Jim Holsenback <jho### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> quake2 plays on xp in compatibilty mode. haha spent the morning blowing the 
> heads off the bad guys .....

  When Quake2 was unveiled at the 1997 E3 convention, it caused somewhat
of an awe. Like always, id was showing the leading edge of gaming technology.

  Quake2 was one of the first games to fully utilize hardware acceleration
(at a time where Quake was still played in software mode and even Half-Life,
unveiled at the same E3, had an *optional* hardware acceleration mode, the
default being a software renderer).

  The light-mapped environments (precalculated with radiosity), dynamic
lighting (demonstrated eg. by how a glowing projectile traversing a corridor
would light up the walls nearby) and enemy AI (eg. monsters crouching to
parry a projectile) caused quite a commotion. These were extremely innovative
and mostly unseen technologies at the time.

  It was also one big reason why Daikatana was delayed for 3 more years
(it was still running on the Quake engine in software mode, and looked
absolutely outdated compared to Quake 2).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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