Development
Unlike Quake, where hardware accelerated graphics controllers were supported only with later patches, Quake II came with OpenGL support out of the box. Later downloads from id Software added support for AMD's 3DNow! instruction set for improved performance on their K6-2 processors, and Rendition released a native renderer for their V1000 graphics chip. The latest version is 3.21. This update includes numerous bug fixes and new maps designed for multiple players deathmatch. Version 3.21, available as source code on id Software's FTP server, has no improved functionality over version 3.20 and is simply a slight modification to make compiling for Linux easier.
Quake II uses an improved client–server network model introduced in Quake. The game code of Quake II, which defines all the functionality for weapons, entities and game mechanics, can be changed in any way because id Software published the source code of their own implementation that shipped with the game. Quake II uses the shared library functionality of the operating system to load the game library at run-time—this is how mod authors are able to alter the game and provide different gameplay mechanics, new weapons and much more. The full source code to Quake II version 3.19 was released under the terms of the GPL on December 21, 2001. Version 3.21 followed later. A LCC-friendly version was released on January 1, 2002 by a modder going by the name of Major Bitch.
Since the release of the Quake II source code, several third-party update projects to the game engine have been created; the most prominent of these are projects focused on graphical enhancements to the game such as Quake2maX, EGL and Quake II Evolved. The source release also revealed numerous critical security flaws which can result in remote compromise of both the Quake II client and server. As id Software no longer maintains Quake II, most 3rd party engines include fixes for these bugs. The most popular server-side engine modification, R1Q2, is generally recommended as a replacement for the 3.20 release for both clients and servers. The most widely used engine modifications as of 2006 appear to be R1Q2, AprQ2 and EGL, with a large majority of users still using the original 3.20 release. In July 2003, Vertigo Software released a port of Quake II for the Microsoft .NET platform, using Managed C++, called Quake II .NET. It became a poster application for the language, showcasing the powerful interoperability between .NET and standard C++ code. It remains one of the top downloads on the Visual C++ website. In May 2004, Bytonic Software released a port of Quake II (called Jake2) written in Java using JOGL. In 2010 Google ported Jake2 to HTML5, running in Safari and Chrome.
Quake II's game engine was a popular license, and formed the basis for several commercial and free games, such as CodeRED: Alien Arena, War§ow, SiN, Anachronox, Heretic II, Daikatana, Soldier of Fortune, Kingpin: Life of Crime and UFO: Alien Invasion. Valve Software's 1998 Half-Life, which went on to sell over eight million copies, was originally going to use the Quake II engine during early development stages. However, the final version runs on a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, GoldSrc, with a small amount of the Quake II code.
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