Quake III Arena

Status

Untested as a played game: published so that Walnut Games can set up its data. On 2026-10-27 the data came from the CD’s ISO on the PS3 and ioquake3 loaded q3dm1 with the right picture (lightmaps, models, HUD; xwd fullscreen, looked at); on 2026-10-28 from GOG’s installer, with Team Arena, whose mpteam1 loaded with its own HUD. Nobody has played a session or measured it yet.

Packages, data and settings

• Engine: our ioquake3 (ioquake3, OpenArena’s engine), /usr/lib/ioquake3/ioquake3. Its package already has Debian’s native game code links: /usr/lib/quake3/base/baseq3/{cgame,qagame,ui}.so for Quake III and /usr/lib/quake3/ta/{baseq3,missionpack}/ for Team Arena. The launchers set vm_cgame 0, vm_game 0, vm_ui 0 and sv_pure 0, so ioquake3 loads those native libraries (ioquake3’s build of id’s GPL game code, the same game as 1.32’s bytecode): ioquake3 has no PowerPC compiler for the QVM bytecode any more (only x86, x86-64 and ARM), and the interpreter is slow on the PPE. With sv_pure 1 the client would insist on the paks’ bytecode.
• Data: game-data-packager’s quake3-data (/usr/share/games/quake3-data/baseq3/pak0-8.pk3) and quake3-team-arena-data (.../quake3-team-arena-data/missionpack/pak0-3.pk3), each with gdp’s links into /usr/lib/quake3/{base,ta}. Those links are why the data manifest and walnut-games-helper take symlinks now (docs/PACKAGING.md “Links”). Team Arena’s Conflicts/Replaces quake3-data (<< 77~) is about old gdp builds and is left out of the manifest: unversioned it would remove quake3-data.
• Launchers (desktop/launchers), both NoDisplay=true with X-Walnut-Requires= the pak0 of their data: “Quake III Arena” (fs_basepath /usr/lib/quake3/base) and “Quake III: Team Arena” (fs_basepath /usr/lib/quake3/ta, fs_game missionpack).
• Defaults: autoexec.cfg in /usr/lib/quake3/base/baseq3/ and /usr/lib/quake3/ta/baseq3/ (desktop/files), OpenArena’s: opengl1, r_mode -2 fullscreen at the desktop’s resolution, vsync, com_maxfps 60, DXT1 textures, the pad bindings; and cl_cdkeyCheck 0 (ioquake3 0030): without it both menus open on a CD KEY screen at every start. ui_cdkeychecked can’t skip it: the UIs register it CVAR_ROM, which forces a value set on the command line or in a config back to 0. No key is shipped or needed (it mattered only to id’s authorize servers).
• Settings live in ioquake3’s XDG folders: ~/.config/Quake3, ~/.local/state/Quake3 (~/.q3a when it exists).

Data sources tried

• CD ISO (QUAKE3.iso, 1.11-era: Quake3/baseq3/pak0.pk3 and pak1): loop-mounted by walnut-data; gdp needs 1.32’s pak1-8 too, from id’s point release linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run. gdp downloaded it from ftp.fu-berlin.de (idstuff) in the games builder on the PC. On the PS3 the import ran with --no-download and GOG’s pak1-8 beside the ISO, for lack of room for the download’s 128 MB.
• GOG’s Quake III Gold (setup_quake3_2.0.0.2.exe, 921 MB, known to gdp): gdp unpacks baseq3/pak0.pk3 as well when only Team Arena is asked for (the installer unpacks to 981 MB, whichever package is asked for); walnut-data’s space check counts that. On the PS3 (2026-10-28) a plain import made quake3-data in 349 s and named Team Arena as an add-on, -p quake3-team-arena-data took 315 s; about 2.4 GB free for the base and 2 GB for Team Arena, besides the installer itself.
• MDF/MDS: the CD’s ISO written as a 2448-byte-sector MDF (2352 + 96 bytes of subchannel) with its .mds and extracted again by walnut-data’s code gave the ISO 9660 volume byte for byte (on the PC).

Known problems

• Sound drops out for 80-170 ms about once a minute in a game with bots (OpenAL’s mmap commit error: Broken pipe in the log, one per dropout): OpenAL’s mixer thread starves at normal priority. With a real-time limit for the session there were none in 3 runs; that change is system-wide and not made yet (the investigation).

Engine options

• ioquake3 (the pick: OpenArena runs on our ioquake3 engine, gamedb/engines/ioquake3)
• Quake3e (a performance fork: x86/ARM JIT, Vulkan; no PPC JIT)
• spearmint (not fetchable)
• id’s Quake-III-Arena (frozen dump, reference)

Research

What the surveys and plans said about it, newest first; each line names its source, the section and the date.

• 2026-10-20, pc-classics.md, “Action and shooters”: “RTCW, Wolfenstein: ET, Quake 3, Elite Force” (mostly with console versions): iortcw, ET: Legacy, ioquake3; playable; GL 1.x/2.x; Q3’s QVM had a big-endian PPC JIT; own data; effort M.
• 2026-10-20, pc-classics.md, “Alternatives and popularity”: ioquake3 (2850 stars, 2026-10-12): the baseline, PPC JIT history.