz/file/eEMxzTTK#w9JU5ARIerhpdW3P7qSSFDqb90_mYqTHLQXIJTSyS0s

 

[Semiurge]

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

Q1E music files do have some very low frequency presence, especially in the track "Focus" that has a low rumbling sound in the background that lasts for the whole duration. If the audio files are generally better quality now it's possible that the clearer higher frequencies mask the lower ones, leading to the perception of tinniness.

They're not, the original used uncompressed CD audio, while the remaster uses OGG files instead, although this normally wouldn't really amount to a perceptible difference. However, Night Dive went with the rumour that Quake's music had pre-emphasis applied to it and should have de-emphasis applied to it, which renders the tracks muffled, so the higher frequencies are considerably less distinct compared to the original version.

Lossy encoding can sometimes alter the perception of dynamics, but it probably depends a lot on bitrate. The average bitrate of the ogg soundtrack is a pathetic 186 kbps, that may well be noticeable.

 

[schru]

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

Q1E music files do have some very low frequency presence, especially in the track "Focus" that has a low rumbling sound in the background that lasts for the whole duration. If the audio files are generally better quality now it's possible that the clearer higher frequencies mask the lower ones, leading to the perception of tinniness.

They're not, the original used uncompressed CD audio, while the remaster uses OGG files instead, although this normally wouldn't really amount to a perceptible difference. However, Night Dive went with the rumour that Quake's music had pre-emphasis applied to it and should have de-emphasis applied to it, which renders the tracks muffled, so the higher frequencies are considerably less distinct compared to the original version.

Lossy encoding can sometimes alter the perception of dynamics, but it probably depends a lot on bitrate. The average bitrate of the ogg soundtrack is a pathetic 186 kbps, that may well be noticeable.

In this case it's definitely the de-emphasis processing, as that's what used to be recommended for use with source ports and I'm familiar with the way Quake tracks modified in this way sound. When I tried converting the main theme to an OGG file with the same bit rate, it still sounded more or less the same as the FLAC file does.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Semiurge, ds, and others interested, here's a comparison of the main theme (Night Dive also mixed up the track titles): https://mega.nz/file/eEMxzTTK#w9JU5ARIerhpdW3P7qSSFDqb90_mYqTHLQXIJTSyS0s

Damn that's beyond noticeable.

But i guess this should be a simple matter of replacing their ogg files with rips straight off the CD audio.

 

[Semiurge]

As for the music, it does sound thinner, probably because of the sound mixer in the Kex Engine. It's the same way in the remaster of the first game.

Q1E music files do have some very low frequency presence, especially in the track "Focus" that has a low rumbling sound in the background that lasts for the whole duration. If the audio files are generally better quality now it's possible that the clearer higher frequencies mask the lower ones, leading to the perception of tinniness.

They're not, the original used uncompressed CD audio, while the remaster uses OGG files instead, although this normally wouldn't really amount to a perceptible difference. However, Night Dive went with the rumour that Quake's music had pre-emphasis applied to it and should have de-emphasis applied to it, which renders the tracks muffled, so the higher frequencies are considerably less distinct compared to the original version.

Lossy encoding can sometimes alter the perception of dynamics, but it probably depends a lot on bitrate. The average bitrate of the ogg soundtrack is a pathetic 186 kbps, that may well be noticeable.

In this case it's definitely the de-emphasis processing, as that's what used to be recommended for use with source ports and I'm familiar with the way Quake tracks modified in this way sound. When I tried converting the main theme to an OGG file with the same bit rate, it still sounded more or less the same as the FLAC file does.

I can't wait to try out this remaster to find out if it sounds like I remember. My sound setup has changed but I'll be able to tell if something is clearly wrong, and Q1E doesn't seem to have any problems except for that random crackling with some ambience tracks playing. Both the music and sound files sound right to me despite their very lossy nature.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, it's kind of hilarious how there's been a war in movies and games against audio, making everything worse, trying to fix what wasn't broken, right at the same time the music industry is actually trying to fix all the bullshit they did in the 80s and 90s, with current remasters being pretty damn good all around.

Maybe we'll see a similar trend reversal in games and movies so i can actually fucking hear the audio.

 

[schru]

Semiurge, ds, and others interested, here's a comparison of the main theme (Night Dive also mixed up the track titles): https://mega.nz/file/eEMxzTTK#w9JU5ARIerhpdW3P7qSSFDqb90_mYqTHLQXIJTSyS0s

Damn that's beyond noticeable.

But i guess this should be a simple matter of replacing their ogg files with rips straight off the CD audio.

Yes, there shouldn't be any problem with replacing the files and it's a separate problem from the way the Kex Engine's mixer might affect the audio.

This doesn't concern Quake II music, by the way. The files in the remaster sound the same as the original CD rips do.