This is the complete client update offered as the main website download. It includes the work from the 1.6 beta cycle through Beta 5 and the October 4 fix pack. The build keeps its Beta 5 version label. Existing personal configurations and presets are not included in the archive and must be retained when updating.

Player contact effects

AVFX contact effects cover wounds, blood, physical fragments, corpses and vapour, with different treatment for biological and mechanical targets. Effects follow confirmed game events; client prediction does not decide damage. Their reflections and interaction with the surrounding scene have been improved. A separate preset family provides factory choices and twelve user slots without replacing the main visual preset.

Standard particles now have individual enable switches and RGB controls for 68 families, arranged over seven menu pages. AVFX particles have their own controls, including the celestial groups. Preset generation respects the distinction between standard and AVFX effects. The dedicated particle-family and contact-effect guides describe each control.

Surfaces and objects

The surface collection includes 32 additional metal floors and 32 metal walls, with named choices and thumbnails. Metal remains opaque and retains its underlying texture. The Metallic Sheen factory preset demonstrates the new materials.

Brick surfaces can use actual relief geometry, including rectangular bricks and seams. Close detail follows screen size; geometry and shader caching reduce repeated work and camera stalls. Fixes address black tiles, unstable generated geometry and shader compilation bursts. Detailed geometry still has a memory and rendering cost.

AVFX surface objects include grass, ivy, ferns, rocks, soil and fallen leaves. Their groups can be enabled separately and have controls for density and variation. Vegetation responds to wind and light. Shadow options include sunlight, moonlight, clouds and the flashlight; these settings are documented individually rather than hidden in a single quality switch. Object shadows are off by default.

The preset generator includes the new objects and materials. Extra uses the Ultra effect selection with user LOD disabled; Ultra uses Quality settings with LOD disabled. Generated mirrors follow the intended floor and slope rules instead of indiscriminately covering walls. Autumn Depression joins the factory presets; Metallic Sheen and Mirror Hell have been updated without discarding their music choices.

Reflections, highlights and Bloom

Moving opaque brush geometry and models are handled more consistently in reflections. Camera and dynamic-mesh updates no longer produce the same stale views. Screen-space reflections still depend on the geometry visible to the client; this is not a promise to reveal objects the server has not sent.

Highlight opacity is separated from outline behaviour. Mirror fill, outline and Bloom have independent controls. Vegetation in puddle reflections can be selected separately; rocks, soil and leaves are not treated as the vegetation reflection group.

Bloom can be adjusted by category from zero to 100 percent. Zero disables the corresponding contribution. Comet settings are separate. Player model parts can be coloured and outlined independently, including the interaction with skins and contrast settings. Corrections remove unwanted blue artefacts and washed-out colours.

The EGL/ANGLE renderer now preserves the intended colours and transparency of individual model parts, including reflected models. The fixes apply to MD2 and MD5 models, world items and weapons. Cel shading also works with highlights: the WGL outline is no longer covered by the colour layers, and EGL uses a pixel-width edge outline rather than an excessively inflated shell near the camera.

Lighting and visibility presets

A common Presets hub contains separate lighting and visibility families. Each has factory presets and four shared user slots. Lighting presets contain 38 parameters; visibility presets contain 123. Saving a preset does not change the normal scope of the underlying settings. A renderer restart is requested only where it is required.

The visibility generator keeps its own Bloom selection separate from the main AVFX preset. The factory collection includes a purple-male/lime-female visibility preset.

Full-screen damage and bonus blends are not lighting. Consequently, gl_polyblend is excluded from lighting presets, from the preset generator and from the lighting menu. Old lighting preset files that contain that setting no longer overwrite the user's blend choice when applied. The normal blend controls remain available elsewhere.

Health and protection ambience

An optional musical layer follows nine health/protection states in single-player and multiplayer. It uses supplied FLAC assets and a 2.5-second transition between states. Death and low health have their own treatment. Explicit music choices retain priority; spectator and demo playback do not trigger the player's combat ambience.

The sound assets are supplied in a dedicated PAK. Their guide explains the state selection, genre options and interaction with online music. This feature is opt-in.

Sound, focus and intro music

The window-focus sound option has three explicit modes: always, while the window is visible, or only while it has focus. Online music and adaptive ambience obey that choice. OpenAL mutes the complete output, including voice sources and effect tails, then restores the selected volume when appropriate.

Starting a recording in the demo browser fades the intro music before the demo-player music profile takes over. Ordinary play and demo viewing retain separate music settings. Custom intro FLAC files use the selected language and their actual duration. Removing the music PAK does not remove the visual intro.

Online music work is asynchronous, and single-player pause handling has been corrected. Routine activation messages no longer clutter the console unless debugging is enabled.

Weapon prediction and sound

Predicted and server-confirmed rocket and hyperblaster impacts no longer replay the same impact sound, including when server confirmation arrives first. Impact and ricochet hand-off is also corrected for rail and bullet events. Rocket-launcher and railgun firing/reload sounds retain their normal sequence, including delayed mechanism sounds.

A stale association between a predicted projectile and a reused server entity no longer hides a later rocket or hyperblaster projectile. Damage and hit decisions remain on the server. Optional rocketdiag diagnostics are off by default. A short rocket-jump echo was not established as a separate duplicate explosion and is not advertised as such a fix.

Underwater weapon impacts are drawn on the relevant surface before transparent water, rather than turning into a flat blood-like layer on the water. A redundant secondary splash was removed. Unknown server events do not generate invented effects.

Personal frag messages

The Network Play menu has a bilingual Frag messages page. Confirmed messages about your own kills and deaths can highlight the opponent's name; this is enabled by default. Optional notifications below the crosshair show your kills and the player who killed you. Both extra HUD notifications are off by default.

Controls cover text and name colour, position, scale, display duration, line count and a neutral background. Weapon icons are shown only when the server message identifies the weapon reliably. The death notification remains until the actual respawn; recent kill notifications fade out. A preview and a reset command help configure the display without playing a match.

Live item timers

OpenTDM-X follows the same automatic-timer permission rules as OpenTDM. The default position is below the mod HUD. Timeouts and the countdown before play resumes freeze manual and automatic timers, audio warnings, ready indications, interval learning and Mega Health waiting. The remaining time continues after the pause.

Quad timing distinguishes a fresh pickup from the remaining effect of a dropped Quad. It does not restart a full duration merely because a dropped item has been taken. Where only partial evidence is available, the display uses that evidence rather than presenting an unjustified fresh timer. The timer guide describes the supported evidence and display behaviour.

Server history and reconnect

The client keeps a persistent list of recent successful server connections. Ten entries are retained by default; the limit can be set from one to 1,000 or storage can be disabled. The shared history records time consistently and does not store passwords. Local sessions and demo playback are not recorded as remote connections.

Automatic reconnection is off by default and can be enabled explicitly. Configuration saving now follows the correct game directory when connecting, reconnecting and changing mods. protocol_info distinguishes the effective connection protocol, including 34, 35 and 36, from the local server protocol setting.

Demo playback and library

demo and mvdplay search the current mod first, then baseq2 and other local mod folders. A recording can be played again after returning to baseq2 without first reconnecting to a server running that mod. Explicit sources are supported, for example demo opentdm/match and demo --mod opentdm match; the same source rules apply to mvdplay.

Search covers nested folders and PAK, PKZ and ZIP archives without the previous eight-level folder limit. Archives may be in subfolders; archives inside archives are not searched. Exact paths relative to demos or a mod root remain usable. The selected recording starts immediately while a background search reports additional copies. The source is retained in playlists, MVD repeat and transitions between the demo players.

The library index, search and grouping span the supported mod folders and archives. With automatic updating enabled, opening the browser starts a background incremental scan. A Current mod tab shows exactly that mod's directory. Hover details include the file, players, map, recorded mod, relative path and local file/archive time; that timestamp is not presented as an exact match start time.

Separate Auto-update and Refresh index controls replace ambiguous refresh behaviour. Manual refresh remains available when automatic refresh is disabled, and a running update is not duplicated. Recordings with the same name in different sources remain distinct in the list, favourites, queue and player details.

Console and command help

Player names are bold, chat text is green and has a contrasting neutral background controlled by console opacity. System messages use explicit categories rather than guessing a colour from their text. English and Russian fonts have consistent normal and green glyph heights. Legacy coloured server text remains readable alongside UTF-8.

The variable and command descriptions have been brought up to date. The interactive browser includes 519 exposed commands: 78 with dedicated entries and 441 additional described commands. Selecting a command displays help; it does not execute that command. Console hints preserve the normal execution of the entered command. The complete command reference also lists internal commands for reference, not as a recommendation to run them.

Menus resize automatically without a video restart. Crosshair zoom scaling reaches ten and texture reduction descriptions cover the actual supported range. The GPU performance HUD uses the correct timer registry. Optional missing cloud textures no longer produce misleading warnings; genuine asset failures still do.

Renderer stability and compatibility

HDR fixes address black output and map-loading hangs in WGL. AVFX state is cleared before normal geometry is drawn, and routine map changes no longer reset HDR unnecessarily. Disabling shaders is guarded where the renderer cannot support the requested combination. Liquid tessellation compilation and the master switch have been corrected.

Updated libEGL.dll and libGLESv2.dll fix an ANGLE vertex-format cache-key problem that could corrupt the cache and crash model rendering or demo playback.

Tessellation support is tested when the renderer starts or its backend changes, independently of AVFX and the selected preset. Representative real shaders are compiled in a separate background process. Failure, a crash or a timeout keeps the safe fallback path active. Hardware tessellation is not used before that check succeeds.

The result is cached against the GPU, driver, rendering context and shader code. Changes require a new check. The protection covers world, snow and mirror tessellation and is not tied to a vendor-name whitelist. It addresses this class of compilation failure, not every possible driver defect.

Alt+Enter behaviour and single-player monster attack-animation skips have also been corrected. Network God remains inactive during demo playback while retaining the user's preference for normal play.

Installation and documentation

Update the complete client layer, including the supplied DLLs, menus, factory data and sound assets. Keep the original Quake II game data and your personal configuration. The package does not contain private demo indexes, caches or user presets. The public client menu does not include the bot administration entry.

The documentation set contains 29 guides in Russian and 29 in English, including the new contact-effect, particle-family, server-history, surface-object, lighting/visibility and health-ambience guides. Generated menu, variable and command tables follow the current source. The illustrated History Book is available separately in both languages, in PDF and as a chapter-by-chapter website edition.

Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5 by ly — Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5 Release Notes

Contents

Q2PRO-X 1.6 Beta 5: changes since 1.5