NPR Quake

I first ran across NPR Quake or "Non Photo Realistic" Quake" in an article on PlanetQuake.com. NPR Quake is a Mod, or modification to Quake 1, the original Quake. What is fascinating to me about this Mod is the very original concept for it, and how it shows off the flexibility of the very first Quake engine.

A quick bit of Quake history here:

Quake was iD Softwares follow-up game to the immensely successful DOOM series. The game was created by John Carmack, John Romero, and their staff at iD Software and released to the public in 1996 on June 2nd. The game sported an entirely new "Engine", that for the first time was capable of rendering a completely 3D enviroment.

Over time the game was refined and new capabilites added. One of these refinements was the OpenGL version of the engine. This OpenGL engine coupled with the new 3D video cards that were being produced, brought the game to an entirely new visual level. At the same time new editing and modeling tools were becoming available to the general public.

These new editing tools allowed the public to create all new content and gameplay modes for Quake. So in effect when you purchased a single game like Quake, you were also getting dozens of FREE games as well ! Team Fortress became among the most popular and widely imitated of these Mods

So NPR Quake was hatched as a class programming project at the University of Wisconsin by Alex Mohr, Erik Bakke, Andrew Gardner, Christopher Herrman and Steve Dutcher. The website for this project is here: NPR Quake

The Mod replaces all the original Quake textures with new, original textures or "brushes". Suddenly the Quake world appears to be being hand drawn before your eyes. The world is now alive with motion as the enviroment is constantly being sketched. It's almost like being inside a cartoon. Or perhaps you could call it 'Quake meets TR0N". It really has to be seen to be appreciated, my screenshots here just can't do justice to the "live" feeling the Mod creates with it's constantly moving sketch image.

So check out these screenshots of the Entrance Hall from OpenGL and "Sketch" NPR Quake for a quick comparison:

Again, these static shots just can't do justice to the otherwordly sight of the scene constantly being drawn by an invisible hand!

There are also Brush and Blueprint styles built into the Mod, they look like this:

By the way, if the Quake entrance hall doesn't look like you remember it, you probably never got to see Quake 1 running in OpenGL !
Check out my article on OpenGL Quake.

So what are you waiting for! Download the ZIP File for NPR Quake from either the University site or from my Files page Here

Using the Mod is fairly simple. Extract the files into a temporary directory, then copy the extracted files and folders and just drop them into your Quake directory. Actualy I made a copy of my Quake directory and used that. Quake 1 doesn't seem to be bothered by renaming or moving it's location. I suspect it is pretty self contained.

Create a shortcut to the the NPR Quake executable file (nprquake.exe) Then open the properties of the link and add these items: -width 1024 -height 768 to the end of the command line to have Quake run at the resolution you desire.

Something like: "C:\NPR QUAKE\nprquake.exe" -width 1024 -height 768

Otherwise it will run at something like 640 x 480. Check Quakes control panel to see the different resolutions you can use.

Now launch the game using your shortcut. Pull down the game's Console using the Tilde key (~) and type in "r_load sketch." without the quotes. Or "r_load brush" or "r_load bprint" to check out the other styles. Return to the normal view with "r_load dr_default".

Here are some more shots from the different Mods as well as some OpenGL shots for comparison.

Just click on the thumbnails for a larger image.

Don't have Quake? The Mod will work with the free Quake Shareware which you can get Here

Cardinal Biggles

01-14-2005