aRQ-Lite2 (pronounced "arc-lite", after the bomb used by the US military), is an improved version of Echon's EGL 0.1.3 source. Much like my original aRQ-Lite project, some of my main concerns are for having good performance on older PC's while still adding a little life to the old engine, as well as presenting an engine that is clean from bugs, and coder friendly.

My initial experiments with the Quake2 engine/aRQ-Lite2 originated using Echon's LiteGL engine, which in many ways is the Quake2 equivalent to Tomaz' Clean Source for Quake. Echon then used LiteGL as the starting point to make his improved engine, EGL. After playing around with the LiteGL source, and pretty much doing all I could to make it a "better LiteGL", I decided that since Quake2 is newer and more complex than the original Quake, adding at least some type of basic particle system and either stainmaps or decals were really sort of a "requirement". Although Quake2's gameplay and story were significantly improved over Quake, it still used the rather meager bubble looking particle system. Rather than reinvent the wheel, or struggle to add someone else's particle system to LiteGL, I decided to use a very early version of EGL, which was pretty much just LiteGL with stainmaps, decals, separate UI module/dll and a few other tweaks.

So aRQ-Lite2 will be a fairly basic engine, by the standards of other Quake2 projects. I have no desires to try to place the features of this engine alongside EGL, Quake2maxx or Quake2Evolved. I just want to have an improved Quake2 engine which runs well on comparatively low end hardware. So what is my definition of "low end hardware"? In general, I think aRQ-Lite2 should run ok on a PII300/128MB RAM/32MB video w/OpenGL support. Keep in mind, aRQ-Lite2 is OpenGL ONLY! It also uses an integrated driver, so you don't have the various "verite", "default" or "software" driver options in the video menu.

Here are the desired goals of aRQ-Lite2:

• Improve code comments/documentation to make it easier for newbie's to work with
• Remove non-essential features such as Gloom support and demo code
• Add basic key features which are "virtually required" in this day and age, such as basic particles and decals
• Do not add anything that is not really essential
• Designed for today's PC's - GL only.

, although there certainly are some changes other than renaming.



Here are some of aRQ-Lite2's features:

• Integrated OpenGL video driver
• Full 32 bit texture support
• Stencil shadows
• MD3 support
• Decal system
• Enhanced particle system
• Selectable crosshairs
• Customizable HUD scale
• Enhanced PAK loading
• Support for TGA, PCX, PNG, JPG images
• Modular UI dll
• Modified RScript support from BeefQuake
• Shaders
• Available high-resolution texture package and other goodies

Head over to the Files page for the latest release.