There are several modern engines created by fans for Quake - DarkPlaces, QuakeSpasm, ezQuake, and so on. Do you prefer the original, or one of the new engines? What are the pros and cons of your favorite?

I use fritzquake mark v. It's rather close to the original look and feel. Works nicely on windows 10. It also supports the music as mp3.

I also use Quake Epsilon, because it looks great. You need the quake files but actually everything is replaced. Textures, Models, Sounds (Edit: I think it also replaces the enemy AI but not sure). However I recommend playing it through with another engine first. It does change the atmosphere quite a bit. Also I have gfx problems in the base game. Mods work fine however. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoP9k9FHabw

I only played in SP. Dunno which engines are best for MP.

Can somebody who has some knowledge of the sheer indefinite amount of Mods, Levels and Engines maybe list the most common and favourite engine types and describe them a little bit? I still have the original disc at home (although scratched beyond readability) but never dug any deep into the Mod-scene.

I wanted to know the same and opened a new thread about it. I also posted 2 mods I liked. http://www.gog.com/forum/quake_the_offering/recommended_mods

Fitzquake or Quakespasm would be the ones I'd recommend.

I'd also recommend grabbing the Quake Injector utility from Quaddicted.com, it lets you one click install mods and maps etc from their massive archive. It'll let you sort by ratings and release dates too. There have been quite a few Quake mapjams recently from the folks over at func_msgboard and their packs are all in there and well worth a play.

If you are on a Mac I'd recommend using the Fruitz of Dojo port.

https://github.com/fruitz-of-dojo

While Tenebrae Quake is there you can just click Quake->Releases and download the .dmg for 1.2.1 - "Quakev1.2.1.dmg" mount it and copy its contents to a folder on your hard drive.

All you will need is the id1, rogue, and hipnotic folders present in the same folder. By default it will load id1. To load one of the missions packs drag and drop them on the GLQuake or Quake application as the read me says or use the CLI(command line tab) to add an argument to launch it(they'll be the first 2 options to add).

It comes in both GL and software renderers for Quake and Quakeworld and can play audio cd or MP3s in a folder of your choosing. Otherwise they are very bare bones and true to the original source as far as graphical options go. And it seems to work great on OS X 10.6.8 as well as 10.10.5.

One downside to the Fruitz port is that mappers don't test their releases against it. It'll probably be fine for the original campaign and missionpacks, but hit-or-miss for third-party maps and mods. And it doesn't support some recently developed engine features like the bsp2 map format.

FWIW, Quakespasm and DarkPlaces have OS X versions that are quite good. (As do a few other "modern" Quake engines.)

Think of the Fruitz of Dojo port as being like Chocolate Doom where as the others are more like ZDoom. One goes for authenticity to the original where as the other tries to modernize it.

Yup that's a fair comparison.

I'd go for DarkPlaces for SP, and ezQuake or FTE QW for MP. Quakespasm is nice, but just like the original engine (DOS, Win, or GL) it gives me terrible motion sickness symptoms. You can use ezQuake for SP too, since it renders a really beautiful picture, that no other engine does, but it's like buying a really expensive professional 3D camera just to record your summer vacation.

I've been trying to run Fitzquake Mark V with no success. I extract the contents into quake's folder, and run the executable, the game shows the 3dfx logo but then crashes to desktop. Am I doing something wrong? You guys have this problem as well?

Remove opengl32.dll.

I've just finished doing a tweak guide video for this release and used Quakespasm. It works great, they only challenging task is extracting the audio files and putting them into the correct folders.

Thank you for the tip!