Giant Bomb‘s weekly thursday night throwdown featured Quake 3: Arena running with ioquake3 this week.

Check out this new texture pack from Paul Marshall (aka Kpax).

It replaces the original textures in Quake 3 with high-resolution versions, and it is licensed under the creative commons!

Download now: xcsv_hires.zip (179MB)

Unzip this file to your baseq3 directory, note that pure servers will need to have the file as well.

Work has already begun on iowolfet and iortcw!

This post will be updated as infrastructure is prepared.

Stop by the irc channels #ioquake3 #iortcw and #iowolfet on irc.freenode.net for more collaboration.

Bugzilla is configured at bugzilla.icculus.org to allow entries for both iowolfet and iortcw.

You can now clone the Mercurial source repositories (Thanks to icculus.org!):

http://hg.ioquake.org/

If you’re new to Mercurial please check out this excellent guide.

Thank you id software!

Via Thunderbird’s excellent kwaak3 ioquake3 spin-off, I just tried out ioquake3 on a borrowed Verizon Droid (Motorola Milestone). I’ve also tried kwaak3 on a donated T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream):

it is truly amazing that ioquake3 can run well on these platforms, not just for first-person-shooters or doom clones, but for new kinds of games to have a stable engine for many, many platforms.

San Francisco, CA – After over four and a half years of serving the Quake 3 community, the developers have behind ioquake3 have decided to make some changes. Citing the need to keep with the future and keep up with the community’s demands, the ioquake3 team has teamed up with Relnav of the Relnav’s Quake 2 project. With this, several changes will be made:

• ioquake3 will be renamed to Relnav’s Quake 3
• The principal development platform will be Windows 7 and Direct3D 11
• Legacy suport for Mac OS X and Linux will be provided by the WINE emulation software project.
• The multiplayer subsystem has been rewritten and a new, written-from-scratch, anti-cheat system has been created.

The first release of Relnav’s Quake 3 will be made available in the next few days. Due to the anti-cheat system, source-code releases have been suspended for the forseeable future.

We’ve already provided a few mod teams with a prerelease version of Relnav’s Quake 3, and we’re excited to see what people can do with it.
One particularly promising mod team has created a mod in the Goldeneye: 007 style but using the CSI: Miami universe! It is really quite amazing.

The Relnav’s Quake 3 team thanks you for your continued support and looks forward to the next five years!

One of the more interesting platforms for ioquake3 is the Nokia n900. The n900 is a smartphone running the Maemo version of Linux and a few months ago a project started to bring ioquake3 to it.

Oliver McFadden maintains this version and demonstrated it in this video captured at Maemo Summit 2009 after the break. Here’s a link to the packages for the n900.

• ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold (Slashdot)
• New ioquake3 (bluesnews)
• ioquake3 Goes Gold WIth Ogg Decoding, x86_64 (phoronix)
  
• ioQuake3 v1.36 veröffentlicht (der quaker)
• ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold (reddit)
• ioquake3 1.36 (happypenguin)
• ioquake3 1.36 (LinuxGames)

Slashdot was by far the leader in both legitimate comments, visits back to ioquake3.org, and trolling. Of course in preparing a Slashdot post at around 1AM I made a huge blunder in attempting to make a joke about Quake Live, which is a great game and I encourage everyone to check out now that the queues have been eliminated.

ioquake3 was even featured around the 16:30 mark on the MODSonair video podcast:

MODSonair Episode 177 on Vimeo.

By far the best reaction was the decision of the Smoking Guns team to start experimenting with ioquake3 as you can see over at their site.

Yee haw!

A few people were confused about what Mumble is, for them I would suggest that they check out the comparison article over at TimeDoctor Dot Org.

The biggest issue ioquake3 faces with public reception is the problem of having content built-in for people to play that does not require the Quake 3 data.

Be assured that we’re working on this though we could really use your help in coming up with content under the creative commons license and game code under the GPL. Please get in touch with us or contact me directly (zachary [at] ioquake.org) if you’re interested.

Go get it as a package for your system, or a source zip file/tarball. Check out your options for help if you run into a problem. If you find any bugs, please search bugzilla, and then report them!

Here is what you can do with ioquake3:

• Play Quake 3: Arena and the expansion, Quake 3: Team Arena
• Make your own game!
• Play standalone games like Urban Terror and Tremulous.
• Play older Quake 3 mods without the Quake 3 security issues but with new features.

Have a look at the list of improvements that have gone into this release:

• Ports to new platforms
• Off-server data downloads (http redirection) via HTTP and FTP with cURL
• OpenAL sound rendering allowing for surround (5.1 and 7.1) speaker layouts and generally improved sound
  quality. Especially on the Windows Vista Operating System.
• Ogg Vorbis audio decoding.
• In-engine VOIP support, with optional Mumble player-location (positional audio) support.
• IPV6 Networking. We’re ready to frag on the net of the future!
• SDL backend for the OpenGL context, window management, and input. This also improves portability.
• Anaglyph stereo rendering (for viewing with 3D glasses)
• Full x86-64 architecture support
• Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support
• New SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64
• Compilation with MinGW and cross-compilation for Windows from Linux
• Improved console command auto-completion
• Persistent console command history
• Improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools
• Colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems
• GUID System
• Multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders)
• PNG format support for textures
• Numerous security fixes

If you’re interested in following more updates with ioquake3, follow our twitter feed , and please do digg/reddit/slashdot this post! Please!

Join us on our forums, mailing lists, irc, etc at the discussion page!

Write just about anything about ioquake3 on the wiki!

Talk with us on our mumble server at mumble.ioquake3.org

Thanks again to everyone who has made this a spectacular release. What do you want to see in the future of ioquake3? 4-Player Split-Screen? Let us know in the comments.

So, I have started by creating an SVN branch for the new rendering conduit and all support for OpenGL rendering will be dropped along with LibSDL support. We’re especially happy about dropping LibSDL support since we realize that everyone who has used our LibSDL version of Icculus Quake has hated the mouse responsiveness and the way it inserts DRM into the rendering channel. Eliminating that kind of drama will really set the project free.

Therefor, I present to you, the gaming public, and screaming Icculus Quake 3 fanboys, VI-OQUAKE3:

(screen shot after the break)