openQ4 0.14.1, the Awakening Edition: play the recovered Quake 4 expansion beside the original campaign, with stable shadow mapping, a new interface, Vulkan on Windows, smarter bots and an experimental Android app.
The Quake 4 expansion that never shipped is now playable. openQ4 0.14.1, the Awakening Edition, is out now, and it is the biggest update since 0.13.2. It brings a second campaign, stable shadow mapping, a rebuilt interface, Vulkan on Windows, smarter bots and an experimental Android app, then spends the extra weeks polishing all of it toward production quality.
0.14.0 was withdrawn soon after release, so for most of you this is the first look at everything below. 0.14.1 replaces it, with every 0.14 feature refined, fixed and optimized. It is a big step on the road to 1.0.
The Awakening, at last
Raven Software and Ritual Entertainment built an expansion for Quake 4 that was never released. Justin Marshall recovered and published it, and openQ4 now plays it beside the original campaign: pick Single Player > Campaign and choose Quake 4 or The Awakening.
- All 13 maps on openQ4's own code. The expansion's monsters, weapons and vehicles are rebuilt in openQ4's engine and game code. openQ4 never loads the alpha's game DLL.
- Finished where the alpha wasn't. Where the alpha's own code or content stopped something working as designed, openQ4 fixes it: the Valkaryne finale, the beach's death-ray turret, the Pain Lord's weak spot and Retches that could never move are the biggest examples.
- New toys. A chaingun turret with heat and its own HUD, and vehicle HUDs in both the new and classic interfaces.
- Two campaigns, kept apart. Each keeps its own saves and settings, and returning to Quake 4, Arena or multiplayer removes the expansion's overrides.
openQ4 ships none of the expansion's content; you supply the files. The Awakening guide shows how.
Looks better, runs faster
- Shadow mapping you can leave on. The Quality and Ultra presets cast soft, stable shadow maps on OpenGL and Vulkan, with sharp contact shadows that soften with distance. They are cached while lights and casters stay still, so they cost less every frame and no longer shimmer as you walk. The flashlight casts shadows on every preset that draws them.
- Vulkan on Windows is now supported and the automatic choice for new installs. It was tested across every stock single-player map and 20 multiplayer maps, picks your GPU in Settings, recovers from driver resets, and falls back to OpenGL in the same launch if it has to.
- Presets re-tiered by frame rate. Ultra now plays smoothly instead of asking for everything at once; the old everything-on Ultra lives on as Maximum. New Low and Enhanced tiers fill the gaps, and Minimum and Low Power suit weak or battery-powered hardware.
- Smarter Auto-Detect reads your active GPU, memory, resolution and CPU, and fresh installs use it automatically.
- No more restarts. V-Sync, MSAA, texture quality, window and fullscreen changes and most presets apply to the running game.
- Quicker loading. Maps load faster, sounds decode in the background, declarations parse a fifth faster and start-up is over a second quicker.
- Cleaner motion. Temporal AA rebuilds full detail below native resolution and holds still when nothing moves, motion blur looks the same at any frame rate, and cutscenes, cameras, ragdolls and spectating stay smooth on high-refresh screens.
A whole new interface
- The Remastered HUD with Minimal, Competitive and Classic layouts, controller button prompts, and Reduced Motion and Reduced Flashing options.
- Rebuilt menus and tabbed settings, including a Display page that keeps or reverts a change on a countdown, plus New Game and Chapters pages for the campaigns.
- Vector weapon wheels and scopes for Marine and Strogg, with live ammo.
- Animated crosshairs. Each weapon's original crosshair assembles, kicks, charges and reloads with the weapon.
- Built for every screen: controllers, touch, portrait and tall layouts, and text up to 200%.
- Arena regains its ceremony: the match-start camera move and "Fight!", opponent introductions and a real pause menu.
Prefer the original look? The classic screens and HUD are one setting away: seta ui_retained 0.
Multiplayer, bots and demos
- Your inputs reach the server on time again, and prediction and lag compensation no longer correct the same delay twice.
- Bots that take orders. They plan safer routes, hear the fight, time item respawns and follow commands such as everyone follow me. They also stop knocking team-mates off walkways, swim to underwater routes and escape napalm and grenades.
- Talk to your team: quick chat on D-pad Down or V, push-to-talk voice chat with per-player mute, and objective markers for flags, assault points and DeadZone zones.
- Demos you can navigate. Multi-view demos gain kill, capture and round markers, Auto-Track and near-instant seeking, and you can record a whole campaign, level transitions included, as one demo.
- Hosting works as set: Create Server options take effect, the Admin page accepts remote-console passwords, dedicated servers change maps faster, and networking is hardened throughout.
Sound and languages
- Room reverb for every map, as the original game had with EAX hardware: closed doors muffle, hangars boom and radio chatter stays dry.
- Truer audio: sound variety, stereo width, radio levels and distance falloff now match the original game, and unplugging your headphones no longer cuts the music.
- Dialogue subtitles with size, backing and speaker names, plus a separate Dialogue Volume.
- Six new languages: German, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish and Ukrainian menus and game text.
New frontiers (experimental)
- Android: a signed ARM64 APK with touch controls, portrait play and a touch layout editor, built on Emile Belanger's port and OpenGL ES renderer.
- VR: head-tracked stereo through OpenXR, with motion-controller aiming, room-scale movement and comfort options, now on Vulkan too.
- Level editor: edit brushes, patches and entities in 2D and 3D views, then build and play the map in one click.
- For modders and mappers: physically based materials with reflection probes, recompiled maps that keep their AI cover positions, and clip brushes that block what they were built to block.
Sturdier under the hood
Three code audits and static analysis fixed crash, memory-safety and save-restore defects throughout the engine and game code. Saves are now written in a portable format and reported only once they are safely on disk, and openQ4's own data ships as separate packs so future patches can be small downloads.
Before you install
- You need your own copy of Quake 4 from Steam or GOG. openQ4 finds it on its own.
- Install into a fresh folder. 0.14.1 repacks openQ4's own data, so don't copy it over an older openQ4.
- Your settings, bindings and saves carry over. Reapply your preset in Settings > System to get the re-tiered values. New saves use a format older builds can't read, so back up your saves if you might go back.
- Multiplayer needs matching openQ4 0.14.1 clients and servers. Retail Quake 4 and mods built for its original game DLLs are not compatible.
- Mappers: recompile maps that use vehicle, fly, shot or item clip brushes.
Experimental means experimental: VR has not yet been qualified on headset hardware, Android has been qualified on one phone so far, and The Awakening is built from unfinished alpha content, with full playthrough qualification still in progress. Your reports help.
Download
Grab it from the openQ4 downloads here on ModDB, or get any package from the GitHub release page:
- Windows x64, as an installer or a zip
- Linux x64, as an AppImage or an archive (also used on Steam Deck)
- macOS on Apple Silicon (preview); signed builds are also offered by Mac Source Ports
- Linux ARM64 (preview), Windows ARM64 and Android ARM64 (experimental)
The full release notes list everything new since 0.13.2, with upgrade notes and known limitations.
The road to 1.0
0.14.1 is a deliberate push toward 1.0: fewer new experiments and more polish on what already exists. The same engine work now underpins the rebased openPREY and openD3 projects, which share fixes with openQ4 in both directions.
Thank you to Emile Belanger for the Android port, Justin Marshall for recovering and publishing The Awakening, Schnapple of Mac Source Ports for the signed macOS builds, akacross for tireless playtesting and pull requests, and everyone who reported issues after 0.14.0. Come and tell us how it plays in #openq4 on the DarkMatter Discord.