Plasma Rifle mod for Quake 2

The weapon is designed to fit in the Quake 2 universe visually and has custom models, animations and sounds.

Like the original DooM weapon, the plasma rifle rapidly fires blue and white bursts of plasma. It uses stock cells as ammo.

Steam Community Guide

Download and extract

Extract the zip file to your Quake 2 game folder. The baseq2 overwrite is optional. It only contains the third-person view weapon.

For steam, right-click on the game title under the Library in Steam and select Properties. Click on the "LOCAL FILES" tab and there click "BROWSE LOCAL FILES..." button.

The plasma folder should be in the same forder as quake2 exe and baseq2 folder.

Make shortcut

Create a shortcut for quake2.exe. Edit shortcut preferences and add "+set game plasma" at the target field after the exe path.

For steam, right-click on the game title under the Library in Steam and select Properties.
Under the General tab click the "Set launch options..." button. Add "+set game plasma" at the target field

Useful console commands

give plasma rifle - Gives you the weapon
use plasma rifle - Equips the weapon
drop plasma rifle - Drops the weapon in front of you
give cells x - Gives you x amount of ammo

plasma_alpha 0 - Sets the plasma sprites opaque
plasma_alpha 1 - Sets the plasma sprites translucent
plasma_alpha 2 - Sets the plasma balls translucent and explosions opaque

Translucent sprite setting can appear be buggy in some lighting situations.

I personally prefer the pixelated look for the game. There's some really great pixelart hidden under all that filtering.

Change opengl texture filtering mode
gl_texturemode gl_nearest_mipmap_linear - pixelated look with smooth far filtering gl_texturemode gl_nearest_mipmap_nearest - pixelated look with pixelated far filtering gl_texturemode gl_linear_mipmap_linear - default smooth texture filtering

Mod is tested with Steam release(3.20), original quake 2 version 3.20 and unofficial 3.24 patch.