Yamagi Quake II

Yamagi Quake II is an alternative client for id Softwares Quake II. Our goal is to provide the best Quake II experience possible, we strive to preserve the game play as it was back in 1997. Thus we aim mostly for bug fixes, stability and gentle enhancements were appropriate.

Features

Yamagi Quake II has a lot of unique features. The most notables ones are:

• Modern OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL ES 3.0 renderers, providing a greatly enhanced look and feel. The original OpenGL 1.4 and even the Software renderers are still supported. All 3D accelerated renderers support anisotropic filtering and multisampling anti aliasing.
• Full support for widescreen displays and arbitrary resolutions. The HUD can be scaled to be readable on HiDPI displays.
• Support for surround sound, from stereo up to 7.1 channels and even HRTF. The background music can be played from OGG/Vorbis files, a CD drive is no longer necessary.
• A rewritten savegame system. Yamagi Quake II savegames are completely reliable and backward compatible between releases.
• Highly precise timings. For example, on a flat panel display with a refresh rate of 144 hertz and vertical synchronisation (vsync) enabled Yamagi Quake II is running at exactly 144 frames per second. Without any physic bugs.
• In comparison with the original client over 2.000 bugs were fixed. The Yamagi Quake II client is very well tested and stable. The dedicated server is able to run for weeks without a single restart. Last but not least the code is fully 64 bit clean and highly portable.

Yamagi Quake II supports the following platforms:

• FreeBSD
• Linux
• OpenBSD
• Windows

Some additional platforms are supported by the community. Yamagi Quake II works on them, but there may be bugs. The Yamagi Quake II developers may not be able to fix these bugs due to the lack of required hardware or software:

• Haiku
• Mac OS
• NetBSD
• Solaris

News

On 2026-05-15 Yamagi Quake II version 8.70 was released. Changes are:

• The default SDL version is now 3.0. SDL 2.0 is still supported as an optional build flag. There are no plans to remove SDL 2.0 support in the foreseeable future, however new features may not be implemented for it.
• The map list maps.lst is now searched in all folders. (by 0lvin)
• centerview was improved to operate more like under Quake I. Instead of snapping back to center immediately, the view now returns to the center in a progressive way. The old behavior can be restored by setting cl_centertime 0. (by protocultor)
• Several improvements to the build system, most notably separate dirs for debug and release builds. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Optional support for XDG directories on unixoid platform. If no ~/.yq2/ directory exists, gamedata, savegames, etc are written to $XDG_DATA_HOME/YamagiQ2. (by Pedro Oliva Rodrigues)
• Most errors regarding sound playback are no longer fatal. The client will survive most broken sound entities sent by the server. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Make the entity limit less restrictive. The client and server now support up to 32768 entities. Due to limitations of the network protocol only the entities 4096 and lower can play sounds. The maxentities cvar needs to be increased to make use of the raised entity limit in single player or when hosting a server. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• More load time optimizations were implemented, making level loading times even shorter in single-player mode. In multi-player mode basic load time optimizations are now enabled by default, yielding a huge improvement in loading times. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Several improvements to the controller / gamepad support. Rework the gamepad menu, slight reform of Flick Sticks, dampened rumble when using gyro and the gamepad used by the game can be selected with the in_initjoy cvar. (by protocultor)
• The crosshair color can now be configured. Predefined colors can be selected through the options menu, arbitrary colors can be configured with the crosshair_color_r, crosshair_color_g and crosshair_color_b cvars. (by Trung Lê)
• Fix lerping with lasers. This makes moving lasers much smoother. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• More mapfixes for cool1. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Solve long standing problems with OpenAL HRTF caused by occlusion. (by David Carlier)
• Huge stability and robustness improvements to the savegame system. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• The ‘pause on focus loss’ menu option was removed to free up one menu slot. The setting is still available as the vid_pauseonfocuslost cvar.
• The server can now handle configstring index overflows. Overflows are no longer fatal instead warnings are printed to the console. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• A lot of smaller bug fixes, code cleanups and robustness improvements. (by 0lvin, ABalfoort, BjossiAlfreds, David Carlier and protocultor)

On 2026-05-15 Three Wave Capture The Flag version 1.13 was released. Changes are:

• A lot of smaller bug fixes, code cleanups and robustness improvements. (by 0lvin, ABalfoort and David Carlier)

On 2026-05-15 The Reckoning version 2.17 was released. Changes are:

• Several improvements to the build system, most notably separate dirs for debug and release builds. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Huge stability and robustness improvements to the savegame system. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• A lot of smaller bug fixes, code cleanups and robustness improvements. (by 0lvin and BjossiAlfreds)

On 2026-05-15 Ground Zero version 2.16 and was released. Changes are:

• Fix crash in Tag DM game when respawning after death. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Several improvements to the build system, most notably separate dirs for debug and release builds. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• Huge stability and robustness improvements to the savegame system. (by BjossiAlfreds)
• A lot of smaller bug fixes, code cleanups and robustness improvements. (by 0lvin, ABalfoort and BjossiAlfreds)

Official Downloads

Source code archives for the official releases. Instructions for compiling the source into binaries are included:

• Yamagi Quake II Client and Dedicated Server: Yamagi Quake II, Version 8.70
• Three Wave Capture the Flag: Three Wave Capture the Flag, Version 1.13
• The Reckoning: The Reckoning, Version 2.17
• Ground Zero: Ground Zero, Version 2.16

Archive with all code and binaries ever released: Yamagi Quake II Archive

Precompiled Windows binaries: Yamagi Quake II for Windows

Precompiled Windows testbuilds: Yamagi Quake II for Windows Testbuilds

Experimental Vulkan renderer library: Vulkan for Yamagi Quake II on Github

Unofficial Downloads

Unofficial downloads, maintained by the community. These aren’t supported by the Yamagi Quake II developer:

• Flatpaks: Flatpaks
• Mac Source Ports: Mac Source Ports
• Precompiled Mac OS binaries: Yamagi Quake II for Mac
• Ubuntu Launchpad PPA with Yamagi Quake II and other open source games: Ubuntu Launchpad PPA

Documentation

The documentation is included in the source archives and with the prebuild Windows binaries. An online version can be found here: Yamagi Quake II Documentation

Contribution and Bugreports

The development of Yamagi Quake II is hosted on Github. If you want to report a bug or send some nice patches please open an issue or a pull request in the appropriate subproject. You can find our organization at: github.com/yquake2

If you’re planing to work on a bigger feature, please do yourself a favor and ask if we’re interested before spending time onto it. We don’t merge every feature that’s submitted to us just because the code is already there. Maintainability, integration with the existing code and our general focus are of great concern, too.