Hack Quake 2

(work in groups of 2s)

Try accomplishing the following hacks on the game Quake 2:

1. Hack at least one of the preexisting monsters or player models and modify its behaviour.
   e.g.. Make a zombie sing Oh Canada when it gets shot instead of falling over. This will require editing the source code.
   Make the behavior easy to provoke.

2. Provide a textfile "readme.txt" describing what you did, some of the problems that you encountered, and how to compile and run through the program.

• Download quake2 demo & source
• Install quake2 demo somewhere
• It should run okay at this point
• Extract the pak0.pak file and then rename or delete it
• You will now get the error: "Error: Couldn't load pics/colormap.pcx" when you try to run quake2.exe. This is because quake2 is expecting everything to be in a pak file. We need a new quake2.exe that doesn't have this restriction.
• To generate the new quake2.exe, open the source's workspace file in Visual Studio. Set the active configuration to "quake2 - Win32 Release" and build the project. This will generate new DLLs and a new quake2.exe, which are located in the "release" directory.
• One of the DLLs may not compile correctly (ref_soft.dll), that's okay, the demo comes with a precompiled version which will do.
• Overwrite the original (demo) quake2.exe with your newly compiled quake2.exe
• It should run okay now.

Compling Quake2 with VC++:

• double click on the workspace file (quake2.dsw)
• set active project to quake2 (under project)
• build with batch build (under build)
• if it complains about any missing .h files, make sure that you add the proper include and library path under tools->options, tab directories

Opening and Editting the pak0.pak file:

pak0.pak contains the data files, such as models, skins, sounds, etc. for Quake 2. The easiest mods to Quake 2 is to edit these data files wth a modeling tool instead of hacking the source code. To edit these files, you will need to download Pak Explorer. Extract all the files from pak0.pak into the directory pak0.pak is in. You can then move or rename pak0.pak so the game will not look there for data. You can now edit the data files for the game. Note, it is not necessary to put your edited files back into the pak file for the game to find them.

Modeling/skinning/editing tools:
planetquake's quake2 editing pages
planetquake's quake2 models&skins
planetquake's general quake2 related pages
Another modeling editing page (this is a locally saved copy, so some of the links may be outdated and may not work, but the page itself is pretty good as it is)
Also try one of these two sites which all contain links to great quake2 tools.
http://www.quake2.com/modeling/
http://www.quake2.com/fear/ed_model.htm

NST is a good skinning tool to start with. Skinning can also be done with any paint program that can edit .PCX files.

Editing the source code:

In order to change monster behaviors, etc, you will need to edit and rebuild the source code. To do this, open the main workspace file in Visual C++ 6. Once you've made your changes, you will need to overwrite the relevant files from the demo with your new versions. For most changes you make to game elements, this means overwriting gamex86.dll. Any other changes will likely require overwriting quake2.exe. Just make note of what the compiler rebuilds after you make a change, and copy any library or executable that was altered.

Submission and deadlines:

At the moment I have not set firm deadline for this little side project, as I really do not want it to distract from your main project, rather I am hoping that it will help the progess of your game. However, I also know that it is in general a bad idea to not set deadlines and usually that assignment simply ends up not getting done! So, let us do it like this, every group will demo what they have accomplished or attempted to accomplish during class on 3/3. But don't feel too bad if things didn't work out well, or that you feel you need to spend more time on your main project. When you are done, do not submit any code or data files. Leave that on the computer you are working on. Simply email me your readme.txt with (hopefully) good clear instructions as to where the material is and how to work it.

Grading:

25% Subjective analysis. How pretty or neat does it look/sound? This hack should be interesting.
A singing/dancing zombie will get great credit on this part. Be creative!

25% Compiles and runs without intervention. (i.e. Please give me some good instructions!)

50% Follows requirements: Did you do what the assignment asked you to do?