OS X Quake live is no more!

[Cougarcat]

Funny that no one here mentioned the obvious…. that id Software founder John Carmack recently LEFT the company (a few weeks ago).

John Carmack was one of the primary reasons why id games have supported Apple platform for a looooong time. With John gone from the company, it's a good assumption to say that there is no one left at id Software that gives a flying crap about supporting the Mac platform.

Sad but true. Oh well, id is a skeleton gaming company nowadays. Won't miss them if they went bankrupt and shut down the company in the next couple years. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

The explanation already given makes more sense than "Carmack's gone; now nobody cares." We'll have to wait til ID's next game to judge the impact of his departure.

 

[pscl]

Here is what I did yesterday:

I visited the ioquake site and downloaded the latest ioquake for OS X and installed it into my applications folder. Then I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine with Parallels and used Steam to download the copy of Q3A for Windows that I own so I could get a file ioquake needs from a legal owned copy of the game. I copied that file along with the key file so I wouldn't have to type my key in again (both files are in baseq folder and the key file has the word key in the name) into the appropriate folder in my ioquake install. This is all detailed in a read me file that comes with the ioquake.dmg file. Lastly, I copied over the Team Arena Mission folder too so I'd have that also since ioquake supports it too.

It works beautifully in Mavericks 10.9.1 and there was plenty of active servers running dm, ctf, etc.

How cool is that?

While I was at it, I also got Hexen II from Steam and then took the relevant files from that to setup with a Mac OS X source port for the game which works great. It's retro but it's good fun.

I was on a roll at that point so I continued on to grab my copies of the other Hexen and Heretic games I own on Steam and those ones I setup with Boxer.

Any old MS-DOS stuff running in DOSBox on Steam doesn't have Steam DRM so you can move your copies into Boxer and as mentioned above retrieve certain files for use with source ports such as ioquake or Hexen II.

doesn't Q3A natively support mac osx? i mean the original CD-Version?

 

[Dirtyharry50]

doesn't Q3A natively support mac osx? i mean the original CD-Version?

Quake III Arena was originally released for Mac OS (predating OS X) in the year 2000. So no recent version of OS X is going to run the original CD release.

This is why it is great the source port ioquake exists so we can use the original data files with an updated Quake III engine that runs beautifully on modern OS X. I happened to have a Windows version of Quake III as I mentioned and so I used the data files from that. It is really just one particular data file you need. ioquake already includes the rest of the them.

 

[pscl]

Quake III Arena was originally released for Mac OS (predating OS X) in the year 2000. So no recent version of OS X is going to run the original CD release.

This is why it is great the source port ioquake exists so we can use the original data files with an updated Quake III engine that runs beautifully on modern OS X. I happened to have a Windows version of Quake III as I mentioned and so I used the data files from that. It is really just one particular data file you need. ioquake already includes the rest of the them.

alright... got it

 

[Sy7ygy]

This isn't id, but Bethesda.

 

[dollystereo]

There you go, OSX intel quake3 (you need the pak0 file in baseq)

 

[Irishman]

There you go, OSX intel compiled ioquake3

So, all I have to do now is find and buy an external DVD drive, plug it into my 2012 iMac, install a game that won't install on intel hardware, and then install a patch that will make it run on intel hardware.

 

[dollystereo]

So, all I have to do now is find and buy an external DVD drive, plug it into my 2012 iMac, install a game that won't install on intel hardware, and then install a patch that will make it run on intel hardware.

No, just add the corresponding .pak files in baseq

 

[roadbloc]

The explanation already given makes more sense than "Carmack's gone; now nobody cares." We'll have to wait til ID's next game to judge the impact of his departure.

I agree. Carmack was just an engine designer. He wasn't responsible for the games actual content other than what the limits the graphic designers had to abide by. And he is still involved in the company despite leaving, he is still their technical advisor.

 

[Janichsan]

So, all I have to do now is find and buy an external DVD drive, plug it into my 2012 iMac,…

…or buy the downloadable Steam version of Q3 (for Windows) and copy the files over.

…install a game that won't install on intel hardware, and then install a patch that will make it run on intel hardware.

…or simply copy the required file from the DVD (if you want to go this route) without installing anything beforehand: it simply lies in an accessible folder on the disc.

 

[saturnotaku]

Copy/pasted from a post I made on another Q3-related thread:

This thread piqued my curiosity, especially since I've not played Quake 3 in a zombie dog's age. I did manage to get it working with ioquake3 on my 2011 MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon 6770M GPU and OS X 10.9.2.

When you download the ioquake3 package, all you need is the pak0.pk3 and q3key files from either an original CD-ROM or Steam. I had to fire up my Boot Camp partition in order to download Q3 from Steam. The total install is around 500 MB, so even on a slower Internet connection, it won't take too terribly long. I had to start the game once so it would generate the q3key file. After that, I copied it and the pak0.pk3 file to my NAS and boot back into OS X.

I installed ioquake per the instructions and copied the pk3 and key files to the correct places. The game ran, but rather oddly. To get it fixed, I had to create a configuration file that would allow for proper widescreen, FOV, and gamma. Mine has these variables set:

seta r_customheight “1050”
seta r_customwidth “1680”
seta r_fullscreen “1”
seta r_mode “-1”
seta cg_fov “115”
seta com_maxfps “60”
seta r_overBrightBits “0”
seta r_ignorehwgamma "1"

Copy and paste the above into a plain-text editor and save it as autoexec.cfg. I had to use WriteRoom to do this as TextEdit and MS Word will keep adding a .rtf or .txt extension to the file.

Place the autoexec.cfg file into Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/Quake3/baseq3. Note that before copying the autoexec file, you might need to launch ioquake3 once in order to create the directory structure. You also cannot change or add any of the above variables to the q3config.cfg file located in the same directory, as they reset every time the game is relaunched.

Naturally, set the customheight and customwidth entries for the resolution you want. A FOV of 115 is correct for 16:10 aspect ratio displays, but you can set this to whatever makes you comfortable. Putting it too high or too low can cause headaches.

Hope this extra detail will help others who want to get the game up and running on modern hardware.