Proto:Quake III Team Arena

This page details one or more prototype versions of Quake III Team Arena.

Back in September 2000, id Software released the Quake III Arena 1.25 Point Release beta patch for those who were daring to test it and report bugs to id as it had brought some major changes to the netcode.

Unfortunately, they accidentally compiled it with Team Arena's new items and gametypes, as curious players soon discovered that the 'give all' cheat also gave them an invisible Nailgun, Prox Launcher and Chaingun. Clearly a mistake, the 1.25y patch in the following month removes all of this.

What was leftover from then has a few interesting differences when tried with Team Arena's final content, giving a bit of a look at Team Arena's state of implementation 3 months before shipping.

General Differences

• 1.25 does not yet support the videoMap shader keyword. Videos within maps are not displayed.
• There is also no shader remapping, so dynamic team logos in maps do not function yet.
• MPTERRA2 crashes. Memory allocation most likely wasn't tweaked to accompany large terrain maps yet.
• There is no new UI code in the 1.25 patch.
• There are no voices or taunts.
• Missing graphics are to be expected when you're running it in 'baseq3', and there's also some missing graphics if you run it with 'missionpack', as early items used different shader, sound and model pathnames. Since this is just only early Team Arena code, there's really no helping that.

Gametypes

One Flag CTF

This gametype is functional as the final. The white flag is also displayed over the team scores.

Overload

Shooting the enemy's core instantly explodes, scoring a point for your team and 100 frags to the inflictor. There is no appearing shield effect.

Harvester

Skulls do not seem to appear from the skull generator after you kill someone, rendering this gametype unwinnable.

Interestingly, the HUD displays the skull count with a spinning 3d skull, showing some preliminary work was done in the classic Q3A hud.

Portal

The unused portal item is also here, and also is broken with the same problems.

Rune Trails

Guard, Scout, Ammo Regen and Doubler does not give you a circling streak indicating which of these you have.

Weapons

To do: Damage and rate of fire differences

Nailgun

Nailgun uses a hitmodel and a different shader for the trails, which the final data does not have. There are no impact sounds.

Prox Launcher

You cannot set off your own mines in Free For All mode. You can still catch them, and they'll damage you, instead of a safe boost in the final.

Chaingun

The world model does not display the barrel model, exhibiting the same bug as the machinegun world model.