Quake II has long been a game with many things we wanted but couldn't always have. Jester, a fellow mapper recently made this deathmatch map and despite the amazing brush & texture work .. one thing that caught my attention was the rain, now although quake II doesn't support such a feature without a engine mod, there's several ways to make it with one of them being animated (or flowing) textures if you will.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: There's one flaw to making the rain in this tutorial and that's the r_speeds, you'll notice a massive difference in fps .. that noted don't use this affect too much in your map or it will be unplayable in the online arena's.

Requirements:

Before you start this tutorial, in order for the rain to work you'll need a graphics card with the latest opengl driver's installed as the affect's of the texture/rain rapidly disappear in software mode as explained in this tutorial.

You'll also need the rain texture and the example map I'm using in this tutorial (the rain texture is in the .zip with the example map)

In the editor, work with the grid settings on "16" as that's what I'm using in this tutorial.

phew ! With keeping all the above in mind, in this tutorial i'll show you a fast and affective way to make some convincing looking rain in no time!

Step 1: Make a Small Room

"TOP" View in QuArK

in game shot

Firstly make a small room as shown above, then add a info_player_start in there along with some light fixtures to give us some light. I'm using Quark's default room for this tutorial so most of this should be already done for you .

Step 2: Adding the Rain Texture

Next we'll add the rain texture into the map you just created , in the screenshot in step 1 there's a opening in the roof , make 1 brush for a start to fit between the sky brush and the floor ( click the image above on the left for a closer look )

Then rotate the texture if its facing the wrong way to look like the picture above, the flag settings should already be set with the texture but if they aren't add the following to each face mist, current_dn, trans33 and flowing.

The applied rain texture

Important: Sometimes your rain may be flowing upwards ;o), if it is then just rotate the texture on that certain face in till it starts going the right way.

the 5 brushes spread apart

Next, copy the brush you just made into 5 copy's , randomly move them around the gap in your roof as shown with the image above on the right, they don't have to be exactjust roughly but keeping them inline with the sky and the floor brushes as you did with the first brush. I spread mine apart to give the rain a better look.

click for a bigger view

There's different ways you can tweak the affect I've just shown you like stretching the rain texture a little longer to give it a faster looking affect

Step 3: The Result!

the finished result

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and even if there isn't a true way to make rain in quake 2 , this is probably the closest you'll get without a engine mod . I look forward to writing more tutorials in the future, but until then go make yourself some rain! :o)

Here's my contact details if you need further help with this tutorial: