vkQuake 1.37 brings contact shadows, gyro aiming

vkQuake 1.37.0 just landed and it is a big one. The headline feature is ambient occlusion from monsters, items and other entities onto nearby level geometry, so that Shambler finally looks like it is standing on the floor instead of floating an inch above it. Also new is independent render resolution: run the game at a lower resolution while menus, text and the HUD stay sharp.

Controller players get gyro aiming, flick stick, rumble and a dedicated settings menu. Fresh configs now default to borderless fullscreen, VSync, 4x MSAA and anisotropic filtering.

Map-Center went back for a second round on Paril's Quake II PSX mod, and this one runs on an industrial subtheme: moving parts, power cores, electricity, lasers and machinery worth stopping to look at. Eleven maps all told, counting an intro, eight regular maps, a secret map and a hub by DetroHogga that is packed with PlayStation references and finishes on a boss fight.

The secret map is another remaster by Shartuterie, pulled out of the classic Quake II archive: Versicolored Vermination by Roger Staines, originally released in 1998. Scanline glasses on, boot sound up, and go and shoot some Strogg like it is the 90s.

cyanbun96 has pushed a major version of QrustyQuake, the WinQuake port that stays faithful to the original and keeps the modern comforts behind options. The headline is Dawn of the Machine from the 2026 rerelease, now fairly playable, helped along by a new r_coarseocclusion that ships set to Auto and only wakes up on BSP2 maps. On levels that were quietly processing geometry nobody could see, it buys back a lot of frames.

The rest of the list is long: a vid_scalemode command, a keepmusic cvar, Saturn text and notification styles, Startup Behavior options, page scrolling in the Maps and Mods menus on controllers through AUX1 and AUX2, a deletesave command and the Delete key in the save menus, r_showtris and r_showtris_color, and a Previous Weapon binding in the controls.

The editor most has had its second release of the year. The headline is the Sweep tool, which builds one shape out of several brushes at once, so a twisted pillar stops being a forty-brush afternoon. The shape builder tool also picks up an arch.

Quake 3 patches can now be created and edited in the editor itself, and the extrude tool has been improved. Builds for every platform are on the release page.

Quetoo development officially started in January 2007, but the project really begins in a dorm room in the late 90s, back when the open source Quake release taught a generation how to write code, how renderers work, how map compilers work and how to think in 3D. Jay Dolan has finally called it done.

It is pitched squarely against the modern arena shooter. The gameplay is not mathematically balanced, the arenas are not starkly lit techno-voids, and when you blow your friends up the giblets bounce off jump pads and fly through teleporters. The announcement comes with a trailer, screenshots and downloads.