Introduction

Quake 3 Arena, & now the add-on pack Team Arena are sure to remain highly popular multiplayer games for a long time, particularly with all the Mod’s available for Quake 3 now. The release of the new Point release offers a wide range of security/anti-cheat updates to Quake 3 & a few other speed improvements.

With all the new settings available its time to update our guide too. Read on.

Troubleshooting/Update

Begin download the latest drivers for your video card & soundcard. This may solve (some) display or audio problems you might encounter. There are links to various manufacturers on the Drivers page. If you own a 3dfx card you should consider downloading the WickedGL for better performance than the 3dfx OpenGL driver.

If you are using an Intellimouse you’ll also need to install the latest drivers. You can get them from Microsoft. This should fix any problems related to that mouse with the game (Or rather, issues with the Quake 3 engine itself).

Now download the latest patch for Quake 3; you can find the latest Quake 3 patch at 3DFiles. This contain many fixes/optimizations over the initial retail version.

Install DirectX 8.0 on your system. DirectX 8.0 has also been shown to improve performance on many systems.

If you experience any lockups & such they might be caused by overclocking, if so try reducing the clock speed of the overclocked device. Quake 3 can be quite sensitive to overclocking at times.

If you experience static noise or irregular audio playback, try the following (assuming that installing the latest drivers don’t fix the problems):

1.      Click on Start, Settings, then Control Panel. If you have Windows Millennium Edition 2000 installed note the different names as shown in brackets below.

2.      Open the Multimedia (Sounds & Multimedia) icon.

3.      Select the Audio tab & then hit the Advanced Properties (Advanced) button.

4.      Select the Performance tab.

5.      Move the Hardware acceleration slider to the 2nd notch from the left (Basic Acceleration). Move the Sample rate conversion quality slider to the middle notch (Improved sample rate converter).

Should you find that the game crashes when I go to a new area or level you should try disabling GL Extensions as shown in the Graphics section, although updating your video card drivers should fix this unless your videocard is quite old.

This guide is based on the 1.27g point release patch. While this guide is pretty in Quake 3 Arena, the config settings will also apply to Quake 3 Team Arena (Both use the same code).

Mods

Mods will be installed in separate sub-directories in Quake 3 Arena, you can make changes to the config files for these as you see fit. NOTE – Ensure that you can download 1.27g compatible versions of the Mods you have installed before upgrading to 1.27g.

If you experience errors in Quake 3 (display issues or otherwise) it is most likely caused by having incompatible Mods/pakfiles installed.