Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5 by ly

Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5 AVFX Advanced Features Guide

Project author: ly

Celestial bodies, volumetric media, surface materials and map-authored scenes

English edition • Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5 by ly • 2026-10-10

Contents

The entries are links: click one to jump to that section.

Materials and reflections in beta 3

Metallic materials and reflections: beta 2

What this guide covers

How to read this

A map of the subsystems

1. Sky and space

1.1. What is available

1.2. Modern and real sky

1.3. Stars, the Milky Way and constellations

1.4. Sun, Moon and Earth

1.5. Meteors, comets and spaceships

1.6. The black hole

2. Volumetric media

2.1. Volumetric fog

2.2. Volumetric clouds

2.3. Backends and volumetric media

3. Water, puddles and reflections

3.1. Water

3.2. Puddles

3.3. Three classes of reflection

3.4. Mirror Surfaces

4. Surface materials

4.1. What they are

4.2. Floor and wall coverings

4.3. Grass

4.4. Wildlife

5. Map-authored content

5.1. Surface drawing

5.2. Volumetric steam and smoke

5.3. Why the generator never touches them

6. Local effects and sound

6.1. Flashlight and monster contacts

6.2. AVFX audio

7. Diagnostics and frame cost

7.1. What you can inspect without any debug mode

7.2. A practical tuning order for your own machine

7.3. Competitive play

8. Presets and custom sets

9. Quick reference

Materials and reflections in beta 3

Existing metals gain improved reflective response, anisotropy and antialiasing. The metal catalog itself was introduced in beta 2.

Updated metallic surface appearance.

Brick geometry forms individual rectangular bricks with joints. Expensive detail follows visibility and projected size; it is separate from the user LOD switches.

Brick material without geometry.

The same view with individual brick geometry.

Fixed dark squares and shaking after generation, the water/lava tessellation master, and model-highlight composition in mirrors and puddles. Puddles can separately reflect vegetation and falling leaves, excluding stones, soil and leaves on the ground. Reduced repeated work is not a fixed-FPS guarantee; complex puddle SSR can still be expensive.

Metallic materials and reflections: beta 2

Floor and wall material pickers now include a metal category: 32 variants each, IDs 129–160. Existing IDs 1–128 are unchanged. An opaque covering uses its own material pattern instead of inheriting the underlying map texture. Existing scale, density, relief and other covering controls retain their purpose. A metallic material does not automatically enable the separate Mirror Surfaces system.

Metallic floor material category.

Metallic wall material category.

Metallic covering example supplied by the project author.

Moving opaque BSP objects, such as platforms, are included in shared reflection snapshots and planar scene capture. Fixed a longstanding camera-state defect that could make model reflections disappear even at Extra quality. The shared mirror, water and puddle path is corrected without reducing quality budgets. Screen-space reflections remain limited by available geometry and server data.

Moving architecture in a reflection.

What this guide covers

The Q2PRO-X AVFX layer consists of two very different parts. The first is the weather and the overall atmosphere: rain, snow, ash, dust, mist, their density, the wind and the speed. That part is described in the AVFX settings guide.

The second part is the large independent subsystems: sky and space, volumetric media, water and reflections, surface materials, wildlife and map-authored scenes. Each has its own menu, its own frame cost and its own dependencies. They are collected here.

How to read this

Every section is arranged the same way: what it is, where it lives in the menu, what it depends on, and what the frame pays for it. The menu-row tables come from the release menu file itself, so the captions in them match what you see in the game.

A map of the subsystems

1. Sky and space

1.1. What is available

Sky & Celestials

1.2. Modern and real sky

The AVFX sky comes in several kinds: the map's own sky, a weather sky, a plain blue one, stars, space, a nebula, a sunny sky and a mystic one. The chosen sky decides the background every other celestial object is drawn against.

One important detail: celestial bodies and stars are drawn in the sky, not on top of the world. Level geometry occludes them exactly as it occludes any distant object.

1.3. Stars, the Milky Way and constellations

Stars Settings

The star field has its own child pages: visibility, catalog, bloom and orientation, colour, objects, the Milky Way, planets and constellations. Planets and the Milky Way are independent layers: they can be enabled and disabled separately from the main star field.

1.4. Sun, Moon and Earth

The Sun, the Moon and the Earth are large celestial bodies with their own position, appearance, lighting and rotation. The Sun has a disk, a corona, a glow and beams through clouds; the Moon has phases, appearance, lighting and rotation; the Earth has an atmosphere, a cloud layer and rotation.

There is a strict occlusion rule worth knowing so that it is not mistaken for a defect:

The accepted final look is a soft cloth of rays around the silhouette of the Moon and the Earth, not a bright rim on the sun-facing side.

1.5. Meteors, comets and spaceships

Meteors and comets fly across the sky; spaceships have their own flight modes, aerobatics and appearance. A separate system handles a meteor falling and striking the ground, with its own damage in single player.

1.6. The black hole

Black Hole

The black hole is the heaviest celestial subsystem. It consists of position, lensing, the accretion disk, streams, colours, quality and a consumption mode. Consumption can draw in celestial bodies and meteors and comets already in flight, and dust lifted from the surface has a settings set of its own.

2. Volumetric media

2.1. Volumetric fog

Volumetric fog / mist

Volumetric fog is not a flat veil but a real volume in which light scatters. It has shape, appearance and lighting on separate child pages.

The two main cost controls here are the performance scale and the step count. The scale cuts the effective number of ray samples, and the step count is the requested number. The effective count depends on both, plus the quality tier.

2.2. Volumetric clouds

Volumetric clouds

Volumetric clouds are additionally split into three independent layers. Each layer is enabled separately and has its own height, density and motion.

2.3. Backends and volumetric media

Volumetric media are the part of AVFX most sensitive to the graphics backend. The client's own menu carries the general recommendation: use the win32egl backend for the best performance.

A practical tuning order:

1. Enable the volume you want.

2. Leave the factory render scale and step count.

3. Look at the frame rate in a scene typical for you.

4. For fog, reduce the performance scale first, then the step count.

5. For clouds, reduce the step count and the quality tier: the cloud buffer scale currently changes nothing.

6. Only then reduce the density and the number of layers.

Details on choosing a backend are in the video guide.

3. Water, puddles and reflections

3.1. Water

Water

AVFX water has several levels. The base layer improves the map's water surface. Realistic water adds separate child pages for the surface, the reflection, the colour and depth, and the foam and shore.

3.2. Puddles

Puddles

Puddles are tied to rain: they appear on suitable surfaces, accumulate and dry. They have their own detail settings and their own reflections.

3.3. Three classes of reflection

This is where confusion arises most often. Q2PRO-X has exactly three, and they are independent:

The preset generator respects that boundary: model reflections appear from Ultra Quality, mirrors only at Extra Quality, and scene reflection in water is enabled from Quality upward.

3.4. Mirror Surfaces

Mirror Surfaces

Mirrors are the most expensive class of reflection, because the scene is built separately for them. They have their own model and quality child pages.

4. Surface materials

4.1. What they are

Surface Materials

Surface materials are the family of effects that bring a level's walls and floors to life: mold, brickwork, cracks, greenery and water running down walls. Each material is enabled separately and has its own coverage, shape and colour settings.

Brick geometry deserves a separate mention: it gives the masonry real relief rather than only a pattern. It is the most expensive part of the materials, which is why the preset generator enables it only at Extra Quality.

4.2. Floor and wall coverings

Floor and wall coverings are independent families with menus of their own. They decide what exactly a surface is covered with, and how densely.

Coverage here means the fraction of the level's surface an effect occupies. Low coverage gives isolated patches, high coverage gives a continuous layer. The preset generator has a separate Full coverage mode that raises material and covering coverage to the maximum and lays it out uniformly.

4.3. Grass

Grass: Placement & Appearance

Grass has three child pages: placement, lighting and motion. Placement decides where grass appears and how densely; lighting reconciles it with the level's light; motion governs the sway.

4.4. Wildlife

Wildlife

Wildlife means the small creatures crawling over the level's surfaces. It has child pages for environment, motion, placement and contacts, and for snakes there are separate combat settings in single player.

5. Map-authored content

Two subsystems differ fundamentally from everything else in AVFX: their content is created by a person for one specific map, not by a random algorithm.

5.1. Surface drawing

Drawing

Drawings are vector objects anchored to specific surfaces of a specific map: layers, strokes, points, effects and contour regions. They are worked on in an editor inside the game.

The key concepts:

A drawing material is portable between maps; a drawing document is not. Once placed, an instance has no live link to the library: it becomes part of the document.

5.2. Volumetric steam and smoke

Surface Volumes

Volumetric steam and smoke (Surface Volumes) are map-authored content too: volumes placed on one specific map and tuned for it.

5.3. Why the generator never touches them

The AVFX preset generator preserves both drawings and a map's volumetric media on every generation. The reason is simple: this is hand-made authored work bound to one specific map. A random scene has no right to erase it.

An AVFX preset does own the complete authored-surface datasets: loading a preset, resetting to defaults or clearing atomically replaces or empties the whole dataset across every map, leaving no trace of the previous preset. The libraries of portable materials and shapes survive that.

6. Local effects and sound

6.1. Flashlight and monster contacts

Local FX & Sound

The flashlight is a local light source with its own settings and a separate shadows child page. Monster contacts with the environment are the environment's reaction to creatures moving through it.

6.2. AVFX audio

AVFX sounds have their own volumes, separated from the game's overall volume: weather, events and contacts are configured independently.

AVFX Sound Volumes

That separation lets you keep the weather visible but quiet — a frequent choice for competitive play.

7. Diagnostics and frame cost

7.1. What you can inspect without any debug mode

The cl_avfx_info command prints the state of the AVFX layer to the console: which effects are active right now, the counters and the budgets. It changes nothing and requires no debug mode to be enabled.

The same action is available from the Advanced effects info… row in the main AVFX menu.

7.2. A practical tuning order for your own machine

1. Start from a ready preset, or from the generator at the Balanced tier.

2. Look at the frame rate in a typical scene, not in an empty corridor.

3. If you need speed, first reduce the step count of the volumetric media, and for fog its performance scale as well.

4. Then disable the most expensive families: mirrors, model reflections, brick geometry.

5. Then reduce material coverage and grass density.

6. Touch weather density and particle counts last: they give less of a gain than you would expect.

A separate saving is the distance LOD: it skips small effects beyond a chosen distance with a soft fade. Puddles, cascade flows and the rain particles themselves are never affected by it.

7.3. Competitive play

Online matches have their own modes: allowing AVFX in multiplayer, allowing it in demos, and a competitive limit that caps opacity, density and particle counts so weather cannot hide targets.

AVFX Modes

There is also a global AVFX disable: it switches the layer off across every mod without rewriting local settings or presets.

8. Presets and custom sets

Any combination of the subsystems described here is saved as an ordinary AVFX preset. Presets can be global or mod-dependent, and custom slots are protected from being overwritten by the shipped presets.

Details are in the AVFX presets guide. The quick way to obtain a new combination is the preset generator, which has a guide of its own.

9. Quick reference