QUAKE III REMIX

Instructions for Beta 127M


Table of Contents

Overview What is it?
Features What does it do?
Quick Start For those who don't want to read the manual.
Installation For those who want to make sure it works.
Configuration How to customize your settings.
Table of Cvars List of all new or modified cvars and their meanings.
Uninstalling How to get rid of it.
More About the Features Some technical details for the curious.
Problems For those who didn't read the manual.
Contact For those who still didn't read the manual.
Legal Stuff Copyright and License Agreement.


Overview

Quake III Remix is intended to provide some interesting gameplay variations, along the lines of what is possible with the Lithium server for Quake 2 or the Oz server for Half-Life, but in a deliberately more limited manner. One complaint many people had about the afore-mentioned mods is that servers were often run with poorly planned configs, to the degree that gameplay suffered. With Quake III Remix the server does not have unlimited control over things like weapon damage or missile speeds. Instead the server must pick from several pre-designed and tested configurations. As a result, you will always get a well-balanced game, and once you know which config is being run you will know exactly what to expect as a player.

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Features

The Remix Server currently has the following features:

Any combination of weapons style and physics model settings can be used, for nine different variations in game feel. Combined with the 4 modes of gameplay included with Quake III, this gives you 36 different modes of play.

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Quick Start

The default configuration of the Remix Server should work fine for most people. If you just want to try the Remix Server and don't want to read the rest of this file, do the following:

  1. Unzip q3remixserver127m.zip into your Quake III directory.
  2. Start Quake III.
  3. Click on the Mods menu.
  4. Click on Quake III Remix.
  5. Click on the Load button on the lower right
  6. Start a game using either the Skirmish option in the Single Player menu, or the Create option in the Multiplayer menu.
  7. Pick your options as you would normally.
  8. When you get to the Game Server screen, notice that there are two new options: Physics Model and Weapon Style. Click on these to cycle through the available choices.
  9. When you are ready to play, click on the Fight button.
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Installation

To install the Remix Server, simply unzip the file q3remixserver127m.zip into your Quake III directory, preserving paths. This should create a directory named "remix" under the directory in which you installed Quake III. You should end up with the following new files under the remix directory:

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Configuration

To play the Quake III Remix server you can either navigate through the Mods menu as described in Quick Start or you can set up a shortcut to directly run the Remix server. To create a shortcut, do the following:

  1. Right click on your Windows desktop.
  2. Select New and then Shortcut from the menu that pops up.
  3. Browse to your Quake III directory and double click quake3.exe.
  4. Now add this to the end of the command line:

    +set fs_game remix

    making sure that there is a space before the plus sign. The whole thing might look similar to this:

    "c:\Quake III Arena\quake3.exe" +set fs_game remix

  5. Click the Next > button.
  6. Give the shortcut a name, like Quake III Remix, and click Finish.

You can use the Game Server menu to configure Quake III Remix, or set variables from the console, or use the included server.cfg file. The Game Server menu is described in the Quick Start section. To use the server.cfg file to configure the Remix server, open the file in a text editor and change the settings to whatever you like. Then when you are playing Quake III Remix, pull down the console and type exec server.cfg. Alternately, you can set up a shortcut or batch file to run the server automatically, by using a command line like the following:

quake3.exe +set fs_game remix +exec server.cfg

The following is a complete list of all the cvars that control the Remix Server features. See the X Client docs for X Client cvars.

Variable Value Meaning
xg_physicsModel 0 Standard Quake III physics.
1 Arcade style physics.
2 More realistic physics.
xg_weaponStyle 0 Standard Quake III weapons.
1 Classic arcade style weapons.
2 High damage weapons.

The game defaults to the Arcade settings for both the physics model and the weapon style. These variables are set as server variables in the code, which means that players will be able to see the value of these variables in most game browsers, and players can check them in game by using the serverinfo command. It also means that they are not normally saved in your q3config.cfg file. If you want the variables to be saved, so that Remix will always start with your preferred settings, you must use archive variables to force Quake III to save your settings. You force the variables to be saved by setting them with the seta command. For example, if you always wanted to run with standard physics and high damage weapons, executing the following two lines, either from the console or from a config file, would cause these settings to be saved to your remix\q3config.cfg file:

seta xg_physicsModel 0
seta xg_weaponStyle 2

Since these are then saved in your remix\q3config.cfg file, the next time you run the Remix server it will start up with these settings.

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Uninstalling

If problem arise, and you want to completely uninstall the Remix server, just delete the entire remix directory, underneath your Quake III directory. No other changes are required.

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More About the Features

The Physics Model

Selecting the Arcade Physics model causes a couple of very simple changes to be made. The first is that air control is doubled. This effect is actually pretty subtle, but it does make some entertaining new tricks possible on the jump pads. Secondly, vertical velocity is conserved when jumping. This makes ramp jumping and double jumping possible.

Conserving jump velocity may be correct dynamically, but it is not actually correct physics or biomechanics. Consequently the Realistic Physics model uses the standard Quake III jumping model. And even though air control is unrealistic, disabling it would make some maps unplayable. Therefore the realistic physics model uses the standard Quake III air control.

The biggest change the realistic physics model causes is in the way projectile weapons work. You have probably already noticed that if you fire a rocket while sailing across a jump ramp, the rocket generally ends up hitting you in the ass when you land. This is because id chose not to use the correct additive velocity formula for projectiles; i.e. the projectile's initial velocity should be added to your velocity in order to determine its final velocity. Actually very few games do this, and the reason is that additive velocities make aiming somewhat more difficult. The only FPS game I am aware of that uses additive projectile velocities is Tribes. Still, as most Tribes players will tell you, it is not that difficult to adjust your aim to take into account additive velocities, and it is worth it in order to regain the use of your projectile weapons while airborne. The trick you have to learn is simply to lead your target according to how fast it is moving across your field of view, regardless of whether it is you or the target that is moving. It's actually quite a simple adjustment to make once you understand the trick.

Weapon Style

The Classic Arcade weapons settings causes the behavior of the weapons to resemble older, single player arcade games. These games had a much wider range of weapon damage, due to the much wider range of strength of the monsters you would be facing. Some people felt that this led to an unbalanced multiplayer game, and hence newer games have reduced the range of power available in multiplayer mode. However there are still many people who feel that the old style weapons result in a more strategic game, whereas more modern, "balanced" multiplayer games tend to emphasize tactics and twitch reflexes only. The Arcade weapons setting takes you back to the more strategically oriented range of weapon damage. When you select Arcade style weapons, the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and lightning gun will behave precisely as they did in Quake. The plasma gun, rail gun, and BFG are unchanged from their standard Quake III counterparts. The gauntlet is depowered a tad to discourage llamas, and the machine gun and shotgun are tweaked so that they fit proportionately into the range of power available.

Where modern multiplayer games typically balance weapons by reducing power, the High Damage Weapons setting goes in the opposite direction. The weapons are well balanced, i.e. there are no excessively weak or excessively strong weapons, however the scale of the weapon damage is taken up a notch or two, and firing rates and projectile velocities are higher. With high damage weapons turned on, all of the weapons are capable of quickly reducing your opponent to giblets. To offset the increased damage slightly and prevent respawn fragging, players are given some starting armor. The combination of increased damage and starting armor creates a more tactical game (you need to know how to position yourself well relative to your opponents), and the more even weapon balance reduces the need for "item hunting" strategies.

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Problems

Most problems can be traced to a failure to follow directions. Seriously! If you are having a problem, please re-read the manual carefully and make sure you installed and configured the Remix Server correctly.

The simplest problem people run into with mods is not installing them in the correct directory. The Remix Server files are zipped up with the proper directory names for installation under the Quake III directory. If you attempted to install the Remix mod into your baseq3 directory, it will not work. If you attempt to create a remix directory first and then install it in there, it will not work, either. In both of those cases the game code will end up too far down in the directory hierarchy and Quake III will not be able to find it. Server mods must be installed in their own unique directory under the Quake III directory. The Remix mod is designed to be run from a directory named "remix" under the Quake III directory, and consequently the installation package has been zipped up with the remix directory name included. Check to make sure you have a remix directory under your Quake III directory, and that it has a remixserverpak*.pk3 file in it. If not, find out where the files ended up, and move them to the correct directory.

Another common source of configuration problems is the autoexec.cfg file. If you have an autoexec.cfg file in your remix directory, the settings in that file will override the settings in remix\q3config.cfg, and consequently your previous console and menu settings, whenever you start the game. If you don't have a remix\autoexec.cfg, but you do have a baseq3\autoexec.cfg, then the latter file will override your Remix settings. If Quake III seems to be losing your Remix settings whenever you restart, check your autoexec.cfg files for conflicts. You may even want to add your Remix server settings to your remix\autoexec.cfg to make sure that they are always there.

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Contact

For problems, or to report bugs, contact haqsau@planetquake.com. Please re-read the manual and carefully check that you have installed and configured everything correctly before contacting me. I will support honest users as best as I can, and constructive criticisms are welcome. However if I have to tell you to read the manual more than twice, or if you flame or spam me, I will block your e-mail address and you will be unable to get any further support from me.

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Legal Stuff

The Quake III Remix mod is copyright © 2000 by Hal Raymond. Portions of the code are copyright © 1999 and 2000 by id Software. You may use this mod for free. You may only distribute it for free, and you may only distribute it as a zip archive named q3remixserver*.zip (where * is a version code) and containing the files listed under the section titled "Installation". You may not distribute it in any other form without the explicit written permission of the author, Hal Raymond. You may not decompile or in any other way reverse engineer the code contained herein. You may not modify the code in any way. Other than that, enjoy!

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This document is © 2000 by Hal Raymond.