Quake III Arena on Linux

From...

March 9, 2000
Web posted at: 8:25 a.m. EST (1325 GMT)

In this story:

Gameplay

A question of character

Getting it installed

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by Rawn Shah

(IDG) -- Quake III Arena is a real, honest-to-goodness multiplayer game. You can play the single-player test zone against the computer just to hone your skills, but that's not nearly as enjoyable as reaching across the Internet and sharing a grenade with another troubled soul.

Even in single-player mode I found the game riveting in its gore and violence -- but playing against 8 to 39 other people pumps gallons of adrenalin through your system, making your heart rate leap from normal to frantic.

Gameplay

The single-player mode of Quake III Arena will pit you against one or more opponents through various levels in the game. As you increase in skill, the game adds more and smarter enemies to the battle. This certainly builds up your dexterity on the controls, but as soon as you feel ready, you should switch to multiplayer games.

The multiplayer mode comes in several forms: Free For All or DeathMatch (DM), Team DeathMatch (TDM), Capture the Flag (CTF), Tournament (TOU), and One On One (1v1).

When you connect to the list of available game servers on the Internet, you will see each game described as being in one of these categories. Here is where the real fun begins, as you match your dexterity and wits against the minds of human opponents.

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DeathMatch (DM) is the classic every-person-for-himself, all-out battle against any number of others. Team DeathMatch (TDM) places you in one of two teams that hunt each other. Each team takes one side of the map as a base station, and walls are appropriately colored either blue or red for your team designation. When killed, team members reappear somewhere near their base station.

Capture the Flag (CTF) is like TDM, except that the goal is to capture your enemy's flag and place it next to your own at your base station. Keep in mind that your enemies can also capture your flag; if they do, you'll have to kill them to bring your flag home.

The One On One game puts you on a playing field against a specific opponent you have to hunt and kill. There may be others on the field, but you get points only for the person you are targeting.

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A question of character

Your character can be configured with a number of different types and colors. You have a wide selection to choose from: humanoid or alien, male or female. There are some familiar character types from Doom and Quake I and II, and a host of new ones as well.

No correlation seems to exist between the character type you pick and your power or skill; the differences appear merely cosmetic -- to give greater variety in multiplayer mode. Some colors do, however, help camouflage your character against certain backgrounds.

You have access to a slew of weapons: the default machine gun and gauntlet, a shotgun, a railgun, a rocket launcher, a lightning gun, a grenade launcher, a plasma rifle, and the BFG. I do wish that Quake III had anti-personnel mines you could place on the ground to trap your enemies, as some other games do.

Armor comes in two forms: basic yellow body armor that gives about 50 points of armor strength, and heavy red body armor that gives 80 points. You can pick up any amount of armor, but once your level of protection exceeds 100 points, it will slowly start counting back down to 100 as it wears off.

You will encounter yellow balls that can give 15 or 50 healing points, and green ones that can increase your current health by 5 points. In addition, a blue ball boosts up your strength to 200. But if your health points exceed 100, these points will slowly wear off and return to the limit of 100. Your armor rating works in the same way.

In addition to armor and health enhancers, there are other goodies out there: items that can temporarily give your weapons quadruple-damage strength, increase your speed, provide additional armor in toxic environments, give you invisibility, and so on. These effects last for 30 seconds, wearing off gradually. If you are killed while an effect is on, the next player can pick it up for his own use for the remaining time.

The environment of the game has some interesting additions, including acid pools and a deadly red mist that can cause substantial damage. Swimming through water provides alternate routes around the game level. A void simulates game levels set in space. Falling off the platforms into the void will kill your character and subtract one kill point.

Circular pads can bounce your character high in the air and catapult you to a different level; launch pads shoot your character through the air in a certain direction. Be careful when you hit these pads, especially when playing space-based levels. You might just go flying out into the void and become one with the nothingness.

You can use your keyboard and mouse to move around the game. Although Quake III on a Windows machine works with joysticks, this is not yet the case under Linux.

For best results, you might use the keyboard and mouse in combination for different actions: use the mouse to look around while you are in place and use the keyboard to move around and jump, for example. I found myself too easy a target when using only the keyboard -- the keys are not subtle enough to fire properly when you are trying to angle your view in different directions.

Don't make a big deal about getting killed. You almost certainly will be, no matter how good you are.

To delay the inevitable, start moving as soon as play starts and keep moving as much as you can. You may think you are in a safe position, only to be surprised by a sudden rocket blast. That's why most players keep jumping -- it's more difficult for opponents to get a square shot at them. That strategy may work for you too, but keep an eye on where you're jumping, so you don't leap right off the map.

You should try to memorize the game levels and the locations where weapons and other items can pop up. The well-armed warrior lives the longest.

Getting it installed

I had a little trouble getting Quake III to work correctly on the Penguin Computing Game System -- the same machine I had used to test Heretic II. It seems that Quake III was looking for the wrong library. With the help of excellent technical support from both Penguin Computing and Loki Software, I was able to fix the problem.

Both Heretic II and Quake III use the Voodoo3 3000 3D accelerator card, but each uses a different configuration. Similarly, although both games use the same graphics libraries, each invokes them in a different way. Since I was set up for Heretic II, the configuration launched Quake in a window without any hardware acceleration at all -- making it impossibly slow and unplayable.

Finally, after a few hours of troubleshooting (and after starting the game through a custom, command-line script the Penguin techie whipped up), I was able to bring it up to full screen with full acceleration.

The game requires kernel version 2.2.9 or above and glibc 2.1. According to the instructions manual, you must at minimum have a 233 MHz Pentium with an 8 MB 3Dfx card, or 266 MHz Pentium II or 350 MHz AMD K6-2 with a 4 MB 3Dfx. You must have XFree86 version 3.3.5 or higher running at 16 bits per pixel. The game currently does not support any other pixel depth, so you have to run Xconfigurator or XF86Setup and set it to 16 bits.

If you have the supported graphics cards installed, you will probably also have the proper OpenGL graphics libraries installed in /usr/lib. You can check to see if you have them by typing ls -l /usr/lib/lib*GL*.so at the command line.

You should have at least two additional files: libGL.so and another one specific to your graphics card. You also need 64 MB of RAM, at least a 4x CD-ROM, and an OSS-compatible sound card.

The game uses /dev/esp to communicate with your sound card. This device should exist if you installed your OSS sound card properly. You can run the game directly from the CD with a minimal install on your hard drive of 20 MB, or you can go for the full install that takes up 480 MB. Finally, you need at least a 28.8 Kbps modem or a LAN card for multiplayer action.

Right now, Quake III supports only two types of 3D cards -- the 3Dfx Voodoo, Voodoo2, Voodoo3, or Banshee; and the Matrox G200 or G400. You need an appropriate version of the Glide2 drivers installed for the 3Dfx cards (2.46 for the Voodoo Graphics, 2.53 for Voodoo2, and 2.60 for Voodoo3 or Banshee). The Matrox cards require a matching version of the Utah Accelerated GLX driver installed. These are all available with the CD or from Sourceforge's Website (see link below).

Additional graphics cards may be supported eventually, but now these two are the only options. To play the game, you must configure the settings to use the appropriate library for your graphics card. In our case, this was the libMesaVoodooGL.so library.

Quake III plays normally in full-screen or DGA mode under the XFree86 X Window server. During a test of game speed on our test machine -- a Penguin Computing Gaming System with a 500 MHz Athlon with 128 MB RAM, 3Dfx Voodoo3 3000, and SoundBlaster PCI 128 -- we got 32.5 frames per second on average running on a 1024 by 768 pixel screen at 16 color bits per pixel. This is slower than the speed of a similar Windows machine running Quake III, but it works well enough for playability.

You can also play Quake III within a window if you install a different version of XFree86 -- one that uses the Direct Rendering Interface (DRI) driver system. DRI will be a feature in the next release version of XFree86 (4.0), but is considered experimental in version 3.9 and is not yet officially supported. Using it involves a complex procedure of installing and configuring the DRI software, which is still a beta release. So far, DRI is available for only a handful of graphics cards, such as the 3Dfx Voodoo cards and the Nvidia TNT.

For obvious reasons I preferred connecting to the Internet over my 768 Kbps DSL to the use of a dialup modem, although network congestion and latency are still big issues even with a fast connection. The game sends Internet pings to the game servers to determine the latency between your client and the server.

In the daytime, most game servers were over 90 milliseconds away from my location, although at night this dropped to as low as 45 milliseconds. As long as the games stayed between 90 and 250 ms, they played well for me -- and I couldn't really tell the difference in game speed. But keep in mind that these latencies are always relative to your connection to the Internet and to your service provider's upstream connection.

At some servers, my connection was disconnected from time to time due to congestion. The farther the game is away from you, the more likely it is you'll get killed due to Net lag.

I did try connecting through a 56 Kbps modem to the Internet. The latencies were, of course, much higher, and the best connection I could find was at around 200 milliseconds. The game was still playable, and there was no difference in the congestion issue.

When this article was posted, there was a point release update to the 32-bit Windows version of the game, but no update yet for the Linux platform. Unfortunately, we still have to wait behind the Windows people for such updates.