Quake
Quake or QuakeWorld?
When Quake initially launched its netcode was not optimized for the dial-up connections of the time, and so consequently QuakeWorld was created, a separate exe for the game which was multiplayer only with adjusted physics and severely revamped netcode. As personal internet connections improved, the original Quake protocol became more relevant. Now there is a divide as to which to play. Serious competitive players are very sensitive to the differences between them, however for the starting out player the differences will be barely noticeable, and the experienced but more casual players play whichever, simply going for servers where a fun time can be had.
For starting out, go with whatever your engine of choice supports and then explore the other as you wish. This can be simplified by using DarkPlaces which will connect to either.
Where To Buy
Steam - Steam regards it as Windows only, but there are many engine modifications which let you play the game on OSX or Linux, and the community particularly supports the latter.
Getting Started
Quake is primarily played with modified engines which make use of modern technology and operating systems. Installing them is as simple as extracting them into the same folder you can find WinQuake.exe and running the modified engine's exe. For multiplayer all you need is to pull down the console (~) and type "connect <server address or ip>". Mouselook can be enabled with "+mlook" in the console, and be sure to set Always Run to On in the Options menu.
Installing and Using Mods
Mods are accessed via an amendment system, where you tell the engine where to look first for game data, and then it falls back to the default subfolder (id1) for the base game. Simply extract a mod into a subfolder inside of \Quake\ where the subfolder root will either have a progs.dat file, or a .pak or .pk3 file. You load the mod with a command line appending of "-game <folder containing the mod>", for example if you wished to run the DarkPlaces engine and the DarkPlaces mod, it would be something along the lines of "c:\Quake\darkplaces.exe -game dpmod".
Installing and Playing Custom Maps
Inside of the id1 folder create a folder named "maps", extract the archive (usually a BSP and a text file) into id1\maps. Launch the game with your preferred menu and in the console type "map <name of the bsp file without the extension>". For example if you wanted to play Matt Sefton's classic map Jawbreaker, you would type: "map jawbreak". You can also have a map be loaded immediately from the command line with "+map jawbreak". The plus is stuffing a console command and its values into the initial engine execution, allowing you to do things like specify a map as well as a difficulty, or connect immediately to a server.
Maps which require mods should be placed inside of a folder named "maps" inside of the mod's folder.
Recommended Engines
- DarkPlaces - Though there are many engines for many needs out there, DarkPlaces is a common one for new players due to its support for modern Windows environments, Linux, and OSX along with modern graphical features such as realtime shadowmaps, bloom, and normalmapping. It also supports both the netQuake, and QuakeWorld networking protocols, as well as its own. It scales well on visual effects from the modern to the classic, and contains excellent mod support.
- DirectQ - DirectQ is a Direct3d oriented engine with a few tweaks to the menu but little to graphical improvements, it simply runs on DirectX instead of OpenGL. It mostly resembles the classic look, but performs excellently.
Community
- Quaddicted - Great collection of categorized and rated single player maps as well as a ton of general information and history.
- Inside3d - The modder hub, QuakeC tutorials and an active forum.
- Func_Msgboard - The mapper hub, new map releases, technique improvements.
- QuakeOne - Original network style multiplayer hub, player community.
- QuakeWorld nu - QuakeWorld multiplayer hub, competitive player community.
- Quake Brasil - Brazilian Quake player hub.