space-station-14 VS vkQuake

Space Station 14 has asked to be not mentioned on the subreddit anymore, under the 'Secret content' rule.

From pull request #14663

On https://spacestation14.io/ there are also guides and docs for most everything.

SS13 has been remade, SS14 https://spacestation14.io/ Its very playable today, and has a bunch of improvements to the original. Its also open source under an MIT License.

> Personally, I prefer https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake because it allows disabling texture smoothing.

All hardware-accelerated Quake source ports that I'm aware of allow you to disable texture smoothing, going all the way back to the original GL Quake (if not earlier).

It was historically set through the console (rather than through a graphical menu), via the `gl_texturemode_ command

On modern hardware capable of trilinear filtering, the appropriate texturemode to disable texture smoothing (which keeping the other niceties of hardware acceleration was

gl_texturemode "GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR"

For the Ironwail engine, which is the currently preferred Quake source port for modern 3D hardware, options on whether or not to use texture smoothing (and other "retro" aesthetics like whether to use square or circular particles) are things that can be toggled in the video configuration menu.

vkQuake https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake (Yes I know the author just dropped support but I suspect it'll be picked back up)

Annnnnd 1.30.1 is already out with a few small fixes: https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake/releases

That last one is an open source engine for a trio of existing free games, but if we count open source engines for commercial games the amount of famous examples grows exponentially. All id Software games up to Doom 3 have had their engines made open source and have a huge number of modern versions available for all of them. So Arcane Dimensions, the greatest by a mile Quake campaign ever made, was completed just three years ago and you need a modern open source engine like vkQuake to play it - even the Quake Remastered engine can't handle the huge AD maps. There's also an open source Morrowind engine, an open source Freespace 1/2 engine (Diaspora above actually runs on this), an open source point and click engine called ScummVM that runs so many old adventure games it's almost an emulator...

You can get the packages to build from vkQuake: https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake

A better solution - and one that lets you run the game at any arbitrary framerate you want - is to switch to a fork of quakespasm with framerate independent physics. I'd strongly recommend playing with Ironwail, but vkQuake is also a great option. Both of these ports offer significant performance improvements over vanilla quakespasm and some other nice rendering features.

If you plan on playing Arcane Dimensions with all features like custom HUD and particles then the best choice is VkQuake. It is also able to play the big and complex maps at very high FPS, which most other source port struggle with.