1. Find your Quake II folder
It must contain a baseq2 directory with the original game data. Back up any personal configurations before updating.
Quake II · Windows client
Final release
Q2PRO-X is ly’s Quake II client, built on Q2PRO. You can adjust map and model lighting separately, give a particular opponent a distinct skin by nickname, and enable weapon prediction so shots produce sound and visual effects without waiting for the server to respond.
The built-in translator helps you follow chat on foreign-language servers, while the menu editor brings your most-used settings together. Demo playback includes tools for reviewing matches, OpenTDM-X bots offer configurable tactics for practice, and single-player options let you change monster behaviour and apply gameplay mutators.
If you are moving from Q2PRO or R1Q2, you can select familiar mouse and movement behaviour before trying the settings that brought you here. For example, keep living players bright, darken bodies and assign a distinct skin to one opponent by nickname so you can pick them out in FFA.
Most settings are available through menus with English and Russian descriptions. Lighting, visibility, effects and interface appearance have factory presets and slots for your own choices; frequently used settings can also go into a personal section placed directly in the main menu.
AVFX graphics are optional: rain, materials, reflections and celestial objects are there for players who want to change the look of a map. Networking tools, chat translation, personal menus and demo features work independently of those effects.
01 · Response and connection
At high ping, the pause between pressing fire and seeing a shot becomes particularly noticeable. Weapon prediction plays the sound and visual effect immediately on your client, then reconciles them with the server’s response; the server still decides whether a shot hits and how much damage it deals.
Prediction can be adjusted for connection latency. On OpenTDM and OpenTDM-X servers it also respects pauses and the countdown before a match, preventing local firing effects while shooting is disabled.
Q2PRO-X can receive game-state updates more often than the standard ten times per second when the server supports it. On a 60 Hz server, for example, the client negotiates that rate when connecting and reports it in the console; on a standard server it continues at 10 Hz.
Enable server-rate adaptation in the online-game settings. Prediction, network smoothing and demo playback account for the selected rate. Connection updates and rendering FPS are separate settings, so enabling adaptation does not itself limit the frame rate you see on screen.
When the server corrects a player’s position, a difference from the client’s prediction can cause a visible jump. LAGHAX smooths these corrections, with controls for adjusting the response to your connection and preferred movement feel.
LAGHAX settings are separate from weapon prediction and server-rate adaptation. An indicator and diagnostic view show the corrections being made, so you can see how changes affect the smoothing.
Network God shows what happens to your connection during a match: changes in latency, packet loss and how regularly updates arrive. Its detailed window includes events, explanations of the readings and setting recommendations, giving you more to work with than the ping number alone when investigating stutter.
Ping adaptation and the other client networking settings are nearby. You can adjust the diagnostic window and indicator’s position, size and opacity; live connection diagnostics are disabled during demo playback.
Mouse and movement options include behaviour familiar from R1Q2 and Q2PRO. Sensitivity, zoom and weapon sway have separate controls, while step and lift smoothing reduce abrupt camera movements without changing the underlying movement of your player.
The menus explain these settings, making it easier to adjust input and movement after switching clients without hunting for variable names in someone else’s configuration.
An accidental press of Win or Alt+Tab can cost several seconds during a match. Q2PRO-X lets you block these and other system shortcuts individually while its window is active; all blocks are off by default.
02 · Match visibility
Map brightness and model-group lighting can be adjusted separately: keep living players well lit, make bodies darker and set your own intensity for weapons, armour and power-ups. Improving an opponent’s visibility no longer requires brightening the entire environment along with them.
Visual settings also cover saturation, glow, view-weapon transparency and the colour flash when you take damage. Lighting and visibility presets combine related settings, and user slots let you save your own combination.
Players and items can have custom colours, outlines and bloom, with separate controls for a model’s head, torso, arms, legs and weapon. This lets you emphasise particular parts and adjust model visibility to the map’s lighting.
Nickname presets help identify opponents in FFA: assign a model, skin and colour to one or more player names. You could make a particular rival red while forcing everyone else to use the same model; their personal preset takes priority over the general colour settings.
Detailed walls and floors can make models harder to distinguish in a competitive match. Q2PRO-X can replace the architecture’s textures with solid colours, checks, a grid or another pattern. Floors, walls and ceilings have separate colours, with controls for effect strength and lighting.
The effect applies to level architecture while preserving your appearance settings for players, weapons, armour and other items. The screenshots show the same map before and after enabling it; the controls are accessible from both online-game and renderer settings.
Items on the map can make small jumps with a jelly-like squash and stretch. Armour, health, weapons and power-ups are configured by group and keep their usual rotation; shadows, highlights and reflections follow the animation.
Jump height is limited to a small displacement from the spawn position. The effect is off by default and never applies to players or weapons held in their hands.
Armour, megahealth and power-up timers appear in a window whose position, size and opacity you can adjust to suit your HUD. Automatic timing is available on servers that permit it.
The server browser keeps favourites and connection history, and caches the server address list locally. If the list provider is temporarily unavailable, the client loads the cached addresses and checks the servers’ current status rather than leaving the browser empty.
03 · Chat and personal settings
The translator lets you read foreign-language chat without leaving the game. It takes the player messages currently visible in the console, detects their language and displays a translation alongside the original nicknames. System messages are excluded, and you can select and copy translated text with the mouse.
Press Translate again to read newer messages; if the text has not changed, the client reuses the previous result. The window can be moved or maximised, its font size and opacity are adjustable, and you choose the shortcut used to open it.
Console categories keep chat separate from command replies and system messages, with tabs across the top or down the left. In this mode, translation works in the chat tab; the usual combined console view remains available too.
Voice chat connects players to a room for their current server, so you can talk without switching away from Quake II to another application. Select your microphone and choose push-to-talk or voice activation in the settings; you can also switch rooms manually.
Volume and connection options are controlled in the client. Waiting for the voice server happens in the background and does not freeze the game interface.
The CVAR Browser searches names and descriptions in English and Russian, showing the current value and help for each result. If you accidentally type an English name with the Russian keyboard layout selected, it also searches the corresponding English spelling.
The All tab includes both variables and commands. You can send a command to the console, check its arguments and run it, or look up a setting whose location in the menus you do not know.
04 · Demos and statistics
The DM2 and MVD2 player supports seeking, jumping to frags and selecting a player to follow. MVD recordings also have an automatic director; movement paths, heatmaps and item timers help you review how a match unfolded.
The browser finds demos across mods, subfolders and archives, with favourites and a playback queue. You can open a recording by its full Windows path without first copying it into the game folder.
Local demos can be used to collect personal match statistics covering results, frags, maps and opponents. Demo viewing has a separate visual profile that applies to recordings from different mods.
05 · Practice and single-player
Q2PRO-X includes OpenTDM-X and menus for choosing maps, opponents and bot behaviour. You can set playing style and aggression, including exceptions for individual maps; ready-made modes include Regular, Training, Hardcore and Training Hardcore.
There are presets for aggressive, defensive and chaotic play, and you can save your own combinations for later practice sessions. The map selector lists maps supported by the installed bot version.
The mod is developed separately from the client and can be updated from the game, manually or on a schedule. Its menus are updated with it, allowing new behaviour settings to appear without replacing Q2PRO-X itself.
Single-player options let you shuffle monsters and items, change enemy appearance and play DM maps with monsters and score tracking. Experimental settings can also alter surface shapes or swap water and lava, including their gameplay behaviour.
Free World changes how monsters behave: they react to sounds, join nearby fights and look for routes around obstacles. AVFX creatures can take part too, such as snakes that interact with the environment and attack players or monsters.
Installed modifications are selected from their own menu, including supported older mods with 32-bit game libraries.
06 · Rendering and AVFX
Internal HDR rendering and output to an HDR monitor are enabled separately. White level and highlight brightness can be adjusted to your display, while tone mapping lets you balance bright flashes against lit surfaces and see the result directly in the game.
HDR output requires support from the monitor, Windows and the selected renderer. Lighting and post-processing controls remain available on a standard display.
AVFX adds weather and environmental detail to Quake II maps: rain collects in puddles and runs down surfaces, snow settles on the ground and lightning flashes illuminate the level. Shots make splashes in water and leave marks in snow; fog, clouds, ash and steam above lava have their own controls.
Surface materials add relief, cracks, brickwork and streaks to walls and floors. Grass, moss, mould, stones, leaves, markings and small creatures can be placed over them, while water, puddles and mirror surfaces reflect the environment and models.
The WGL renderer supports tessellation of architecture and liquids, adding geometric relief to walls, floors, water and lava. Object density and reflection quality are adjustable independently of the other effects.
Sky effects include stars and constellations, the Sun, Moon, Earth and other planets, as well as meteors, comets, spacecraft and a black hole that bends light. Celestial bodies and moving objects can be enabled separately to build the scene you want.
AVFX has an overall switch, and its settings can be saved in presets. Weather and environmental effects can change the appearance of a map without changing your networking settings.
AVFX contact effects connect weapon impacts with damage to models and surfaces: blood sprays and pools, bullet marks, explosion craters and debris. Each weapon has its own effect strength and composition, so a shotgun pellet and a rocket explosion leave different results.
Blood colour and mark lifetime are adjustable, and pools have reflection and quality settings. Energy weapons can produce both blood and vaporisation because those effects have independent controls.
Separate switches determine whose actions create effects: your player, other players or monsters. Demo playback is supported too. Contact effects have their own presets, independent of AVFX weather and scenery.
Standard Quake II particles have enable switches and RGB controls by family. Change the colour of a projectile trail or blood, or turn off one distracting effect while keeping the rest. These settings apply globally across the game.
AVFX particles are configured independently, including falling and flying meteors, comets, lightning and impacts on water or snow. Their colours are saved in AVFX presets, so changing standard particles does not recolour your selected scene.
Factory presets combine weather, material and scenery settings into scenes you can adjust and save under your own name. Music has a separate set of presets.
The generator creates combinations of effects within the restrictions you choose, and Full Chaos mode also varies particle colours. Blood and impact settings stay in their independent contact-effect presets and are excluded from this generation.
07 · Sound and appearance
OpenAL provides positional audio, binaural headphone sound and reverberation to help locate footsteps and shots in their surroundings. Hit feedback is configured separately, and you can replace game sounds with your own files.
Music options include online playback and ambience that changes with the player’s health and protection. While a menu is open, the current track can drive a spectrum, waveform or radial visualisation with adjustable colours and opacity.
An appearance preset sets the colours of menus, dialogs, console buttons, the logo and music visualisation. There are 20 factory themes and six slots for your own; each part of a selected theme can also be adjusted separately.
Text sizes are configurable for titles, section headings, normal entries and selected entries, with shadows to improve readability over busy backgrounds. You can change the selection shape, logo colours, glow and lightning, and apply menu opacity either to the panel alone or to the full-screen background.
Changes appear as you adjust the settings. Save and rename your own theme, or select Default to restore the factory appearance.
The startup scene uses the logo, lightning, glow and music configured with the client’s appearance settings. The intro and its sound have separate switches, and the scene is skipped when launching directly into a map or connecting to a server.
Windows x64 · Requires original Quake II game data
The archive contains the client, OpenTDM-X bots and guides. Extract it into an existing Quake II or Q2PRO-X installation.
After installation, choose a server, the campaign or a bot game from the main menu.
It must contain a baseq2 directory with the original game data. Back up any personal configurations before updating.
Download the archive and extract its entire contents into your Quake II folder, allowing client files to be replaced.
Run Q2PRO-X.exe. Choose your screen resolution and mouse sensitivity, then start playing from the main menu.
The guides explain menu options, parameter values and setup steps. Read them here or download the DOCX files to keep an offline copy.
Find the right guide, from installation to detailed settings.
OpenFeatures and fixes added since the 1.5 release.
OpenColours, text sizes, dialogs, opacity and saving your own themes.
OpenWhat settings do, which values they accept and how to use console commands.
OpenUsing the variable and command browser.
OpenDisplay, lighting, shadows, post-processing and image quality.
OpenBrightness settings and output to an HDR monitor.
OpenSpatial audio, reverberation and music settings.
OpenChoose a microphone, room and voice transmission mode.
OpenInput modes, sensitivity, zoom and system shortcuts.
OpenServer rate, ping, prediction and movement smoothing.
OpenRead connection indicators and investigate networking problems.
OpenFind recordings, seek through them, choose a player and use the director.
OpenCollect results from demos and review maps, opponents and match history.
OpenRespawn countdowns and timer window settings.
OpenIntro scene, logo, music and how to turn them off.
OpenRain, snow, water, fog and other environmental effects.
OpenChoose a scene, save your own settings and rename presets.
OpenEnvironment, reflections and celestial object settings.
OpenSet limits and generate new combinations of effects.
OpenColours, outlines, bloom, model parts and nickname presets.
OpenCampaign, mutators, practice and launching installed mods.
OpenWeapon effects, blood pools, craters, debris and contact presets.
OpenEnable particle families and choose colours for standard effects and AVFX.
OpenConnection history, reconnecting and console commands.
OpenPlace and adjust environmental details.
OpenChoose presets and save your own lighting settings.
OpenChoose background audio for different player states.
OpenReplace sounds and prepare audio files for the game.
OpenConfigure the sound played when you hit an opponent.
OpenSelect a language, translate visible messages and copy text.
OpenHorizontal and vertical tabs for different message types.
OpenCreate sections, add settings and choose where they appear.
OpenMaps, opponents, behaviour presets and bot updates.
OpenPatterns, colours and brightness for walls, floors and ceilings.
OpenJumps, squash and stretch by item group.
OpenQ2PRO-X
Q2PRO-X 1.6 Final by ly: the client, OpenTDM-X bots and RU/EN guides.