Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena is a first person shooter sequel to Quake II, released on December 2, 1999. One of the twitch shooters of the late 90s, it features extremely fast paced multiplayer and extensive modding support. Its immense popularity fostered the creation of the QUAKECon LAN party and convention held yearly in Dallas, Texas. As with id Software tradition, the source code was released under the GNU General Public License in 2005, allowing the game to be ported and improved on by the community.

Quake Live

id Software launched a free-to-play browser-based port of Quake III titled Quake Live. Most players have migrated to this service to continue playing, as it adds new features and game modes, and improves compatibility with newer systems.

Engines

While the original Quake III Arena point releases still work on modern systems, the release of the engine's source code has enabled the creation of additional variants that improve upon the game but are backwards compatible for multiplayer play. These versions do not support PunkBuster anti-cheat and thus cannot connect to servers using it, though very few still exist.

Vanilla

The original, closed-source versions of the game still work for online multiplayer and are the ones distributed via the Steam platform. Many users may prefer to use more recent, improved engines based on the source code release.

ioquake3

ioquake3 is a port of the engine to SDL to assist in multi-platform development of stand-alone mods for the Quake III engine. It adds several features to the engine:

• Ports to new platforms
• Off-server data downloads (http redirection) via HTTP and FTP with cURL
• OpenAL sound rendering allowing for surround (5.1 and 7.1) speaker layouts and generally improved sound
• quality. Especially on the Windows Vista Operating System.
• Ogg Vorbis audio decoding.
• In-engine VOIP support, with optional Mumble player-location support.
• IPV6 Networking. We’re ready to frag on the net of the future!
• SDL backend for the OpenGL context, window management, and input. This also improves portability.
• Anaglyph stereo rendering (for viewing with 3D glasses)
• Full x86-64 architecture support
• Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support
• New SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64
• Compilation with MinGW and cross-compilation for Windows from Linux
• Improved console command auto-completion
• Persistent console command history
• Improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools
• Colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems
• GUID System
• Multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders)
• PNG format support for textures
• Inter-Quake Model support
• Numerous security fixes

Aspect Ratio and Field of View

The game does not automatically adjust the aspect ratio to match widescreen resolutions. Certain cvars may be set to fix this:

• r_mode -1

  sets the display mode to the custom resolution specified by the following cvars.

• r_customwidth, r_customheight

  set the custom display mode.

• r_customaspect

  sets the aspect ratio for the 3D scene (not the HUD or menus!). Set this to the horizontal screen ratio (i.e. for 16:10, set this to 1.6)

Derivatives of the Quake III Engine

Many games have derived from Quake III by licensing the engine out from id Software. These include the Call of Duty franchise, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and American McGee's Alice.