Game Server Hosts: Please Make Sure Your Servers are Updated

Game servers report their ip address and other server details to our directory server in order for you to find them. Whenever you play a multiplayer game of Quake 3: Arena or any other game based on ioquake3, the game client running on your computer is connecting to our directory server in order to get a list of game servers for you to choose from.

If you don’t host a game server, you’re good. This is a heads-up for anyone hosting game servers that use ioquake3, or ioquake3-based games, of a few important changes to our long-running game directory server:

• Our directory server’s ip address has changed and is now available at directory.ioquake3.org. The backwards-compatible URL will remain available for the foreseeable future, but the old ip address will be offline within days.
• As long as your version of ioquake3 was compiled more recently than 2017, your game server will update automatically to the new ip address.
• If you aren’t sure, you can restart the game server and it will get the new ip address. The vast majority of game servers have already switched over to the new ip address but a few haven’t updated yet.
• If you are a large number of game servers you likely have a management tool for deploying servers already, but smaller server operators may want to check out the game server-oriented scripts in our source tree as a starting point.

We strongly recommend against using unmodified (non-ioquake3) Quake 3 game servers and clients from 2005 on the open internet in 2025.

By default, unmodified (non-ioquake3) Quake 3 clients and game servers only use id software’s directory server and cache the ip address results of DNS lookups until they are restarted. id software’s directory server sometimes goes offline for long periods of time, and ioquake3-based game clients and servers will continue to work when that happens.

Unmodified (non-ioquake3) versions of Quake 3 are still capable of being maliciously exploited as long as they are on the open internet. Unmodified versions of Quake 3’s source code haven’t been updated since 2005.

mpdirectory

The game directory server we are running now is a fork of dpmaster called mpdirectory Thank you to the DarkPlaces team for creating the directory server software! They did the hard work making this software, we just forked it and intend to continue its development.

If you make a multiplayer game that needs a directory of game servers, we want to support your game with mpdirectory. Please submit pull requests.

Thank you for your support

ioquake3 has been available for free to the community since 2005 and our bills have always been larger than what we receive in monthly support. Please consider supporting me directly through Patreon to help offset these costs. You can find more ways to help support ioquake3 and other maintainers, including for free, here.