Potentially unpopular opinion: pathtraced Quake was peak. Anyway to play Dawn of the Machine with path tracing?

For those who might not know, back when path tracing wasn't even an option in Cyberpunk, there were are few teams that were path tracing older games like Quake, Half-Life 1, and Descent: https://github.com/sultim-t/vkquake-rt

I am a huge fan of all 3 of these games and used this as an excuse to replay through them. My verdict was that the pathtraced Quake1 was absolutely brilliant. The lighting became much more moody and atmospheric while the weapons, lighting bolts, and light sources all cast dynamic light that shadowed everything. The shambler would be in a dark and brooding environment and suddenly blast you with energy that affected the whole world.

I got the Machine Games update when it first came out and played through all their brilliant new campaigns. A+.

However, it left me wishing for the dynamisms that the pathtracer could bring to the lighting. Does anyone know if this is possible? It looks like the author of vkquake-rt hasn't updated it in nearly half a decade.

Also, I know that reshade can give a screen space GI affect that is decent, but not compared to full pathtracing.

Anyone else share my sentiments or am I just a bratty old timer with too much GPU?

I like path-tracing in games. But putting it into Quake will change the look entirely, and not for the better, IMO. The only problem I have with Path tracing is changing the artistic vision, but if they can dial it close, I'm all for it.

Without looking too far into it since I'm on the go:

Dawn of The Machine expansion runs on MachineGames' modernized Quake engine called Kex Engine.

Now, could it be possible that Dawn of the Machine will run on regular idTech just by moving assets over? Maybe.

You'll need to figure out if Dawn of the Machine is legacy idTech 1996 compatible. Before that, it isn't running on VkQuake-RT.

I believe there is work that must be done at a map level to add path tracing (like adding the light sources and adjusting their values). It isn’t just like a post processing filter.

I was able to get Down of the Machine running with vkquake on linux, passing it command-line flags:
"basedir" is where the mods are. this could be the steam directory, I copied it to my games folder.
"game" is the folder of the mod to start. mg3 is the folder name for "dawn of the machine"
the extra flag for turning off md5models requires the + and the 0

./vkquake.AppImage -basedir /home/username/games/Quake/rerelease -game mg3 +r\_allow\_replacement\_md5models 0

As far as I'm aware, the lighting needs to be completely redone for Dawn of the Machines to work with pathtracing. Every light source would need to be edited by hand and emissive textures (like the shambler's lighting) need to be set by hand. That being said, it looks like Iornwail supports all the new episodes, including Dawn of the Machine: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail

Yeah. I was wondering if anyone knew of anyone who was planning on doing this or had attempted to. Quite a bit of optimization and improvements have come to real-time path tracing since vk-quake-rt 4 years ago.

Have you given the pathtraced quake 1 try? https://github.com/sultim-t/vkquake-rt

It certainly does change the look. But the dynamic shadows and light give it so much atmosphere and intensity. It really is something special.

And also, to be fair, pretty much every version of quake we play these days has a different look than when we played it in '96. Even the Kex engine adds modern features that fake pathtracing like ambient occlusion.

Eh. We're all playing variants of GLquake these days, which honestly looks pretty different from the actual original game.

KEX isn’t a Quake engine, nor is it MachineGames’.

Useful info, important correction. After giving it more thought, ultimately it's just assets right?

Dawn of the Machine runs fine on most source ports.

As a person who is only known in this community for embracing real-time lighting projects, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I also enjoy the aesthetics that path-traced shadows and lighting add to Quake. When I went through Dawn of the Machine I often thought about how some scenes would look incredible in a path-traced environment. That said a quality feature-full port just doesn't exist, and the vkquake-rt engine is pretty underwhelming.

Kex is just another layer to allow Quake to run on modern hardware and consoles. The Quake engine is there, that's why it still can run mods, old and new.

I love Rtx for older games. It bring new life to older games. For me Painkiller RTX is great.

Quake and Quake 2 look great in RTX, also doom 2.