The new version of Quake 3 Arena has been released today, v1.29f Beta.  It won’t even load up on my machine, and I am miffed, but it seems that this is a OS X only release.  Did they rewrite it in Cocoa?? Who knows.  But I though my fellow gamers might be interested.

http://www.quake3arena.com

I couldn’t get it to work at first either, but saw these instructions posted by somebody at VersionTracker:

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK: Alright, here’s what you do. You need a full install of Quake III on your drive. Then copy the QuakeIII app from this update into the quake3 folder and the stuff in the baseq folder into the baseq folder your installer made… it may make you choose the quake3 folder when it first loads… do this and you’re done. It should work  

Low and behold, it works!  I have a B&W G3/400 with 512MB of RAM and the standard ATI Rage 128 card, and I was getting between 15-30fps with all the settings on High.  Playable, but not great.  Of course tweaking the settings would make it far quicker, but I’m pretty impressed.  A Radeon or NVIDIA card should easily pump out 40fps on a 500MHz or faster G4.  I know, I know…Windows users measure framerate in the realm of 100fps, but once you are able to get sustained rates of 30 or higher, the game is VERY enjoyable.  Any game, for that matter.

If you like Quake, and have OS X, go get this now.  You’ll dig it.

We also posted a story about this today, in case you missed it:  http://www.macobserver.com/gamingnews/2001/06/19.2.shtml

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kyle on 2001-06-19 11:37 ]</font>

Has anyone played it with a better card than Kyle’s? I would like to see the performance on a newer machine.

35fps with sound on
78fps with s_initsound 0
sh*te is the word I’m looking for, just another reason to buy a wintel box for gaming really

Thanks for the tip, it works on my G4 w/10.0.3 now.

Its too bad that turning sound off gives such an improvement.  I bet you anything that if we installed a real sound card in the machine, it would work just like the PC.  I got 31 fps with r_picmip 7 doing a timedemo on the included demo, on my g4/450 with Rage 128 vr.  Oh well, it was a good time to retire from gaming.  Now at least I don’t have to reboot.

Keep in mind that this release is only a Beta, the final might be better (keep your fingers crossed).

A note to all Mac User’s downloading the new Quake release: Included are (annoyingly) two Microsoft Word documents.  All they say is what new features are included, so it is not worth installing Word just to read them.  You can find this same information about new features at just about any quake web site.

Remember, you can open and read Word formatted documents with Text Edit.  Yes, there are some garbage characters at the top and bottom, but definitely readable.

I couldn’t get it to work on my Dual 450 G4, it kept saying there is no OpenGl video card installed.  Then I shut down and unhooked my second monitor, rebooted, then it is fine.  That is totally annoying.  It works, but I have to reboot every time I want to play, and when I am done.  Lame considering I almost never reboot anymore…

Skippy

I heard other people at VersionTracker are reporting your same problem with Dual Monitor systems.  Send an email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (I think thats it, check the readme) about the Dual Monitor problem.  This is a beta quake version, so if you report your problem it should be fixed by the final point release.

I made one simple change, turned the sound quality from High to Low, and that gained me an extra 10fps or so.

I find that remarkably interesting.  Anybody running this with an NVIDIA or Radeon card that can give an idea of framerate?

Oh, and it seems you can only connect to servers that are also using the latest point release.  That might explain why others have been getting cut off or booted.  I have found a few that work, but all of them say specifically “1.29” or something along those lines.

Hi Kyle.  The reason you can only connect to 1.29 servers is because the networking code has changed, they now use 5:1 compression which means that pings should be lower all around.

I’m running it on a G4/400 with a AGP Radeon card under OS X, and it’s much much faster than under OS 9. The networking speeds are blazing compared to the earlier versions, and the gameplay is very smooth at 1024x768. I don’t know how to measure fps, so if anyone can tell me I could post results…

to find out how many fps your getting, do this:

load the game
and in console type ‘timedemo 1’
look for the “demos” menu
click “four.dm_66”, then play

it’ll run at a stupidly fast speed, but its supposed to.

right at the end.. as the demo closes.. if you again bring down console, it’ll say how many frames in total were shown, how many per second.. and how long it was playing for. the middle number.. which will be something like ‘50fps’ is the important one.

my comps specs are: p3-500, 128mb ram, windoze98se.. and on a fresh install of q3, along with the new patch. i got 47fps without tweaking/touching/changing anything at the original out of box res of 640x480.

can someone please tell me the mac equivalent of my comp.. because id like to know how macs compare for games.

oh.. just incase your wondering what you can squeeze out of a machine fps wise after tweaking the sh*t thru it.. my same comp has gotten over 110fps, but that was running a copy of fatalitys .cfg and on an old pointrelease, 1.17 i think [fatality being a top q3 player]

anyways.. a little rundown of how games like q3 run on the new mac G4’s would be great.. like, how the various res’ eg. 800x600 on a dual533 would go against a 733. how much dif ram makes etc.

thanks
//pappa
//.au quakeworlder

Hey Pappa,

Welcome to the forums. It’s good to have a friendly PC gamer amongst us.    Consider registering and hanging out more often.

I’ll field the equivalent Mac question.  In terms of raw CPU power, a 300-400 MHz G3 or G4 is about as fast as your box, all other things being equal.  Raw horse power is a poor indicator of real world speed, however.  For instance, the system bus on your 500 MHz P3 is probably faster than the system bus on a 300-400 MHz G3 or G4, and that impacts performance greatly.  Windows also handles I/O better than does the Classic Mac OS, which also impacts performance. Mac OS X is in the process of changing all of that, however, and we’ll have a much better idea once Mac OS X 10.1 comes out at MACWORLD in July.  The bottom line is that in real world gaming, I think a 400 MHz or greater G4 would probably perform as well as your current machine, depending on the game.

That said, if it were a game that was highly optimized for AltiVec (Apple calls it The Velocity Engine), a 400-500 MHz G4 would smoke your P3, though the video card would make all the difference.  Unfortunately, a highly optimized for AltiVec game doesn’t exist yet.  The final release of Quake 3 for Mac OS X will probably be that game. 

Again, welcome to the TMO forums!

Anyone else having trouble connecting to any quake servers?  I keep getting a “no response from master server” error.  I think its time to reinstall from scratches.

Just in, from planet quake…

While it’s not actually a .plan update from the heavens, it’s close. id Software’s Graeme Devine has made a .plan update regarding the status of the Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS builds of the latest Quake 3: Arena update. Here’s the full scoop:

A new Mac OS X 1.29f Beta is in the process of being posted to the id ftp site.

This fixes some os the issues related to the slow sound code in the first release, many of you had written that timedemos were much faster with sound off than on (more than to be expected).

The filename is quake3-macosx-129f-2.dmg

I’m now working on the Classic release.

Graeme.