Is this KMQuake II the same engine as Quake II?

[Harris]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I've seen a lot of misleading titles on the internet about mods for this game like ' Quake 2 widescreen fix '. But some of them actually run on a completely different engine which is not really a widescreen fix but a remake of the game on another engine. Is KMQuake the same? I also want to ask - is there a way to make the game run at 1080p just by using the original game's commands? Without any 3rd party stuff? Thanks.

[cluckstick]

Probably the easiest way would be to run the unofficial 3.24 patch because it is the closest to the original 3.20 quake2 without a doubt. I think it's actually optimized a bit better than ID's original judging from the 10 degrees or so cooler my pc runs at when using 3.24, over the original.

kmq2.toastednet.org/downloads/q2-3.24-x86-full-ctf-1.5.zip

You can hack the original quake2.exe to run on widescreen and even display the gun at higher fovs too if you fancy total originality.

www.wsgf.org/article/quakeii-exe-widescreen-support

and this explains how to hack a gun over fov 90:

steamcommunity.com/app/2320/discussions/0/558747287493574674/

[knightmare]

KMQuake2 is not a from-scratch recreation/remake (like the new version of Kingpin), but an enhancement of the Quake2 engine done over a number of years, as are almost all Q2 engine projects. It's very still much the Quake2 codebase, but with increased limits for making new maps, new capabilities, and lots of optimizations. KMQ2 is much closer to the original Quake2 than SiN or Daikatana. The only area that's had a near-total rewrite is the OpenGL renderer.

KMQuake2 also scales up fonts, with my v3.24 patch (which does support widescreen with auto-scaled FOV and is 100% vanilla Q2) you will probably have trouble reading the 8-pixel tall text at 1080p and it's even worse at 1440p.

The original Quake2 only worked with a hard-coded list of resolutions, there was no custom resolution setting. Probably one of Carmack's larger omissions, as he used a huge 1080p CRT at the time.

And yes, with the source release over 18 years ago, hacking the v3.20 quake2.exe to do anything is a total waste of time.