The OS X wizards at The Omni Group have released an OS X native version of Quake 3 Arena for use with Beta. The version is not a "stand alone" application, and requires users to have a previously installed version of Quake 3 Arena 1.17 for the program to work. Among the highlights, The Omni Group has seen performance increases of up to 20% over the OS 9 version. According to The Omni Group:
Frequently Asked Questions:
I thought this port was supposed to be 20% faster than under Mac OS 9! So why is it so dog slow?
Good question! Perhaps your video card isnit supported for OpenGL hardware acceleration under Mac OS X? Send us mail with more details about your configuration (processor and video card) and about exactly what is slow (low number of frames per second, or lots of lag in net games, or what?) and letis see if we can figure out why itis slow for you. (And hey, that 20% number wasnit meant to be a promise, it was just the results we were seeing in our tests. Iim sure weill see a bunch of more authoritative benchmarks from third parties soon.)Isnit this port 20% faster because youire using native code while everyone else is using platform-independent VM code?
No, weire using Quake VM byte code just like everyone else. (We did experiment with native code and yes, that did make things faster yet, but this time around we released without native code.)Howid you get those numbers, anyway?
We used this configuration file with this demo file on a Dual G4 with Quakeis SMP support disabled (r_smp = 0), a ton of memory (half a Gb), and had the display set to 16bit color ("Thousands of colors") in both System Preferences and Quake3.Enough about performance already! Quake3 says it canit find its levels. What do I do?
Press "Find...", and tell it where your top-level Quake3 folder is (not your baseq3 folder, but the folder which contains it).My screen turns orange or yellow, but nothing else happens! Whatis wrong?
If you pull up the system console (youill find the Console application in Applications:Utilities), youill see more information that might help us determine whatis going wrong. The most common problems are configuration problem such as trying to use a partial install, or data files which havenit been upgraded with the v1.17 patch, or a bad "q3config.cfg" configuration file which sets some option that isnit correct for this version.Why donit my mods work?
Mods? There are mods? Where are you putting them? How do they work? What are these "mod" things anyway? Seriously, tell us where to find and how to use the mods youire trying and weill see if we can figure out whatis wrong with them--weive never used any, but weid love to make them work if they donit already. (And itis possible that the problem is something trivial, like our port isnit looking for them wherever youire putting them.)Why canit I join any online games?
Hmm, works for me! Have you entered your CD key? If that isnit the problem... Perhaps youire trying to join a game which uses a mod that isnit loading? (See "Why donit my mods work?" above.) Or maybe itis just a bug of some sort, in which case please let us know!Why did you use Cocoa when id Software is using Carbon for their port to Mac OS X?
There is no Carbon port by id (though people keep assuming that for some reason), and in fact thereis no separate port: theyire using the same codebase as we are. (In fact, part of the reason for the delay in releasing 1.17 is that our code was based on 1.25, but Mac users donit have 1.25 yet so we had to branch the code at v1.17 and backport our code.) But actually, itis not really fair to call this port a Cocoa application anyway: Quake3 uses OpenGL and CoreGraphics for display, CoreAudio for sound, BSD sockets for networking, and (yes, finally) Cocoa for input (until the new HID APIs become available) and some basic application functionality (like launching and finding its levels).
So there you have it! You can download the OS X version from The Omni Group web site, and start fragging!