Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena is a 1999 first-person shooter game developed by id Software. The third installment of the Quake series, Arena differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing primarily on multiplayer gameplay. The single-player mode is played against computer-controlled bots. It features music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly founder Bill Leeb.
Notable features of Quake III Arena include a minimalist design, very extensively customizable settings such as field of view, texture detail and enemy model; and advanced movement features such as strafe-jumping and rocket-jumping.
The game was praised by reviewers who, for the most part, described the gameplay as fun and engaging. Many liked the crisp graphics and focus on multiplayer. Quake III Arena, often being considered one of the greatest video games ever made, has also been used extensively in professional electronic sports tournaments such as QuakeCon, Cyberathlete Professional League, DreamHack, and the Electronic Sports World Cup.
Gameplay
Unlike its predecessors, Quake III Arena does not have a single-player campaign. Instead, it simulates the multiplayer experience with computer-controlled players. The game's story is brief: "the greatest warriors of all time fight for the amusement of a race called the Vadrigar in the Arena Eternal." The introduction video shows the abduction of such a warrior, Sarge, while making a last stand. Continuity with prior games in the Quake series and even Doom is maintained by the inclusion of player models and biographical information. A familiar mixture of gothic and technological map architecture as well as specific equipment is included, such as the Quad Damage power-up, the rocket launcher, and the BFG.In Quake III Arena, the player progresses through tiers of maps, combating different bot characters that increase in difficulty, from Crash to Xaero. As the game progresses, the fights take place in more complex arenas and against tougher opponents. While deathmatch maps are designed for up to 16 players, tournament maps are designed for duels between 2 players and in the single-player game could be considered 'boss battles'.
The weapons are balanced by role, with each weapon having advantages in certain situations, such as the railgun at long-range and the lightning gun at close quarters. The BFG super-weapon is an exception to this; compared to other similarly named weapons in the Doom/''Quake series, Quake III Arenas incarnation of this weapon is basically a fast-firing rocket launcher and it is found in hard-to-reach locations. Weapons appear as level items, spawning at regular intervals in set locations on the map. If a player dies, all of their weapons are lost and they receive the spawn weapons for the current map, usually the gauntlet and machine gun. Players also drop the weapon they were using when killed, which other players can then pick up.
Quake III Arena comes with several gameplay modes: Free for All, a classic deathmatch, where each player competes against the rest for the highest score, Team Deathmatch, where usually two teams of four compete for the highest team frag total, Tournament, a deathmatch between two players, usually ending after a set time and Capture the Flag, which is played on symmetrical maps where teams have to recover the enemy flag from the opponents' base while retaining their own.
Quake III Arena was specifically designed for multiplayer. The game allows players whose computers are connected by a network or to the internet to play against each other in real time, and incorporates a handicap system. It employs a client–server model, requiring all players' clients to connect to a server. ''Quake III Arenas focus on multiplayer gameplay spawned a lively community, similar to QuakeWorld, that is still active as of 2021.
Characters
Quake III Arena features several characters from previous entries in the Quake series including "Bitterman" from Quake II, the "Ranger" character from Quake as well as Doomguy from id Software's sister franchise Doom.Development
During early March 1999, ATI leaked the internal hardware vendor copy of the game, which unveiled to the public in Macworld Conference & Expo at Moscone Center in January and Makuhari Messe in February by Steve Jobs. This was a functional version of the engine with a textured level and working guns. The IHV contained most of the weapons that would make it into the final game although most were not fully modeled; a chainsaw and grappling hook were also in the IHV but did not make it into the final release. Many of the sounds that would make it into the final release were also included. The game was developed by nine people in 18 months.After the IHV leak, id Software released a beta of the game called Quake III Arena Test on April 24, 1999, initially only for Mac OS before expanding to Windows at a later date. The Q3Test started with version 1.05 and included three levels that would be included in the final release: dm7, dm17, and q3tourney2. Id Software continued to update Q3Test up until version 1.09.
id co-founder and former technical director John Carmack has stated that Quake III Arena is his favorite game he has worked on.
Quake III Arena was shipped to retailers on December 2, 1999; the official street date for the game was December 5, although id Software chief executive officer Todd Hollenshead expected the game to be available as early as December 3 from retailers like Babbage's and EB Games. The game supported the A3D 2.0 HRTF technology by Aureal Semiconductor out of the box.
Game engine
The id Tech 3 engine is the name given to the engine that was developed for Quake III Arena. Unlike most other games released at the time, Quake III Arena requires an OpenGL-compliant graphics accelerator to run. The game does not include a software or Direct3D renderer.The graphic technology of the game is based tightly around a "shader" system where the appearance of many surfaces can be defined in text files referred to as "shader scripts". Quake 3 also introduced spline-based curved surfaces in addition to planar volumes, which are responsible for many of the surfaces present within the game. Quake 3 also provided support for models animated using vertex animation with attachment tags, allowing models to maintain separate torso and leg animations and hold weapons. Quake 3 is one of the first games where the third-person model is able to look up and down and around as the head, torso and legs are separate. Other visual features include volumetric fog, mirrors, portals, decals, and wave-form vertex distortion.
For networking, id Tech 3 uses a "snapshot" system to relay information about game "frames" to the client over UDP. The server attempts to omit as much information as possible about each frame, relaying only differences from the last frame the client confirmed as received. id Tech 3 uses a virtual machine to control object behavior on the server, effects and prediction on the client and the user interface. This presents many advantages as mod authors do not need to worry about crashing the entire game with bad code, clients could show more advanced effects and game menus than was possible in Quake II and the user interface for mods was entirely customizable. Unless operations which require a specific endianness are used, a QVM file will run the same on any platform supported by Quake III Arena. The engine also contains bytecode compilers for the x86 and PowerPC architectures, executing QVM instructions via an interpreter.
Quake III Arena features an advanced AI with five difficulty levels which can accommodate both a beginner and an advanced player, though they usually do not pose a challenge to high-tier or competitive players. Each bot has its own, often humorous, 'personality', expressed as scripted lines that are triggered to simulate real player chat. If the player types certain phrases, the bots may respond: for example, typing "You bore me" might cause a bot to reply "You should have been here 3 hours ago!". Each bot has a number of alternative lines to reduce the repetition of bot chatter. The Gladiator bots from Quake II were ported to Quake III Arena and incorporated into the game by their creator - Jan Paul van Waveren, aka Mr. Elusive. Bot chat lines were written by R. A. Salvatore, Seven Swords and Steve Winter. Xaero, the hardest opponent in the game, was based on the Gladiator bot Zero. The bot Hunter appears on magazine covers in the later id game Doom 3.
On August 19, 2005, id Software released the complete source code for Quake III Arena under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later, as they have for most of their prior engines. As before, the engine, but not the content such as textures and models, was released, so that anyone who wishes to build the game from source will still need an original copy of the game to play it as intended.
Fast inverse square root
Fast inverse square root, sometimes referred to as Fast InvSqrt or by the hexadecimal constant 0x5F3759DF, is an algorithm that estimates, the reciprocal of the square root of a 32-bit floating-point number in IEEE 754 floating-point format. The algorithm is best known for its implementation in the source code of Quake III Arena.At the time, it was generally computationally expensive to compute the reciprocal of a floating-point number, especially on a large scale. However, the fast inverse square root bypassed this step.
Around 2002, initial speculation pointed to John Carmack as the probable author of the code, but he demurred and suggested it was written by Terje Mathisen, an accomplished assembly programmer who had previously helped id Software with Quake optimization. Mathisen had written an implementation of a similar bit of code in the late 1990s, but the original authors proved to be much further back in the history of 3D computer graphics with Gary Tarolli's implementation for the SGI Indigo as a possible earliest known use.