Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena
North American boxart
Developer(s)	id Software Raster Productions (DC) Bullfrog Productions (PS2)
Publisher(s)	Activision (Windows, Mac, Steam) Loki Software (Linux) Sega (DC) Electronic Arts (PS2) Valve Corporation (Steam)
Designer(s)	Graeme Devine
Composer(s)	Sonic Mayhem, Front Line Assembly
Series	Quake series
Engine	id Tech 3
Version	1.32c (2006-05-08)
Platform(s)	Linux, Microsoft Windows, IRIX, Mac OS, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox Live Arcade
Release date(s)	Windows NA December 2, 1999 Linux NA December 7, 1999 DC 2000 Steam 2007
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single-player, Multiplayer
Rating(s)	ELSPA: 15+ ESRB: M OFLC: MA15+
Media	CD-ROM, Steam
System requirements	3D graphics accelerator with full OpenGL support, Pentium II 233 MHz or AMD 350 MHz K6-2 processor or Athlon processor, 64 MB RAM, 8 MB video card, 500 MB of free hard drive space, 100% DirectX 3.0 or higher compatible sound card, CD-ROM drive (600 kB/s sustained transfer rate)

Quake III Arena (also known as Quake 3; abbreviated as Q3A or Q3), is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer and video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly. Quake III Arena is the third in the series and differs from previous games in the series by excluding a traditional single-player element and focusing on multi-player action. The single-player is instead played against computer controlled bots in a similar style to Unreal Tournament.

Notable features of Quake 3 include the minimalist design, lacking rarely used items and features, the extensive customizability of player settings such as field of view, texture detail and enemy model, and advanced movement features such as strafe-jumping that give more speed with greater skill in contrast to the digital, all or nothing design of many computer games.

Gameplay

Modes

Q3A comes with several gameplay modes:

• Free for All (FFA) – Classic deathmatch, where each player competes against the rest for the highest score.
• Team Deathmatch (TDM) – Team deathmatch, usually two teams of four compete for the highest team frag total.
• Tournament (1v1) – A deathmatch between two players, usually ending after a set time.
• Capture the Flag (CTF) – Team-based, played on symmetrical maps where teams have to recover the enemy flag from the opponents' base while retaining their own.

Single player

Unlike its predecessors, Q3A does not have a plot-based single-player campaign. Instead, it simulates the multiplayer experience with computer controlled players known as bots (see Bots below).

The game's story is brief - 'the greatest warriors of all time fight for the amusement of a race called the Vadrigar in the Arena Eternal.' The introduction video shows the abduction of such a warrior, Sarge, while making a last stand. Continuity with prior games in the Quake series and even Doom is maintained by the inclusion of player models related to those earlier games as well as biographical information included on characters in the manual,^[1] a familiar mixture of gothic and technological map architecture and specific equipment; for example, the Quad Damage power-up, the infamous rocket launcher and the BFG super-weapon.

In Quake III Arena the player progresses through tiers of maps, combating different bot characters that increase in difficulty, from Crash (at Tier 0) to Xaero (at Tier 7). While deathmatch maps are designed for up to 16 players, tournament maps are designed for duels between 2 players and in the single-player game could be considered as 'boss battles'.

The weapons are balanced by role, with each weapon having advantages in certain situations such as at long-range or fired around a corner; the BFG is an exception to this as a super-weapon. Weapon balance was achieved by examining earlier games in the series, Quake and Quake II as well as extensive play testing with well-known players such as Thresh. In the first Quake the rocket launcher was so effective that it dominated entire deathmatches^{[citation needed]} while the rocket launcher in Quake II so weak that it was sometimes ignored.^{[citation needed]} The rocket launcher in Quake III is effective but not overpowering, allowing it to be countered in many situations.^{[citation needed]}

Weapons appear as level items, spawning at regular intervals in set locations on the map. If a player dies all their weapons are lost and they receive the spawn weapons for the current map, usually the gauntlet and machine gun. Players also drop the weapon they were using when killed, which other players can then pick up.

Multiplayer

Quake III Arena was specifically designed for multiplayer, the game allows players whose computers are connected by a network or to the internet, to play against each other in real time. It uses a client-server architecture that requires all players' clients to connect to a server. Q3A's focus on multiplayer gameplay spawned a lively community, similar to Quakeworld, that is active to this day.

Development

During early March 1999, ATI leaked the internal hardware vendor (IHV) copy of the game.^[2] This was a functional version of the engine with a textured level and working guns. The IHV contained all the weapons that would make it into the final game although most were not fully modelled; a chainsaw and grappling hook were also in the IHV but did not make it into the final release. Many of the sounds that would make it into the final release were also included.

After the IHV fiasco id Software released a beta of Quake III called Q3Test on April 24, 1999. Q3Test started with version 1.05 and included three levels that would be included in the final release: dm7, dm17, and q3tourney2. Id software continued to update Q3Test up until version 1.11.^[3]

Technology

Graphics

A mirror reflects Sarge and the Quake III logo in the opening scene of the first level, Q3DM0.

Unlike most other games released at the time—including its primary competitor, Unreal Tournament—, Quake 3 requires an OpenGL-compliant graphics accelerator to run. The game does not include a software renderer. The graphical technology of the game is based tightly around a "shader" system where the appearance of many surfaces can be defined in text files referred to as "shader scripts." Shaders are described and rendered as several layers, each layer contains a texture, a "blend mode" which determines how to superimpose it over the previous layer and texture orientation modes such as environment mapping, scrolling, and rotation. These features can readily be seen within the game with many bright and active surfaces in each map and even on character models. The shader system goes beyond visual appearance, defining the contents of volumes (e.g. a water volume is defined by applying a water shader to its surfaces), light emission and which sound to play when a volume is trodden upon.^[4] In order to assist calculation of these shaders, Quake III implements a specific fast inverse square root function, which attracted a significant amount of attention in the game development community for its clever use of integer operations.^[5][6]

Quake 3 also introduced spline-based curved surfaces in addition to planar volumes, which are responsible for many of the surfaces present within the game.^[7]

The original version of Quake 3 provided support for models animated using vertex animation with attachment tags (known as the .md3 format), allowing models to maintain separate torso and leg animations and hold weapons. Quake 3 is one of the first games where the third-person model is able to look up and down and around as the head, torso and legs are separate.^{[citation needed]}

In-game videos all use a proprietary format called "RoQ", which was originally created by Graeme Devine, the designer of Quake 3, for the game The 11th Hour. Internally RoQ uses vector quantization to encode video and DPCM to encode audio. While the format itself is proprietary it was successfully reverse-engineered in 2001,^[8] and the actual RoQ decoder is present in the Quake 3 source code release. RoQ has seen little use outside games based on the Quake 3 or Doom 3 engines, but is supported by several video players (such as MPlayer) and a handful of third-party encoders exist.

Other visual features include volumetric fog, mirrors, portals, decals, and wave-form vertex distortion.

Sound

Quake 3's sound system outputs to two channels using a looping output buffer, mixed from 96 tracks with stereo spatialization and Doppler effect. All of the sound mixing is done within the engine, which can create problems for licensees hoping to implement EAX or surround sound support.^{[citation needed]} Several popular effects such as echoes are also absent.

A major flaw of the sound system is that the mixer isn't given its own thread,^[9] so if the game stalls for too long (particularly while navigating the menus or connecting to a server), the small output buffer will begin to loop, a very noticeable artifact. This problem was also present in the Doom 3, Quake, and Quake II engines.^{[citation needed]}

Networking

Quake 3 uses a "snapshot" system to relay information about game "frames" to the client over UDP. The server updates object interaction at a fixed rate independent of the rate clients update the server with their actions and then attempts to send the state of all objects at that moment (the current server frame) to each client. The server attempts to omit as much information as possible about each frame, relaying only differences from the last frame the client confirmed as received (Delta encoding). All data packets are compressed by Huffman coding with static pre-calculated frequency data to reduce bandwidth use even further.^[10]

Quake 3 also integrated a relatively elaborate cheat-protection system called "pure server." Any client connecting to a pure server automatically has pure mode enabled, and while pure mode is enabled only files within data packs can be accessed. Clients are disconnected if their data packs fail one of several integrity checks. The cgame.qvm file, with its high potential for cheat-related modification, is subject to additional integrity checks.^{[citation needed]} Developers must manually deactivate pure server to test maps or mods that are not in data packs using the .pk3 file format. Later versions supplemented pure server with PunkBuster support, though all the hooks to it are absent from the source code release because PunkBuster is closed source software and including support for it in the source code release would have caused any redistributors/reusers of the code to violate the GPL.^[11]

Virtual machine

Quake 3 uses a virtual machine to control object behavior on the server, effects and prediction on the client and the user interface. This presents many advantages as mod authors do not need to worry about crashing the entire game with bad code, clients could show more advanced effects and game menus than was possible in Quake II and the user interface for mods was entirely customizable.

Virtual machine files are developed in ANSI C, using LCC to compile them to a 32-bit RISC pseudo-assembly format. A tool called q3asm then converts them to QVM files, which are multi-segmented files consisting of static data and instructions based on a reduced set of the input opcodes. Unless operations which require a specific endianness are used, a QVM file will run the same on any platform supported by Quake 3.

The virtual machine also contained bytecode compilers for the x86 and PowerPC architectures, executing QVM instructions via an interpreter.

Bots

Quake III Arena features an advanced AI with five difficulty levels which can accommodate both a beginner and an advanced player, though they usually do not pose a challenge to high-tier or competitive players.

Each bot has its own, often humorous, 'personality', expressed as scripted lines that are triggered to simulate real player chat. If the player were to type certain phrases the bots may respond, typing "You bore me" might cause one of the bots to reply "You should have been here 3 hours ago!". Each bot has a number of alternative lines to reduce the repetition of bot chatter.

The Gladiator bots from Quake II were ported to Quake III and incorporated into the game by its creator - Mr. Elusive.^[12] Bot chat lines were written by R. A. Salvatore, Seven Swords and Steve Winter.^[13] Xaero, the hardest opponent in the game, was based on the Gladiator bot Zero.^{[citation needed]} The bot Hunter appears on magazine covers in the later id game Doom 3.

Source release

On August 19, 2005, id Software released the complete source code for Quake III Arena under the GNU General Public License,^[14] as they have for most of their prior engines. As before, the engine, but not the content such as textures and models, were released, so that anyone who wishes to build the game from source will still need an original copy of the game to play it as intended.

A project called OpenArena creates open content and bundles it with the engine as a standalone Quake 3 release. Open Arena uses the ioquake3 engine,^[15] which is focused on bug fixes, sound and graphical improvements.^[16]

Expansion

An expansion pack titled Quake III: Team Arena was released in December 2000 by id Software. It focused on team gameplay through new game modes and new weapons, items, and player models. Team Arena was criticized, as its additions were long overdue and had already been implemented by fan modifications. A few years later Quake III: Gold was released, including the original Quake III Arena and the Team Arena expansion pack bundled together.

Other versions

Dreamcast

Quake III Arena was released for the Dreamcast (ported by Raster Productions and released by Sega) in 2000 and featured 4 player online play versus Dreamcast and PC gamers. It is often considered one of the best PC to console ports of its time due to its smooth frame rate and online play.^[17] There are still communities that play this version online on the remaining dedicated servers running patch version 1.16n and the required map pack.^[18]

PlayStation 2

Quake III Revolution was released for the PlayStation 2 (ported by Bullfrog Productions and released by Electronic Arts)^[19] in 2001, featuring several elements adopted from Team Arena, along with a more mission-based single-player mode. It features split-screen multiplayer for up to 4 players, but lacks online play and mouse support. Gamerankings.com rated the release at 83%.^[20]

Xbox

A port of Quake III was released for the original Xbox console; however, it was built using an unlicensed version of Microsoft's Xbox Development Kit, and as such there is no legal way to download and play it. In addition, it requires a modded Xbox to run.

Xbox 360

Quake III: Team Arena was revealed in a ESRB listing for the Xbox 360. The title is being developed by Pi Studios.^[21]

Quake III Arena for the 360 was officially announced by id at QuakeCon 2007.^[22] The title will be released on Xbox Live Arcade and will be jointly developed by id and Pi Studios.

Quake Live

Quake Zero was announced at QuakeCon on August 3, 2007 and will be an updated version of Quake 3 Arena, distributed by free download, run in a browser window and supported by built-in advertising content.^[23] On February 20, 2008 id announced that Quake Zero would be launched as Quake Live.^[24]

Quake Live is now in open beta and can be played at the Quake Live website.

Quake Arena DS

Quake Arena DS was announced at QuakeCon on August 4, 2007. John Carmack announced the game and said that touch screen controls would not be implemented as much as in Metroid Prime Hunters, for example. He stated that he would like all shooting in the game to be controlled with the D-pad instead of the Touch Screen.^[25]

Quake III iPhone/iPod Touch

An iPhone/iPod touch version was released on Saurik's Cydia by the xSellize application source. The application can only be played on jailbroken devices and is extremely similar to the original except for the fact that it integrates the iPhone's accelerometer and touch controls to make the gameplay possible.

Modifications

A screenshot from the free game Tremulous.

Like its predecessors, Quake and Quake II, Quake III Arena can be heavily modified, allowing the engine to be used for many different games. Mods range from small gameplay adjustments like Rocket Arena 3 and Orange Smoothie Productions to total conversions such as Smokin' Guns and DeFRaG. The source code's release has allowed total conversion mods such as Tremulous, World of Padman, OpenArena and Urban Terror to evolve into standalone free games. Other mods like Weapons Factory Arena have moved to more modern commercial engines. Challenge ProMode Arena became the primary competitive mod for Quake III since the Cyberathlete Professional League announced CPMA as its basis for competition. CPMA includes alternative gameplays, including air-control, rebalanced weapons, instant weapon switching and additional jumping techniques.

Competitive play

Quake III Arena's multiplayer-focused development lead to it developing a large community of competitive players and like its predecessors it was used extensively in professional electronic sports tournaments.

In competitive Quake III Arena there are two distinct gameplays, often referred to as 'rulesets', the out-of-the-box Quake III Arena game, also known as vanilla Quake 3 (VQ3), and the CPM ruleset of the Challenge Pro Mode Arena mod.

On July 26, 2006, Challenge Pro Mode Arena with VQ3 gameplay was chosen by Cyberathlete Professional League as the mod of choice for their tournament, making it the standard competitive mod for Quake III Arena. Previously, Orange Smoothie Productions was the most widely used tournament mod.^[26]

Competitions and leagues

The following competitions have held Quake 3 events:

• Cyberathlete Amateur League
• Cyberathlete Professional League
• Electronic Sports World Cup
• QuakeCon
• World Cyber Games

Many of these competitions have now moved on to more recent games.

See also

Video games portal

• Quake (series)
• id Tech 3, AKA the Quake III Engine
• OpenArena – free clone with Quake 3 engine
• Quake Live - a browser-based variant of Quake III Arena

Notes

External links

• Official game homepage
• Quake III Arena at MobyGames
• Quake III Arena at the Open Directory Project