Having just ported his original Quake II map Grunt No More to Quetoo, I asked Panjoo how it felt to remake one of his own maps, versus the 8 Quake II deathmatch levels he has already remade. He offered some fantastic insight:

It's with great excitement and sincere gratitude that I share all of this news. 2016 has been an incredibly productive year for this decade-old project, and I couldn't be happier to still be working on Quetoo with this team.

Panjoo, the creator of all of our beautiful Quake II classic remakes, our logo, and many of the models and skins you see in Quetoo, has been officially handed the creative reigns, and the title of Creative Lead. Pan's excruciating love for Quake2 bleeds through every piece of artwork he touches, and over the past four years, he's shaped Quetoo's aesthetic into a fitting tribute to our beloved classic. So thank you, Pan, from the bottom of my heart, and congrats!

This next update.. I have to laugh, at least just a little. He posted a wonderful Facebook update to the Quetoo page (several, actually), but didn't mention the massive news that he, Jonathan 'Paril' Barkley has joined our team as a core contributor, and has been absolutely crushing it for the last two months. Canadians are just too humble..

Paril has saved our Windows build from the brink of utter neglect, porting the project to Visual Studio and fixing over a dozen Windows-related bugs along the way. He also took on a massive refactoring effort to make Quetoo's renderer OpenGL 2.0 compliant, resulting in higher framerates across the board. On top of that, he's fixed several long-standing player movement bugs that I had basically given up on. Suffice to say, I am extremely grateful to have Paril on the team.

He's not the only new contributor, either! Since our outreach in September, we've picked up sound designer Anthony Webb, man of mystery and jack of all trades who goes by the IRC handle KaadmY, intrepid developer Coşku Baş and Spanish translator Eduardo 'mitomon' Pecina. Their combined efforts have been transformative for the project, and the stats speak for themselves.

I'll post another update with general progress, but for now, I just wanted to express my excitement and thanks to the Quetoo team. Hobby projects like ours are hard. Many have vanished over the years. They consume nights and weekends, and can wear you down. 10 years into this thing, there have certainly been times when I've wondered why I keep at this. But when I consider the friendships made, and the beautiful, twitchy, gritty game that we've forged together, I see no reason to ever stop creating and learning with Quake.

In an effort to improve our own brand and not tread on id Software's Quake II trademark, our project is now known as Quetoo. Folks have often wondered why our project's IRC channel on Freenode is named #quetoo. The name dates back to 2005, and was the title of a Quake II-compatible engine I produced for GNU / Linux for about 2 years. Focused purely on performance, Quetoo sought to make Quake II playable on the weakest of GPUs that were unfortunately popular in low-end systems of the day.

Eventually, I grew restless in keeping compatibility with Quake II, and so the Quake2World project was born. Indeed, Quake2World started as a branch of Quetoo, but with a much larger mission: to build an entire game. And as development of Quake2World gained momentum, the little Quake II engine it came from fell by the wayside and all but disappeared from the Internet. Except for one place..

A small but dedicated community had formed around Quetoo, and we called #quetoo on irc.freenode.net home. And altho short-lived attempts to migrate the team to #quake2world were tried, they never stuck. And so here we are, 10 years later, still Quetoo. I guess we've come full circle: Quetoo is Quake2World is Quetoo again.

So please: update your bookmarks, stop by the IRC channel and say hello, and keep your eyes out for new Quetoo builds and patches to GtkRadiant.

As we enter our 8th year of development, Quake2World continues to evolve and improve. Here's a quick video showing off some of our new lighting and shadow effects, as well as a subset of the new level remakes by Pan. This is a first look at The Pits and Lost Hallways, as well as an update on The Frag Pipe. Not featured in this video, but well underway, are Pan's reworks of Lava Tomb, Tokay's Towers, and The Warehouse.

We're still actively recruiting model and texture artists to revamp or replace our weapon, item and world objects. Programmers, level designers, and sound artists are all encouraged to inquire about contributing, too! Contact us in #quetoo on irc.freenode.net, or post on our Facebook page.

It's been 18 months since our BETA made an ironic splash on April 1st 2012. We figured it's time to communicate what our goals are for a 1.0 general release.

But first, a quick recap of what our team has accomplished in the last year and a half:

Player movement

The player movement code (pmove, for short) has been significantly refactored to feel more like Quake II, but more consistent and accessible to new players. Also, mods will now be able to provide their own pmove implementations, thanks to efforts to move client-side prediction into the cgame module. We hope that this will encourage more inventive ports of popular Quake II mods like Action and D-Day.

PhysicsFS

The popular PhysicsFS filesystem abstraction library used by the Build Engine and other notable games replaced our Quake2-legacy virtual filesystem (VFS) implementation. PhysFS is highly performant, completely portable and well-tested. It also supports numerous archive formats such as .pk3.

PK3 Archives

All of Quake2World's assets are now bundled in Quake III: Arena .pk3 (ZIP) archives. This brought our game data down in size from 500M to 200M. Our BSP compiler, Q2WMap, has been updated to automatically create .pk3 archives from your custom maps, too.

GtkRadiant support

Mapping for Quake2World has never been easy, especially for Windows users. We have teamed up with GtkRadiant and taken tremendous strides to eliminate the barriers and snags to mapping for Quake2World, on all 3 major platforms. More on that below!

GLib

The core foundation of the GNOME platform, GLib was integrated to provide universal string handling, path name manipulation and collections management. The consistency and efficiencies gained by leveraging GLib throughout the code allowed us to eliminate dozens of small, old bugs and greatly reduce level loading times.

Github

Slightly late to the game, Quake2World migrated to Github back in June. The code and data live in separate repositories: quake2world and quake2world-data. If you find bugs in the current BETA, you are encouraged to file issues there.

Jenkins

maci was good enough to invest hours and hours into setting up a proper continuous integration environment for us running Jenkins. While the Jenkins portal itself isn't directly helpful for end-users, it has greatly improved the availability of our builds.

So What's Left?

Maps!

Our highest priority for the 1.0 general release is to provide quality remakes of the classic Quake II deathmatch levels. Panjoo has started us off on the right foot with his superb rework of The Edge, and TRaK, before retiring from the project, gave us an excellent head-start with initial cuts of The Frag Pipe and The Warehouse featuring his own original textures.

We are seeking new mappers to pick up the torch and see these maps through to completion, and to port the remaining Quake II deathmatch levels as well. And to that end, we've upped our game by providing the very best tools and support we've offered to date.

GtkRadiant

Since Quake2World's inception, the NetRadiant editor has been our tool of choice for level editing. Unfortunately, NetRadiant seems all but unmaintained these days, and several long-standing issues with it led us to seek an alternative. While we may eventually support NetRadiant again in the future, it was time to make a change..

By joining up with TTimo's GtkRadiant maintenance effort, we have fixed several long-standing issues for mappers on the Windows platform. Namely, GtkRadiant 1.6.4 now supports per-user game data directories, so mappers no longer have to navigate the perils of placing their custom assets in the official game directory (where Quake2World's Update process will delete) them just to make them visible to Radiant.

Additionally, Q2WMap now integrates with GtkRadiant, allowing BSP process monitoring through the in-editor BSP compilation menu. This allows Q2WMap to send realtime feedback directly to the Radiant user interface, and select malformed brushes, point the user to leaks, etc. Moreover, all of the compiler's output gets logged right in the Radiant console -- no more console window popping up and then disappearing before you can read the results.

For the first time ever, users of Mac OS X will be able to create levels using GtkRadiant, too. As a Mac user myself, it was imperative for me to have a working editor, and so I'll now be providing packaged OS X builds of GtkRadiant for users running Lion and Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard users will be able to compile their own copy by following my build instructions. Look for the OS X builds of GtkRadiant 1.6.4 to appear on the project site soon.

Finally, the Quake2World entities definitions file for GtkRadiant has been completely rewritten to be more accurate and readable. Frankly, it's at least as good as Quake III: Arena's, which should make mapping for Quake2World less confusing and more productive than ever.

Linux server binaries

While client binaries for GNU / Linux have proven difficult to provide in any distro-agnostic way, we are committed to providing dedicated server builds for i686 and x86_64 Linux, complete with an rsync-based update channel. Expect to see this in Q4 of 2013.

More goodies

As we march towards these primary goals, many smaller fixes and enhancements will continue to flow into the project: revamped weapon models, weapon spin-up times, new player models, expanded gameplay modes and more general polishing are sure to come. In fact, you can keep tabs on the items we're tackling for 1.0 by watching these milestones on Github:

• Quake2World Issues - 1.0 milestone
• Quake2World Data Issues - 1.0 milestone

I'd also like to mention that, "post-1.0," we'll be taking on more major challenges such as AI and bots, upgrading to SDL 2.0, and providing more user-friendly in-game menus. But for right now, we're focused on our 1.0 goals and..

We need your help

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? That's why we need your help. Contribute or spread the word! If you have a skill set like mapping, texturing or programming, or if you know someone who does, please get in touch on our forums or IRC (#quetoo on irc.freenode.net). Want to help beta test? That's cool, too -- post a thread or say hello on IRC. All levels of contribution and participation are welcome.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Jay (jdolan)

It appears that, literally overnight, DynDNS decided to cancel my free-tier account which I've had since 2000. Apparently, they changed their SLA 30 days ago, requiring that all free-tier account holders must login to their admin panel once per month or face cancellation of services. Unfortunately, the email address I had on file with Dyn is a Yahoo! account I rarely check.. bummer.

I'm very happy to share that GtkRadiant will support Quake2World and Quake II on 3 major platforms starting in version 1.6.4, which is already in testing.

I'm happy to officially announce that Quake2World development has moved over to Github. Github brings more flexibility and less upkeep to our development effort, while at the same time increasing our visibility and accessibility to new developers and artists, so this is a big win. We're also using Github's built in issue tracking in lieu of our old Trac instance, which remains online for historical purposes but is in read-only mode.

Lately I've been reevaluating my stance on anticheat measures in GPL games -- specifically in Quake II and Quake2World. For years, I've advocated just playing with people you trust, on servers you trust, and leaving it at that. After all, it's just a game, right?

Fans of classic Quake II may find our new packages for Mac OSX 10.6 and 64 bit GNU / Linux interesting! There is no compilation, Subversion checkouts, or anything else to fuss with. Just download, extract, and run. More information and, of course, download links here.