Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena is a first person shooter game made by id Software in 1999. As the name suggests already, the main emphasis of this game is to fight over the Internet in one of many "arenas" against other human players.
There is no single-player goal or plot in this game. Instead, it is similar to multiplayer fighting, with computer controlled bots making up the opposition instead of humans. In the manual, 'how to play' is reduced to the single instruction: "Frag Everything That Isn't You."
Quake III Arena was one of the first FPS games which did not support software rendering. A hardware accelerated graphics controller is mandatory to run the program at a playable frame rate.
Background music was done by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly.
An expansion pack called Quake III: Team Arena was also released. Focused on teamwork gameplay, the expansion features new weapons and items, new player models and new game modes.
Like its predecessors Quake and Quake II it can be heavily modified to support other gaming styles with mods such as Urban Terror. Quake III Arena can use (like Quake II) native shared libraries to store the game code but the preferred method is to program all modifications in pure ANSI-C and compile them with a special version of the free C compiler LCC into machine independent byte code, which will be interpreted by an in-game virtual machine. The virtual machine in Quake III Arena even uses "just-in-time" techiques like modern Java virtual machines.
VQ3, CPMA, VQW and JawnMode
In competitive Quake III Arena, there are 2 distinct disciplines, often referred to as "rulesets". Vanilla Quake 3 (VQ3) features less movement abilities and other miscellaneous changes than Challenge Pro-Mode Arena (CPMA). The same applies to Quake I, where the 2 rulesets are Vanilla QuakeWorld and JawnMode. As with CPMA, JawnMode adds more able movement and other competition oriented changes.
Games using the Quake III Arena engine
- American McGee's Alice
- Star Trek Voyager Elite Force
- Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2
- Return To Castle Wolfenstein
- Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
- Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
- Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
- Star Trek Elite Force 2
- Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
- Call of Duty