I want to take a quick look at the differences between ioquake3 and Quake III Arena, as in the additions and improvements that ioquake3 has made.
ioquake3 is made to remain completely compatible with Q3A. Some of (what I consider) the main features are:
- Stereoscopic rendering
- OGG support
- Voip & Mumble support
- PNG support
- OpenAL
- and extremely cross platform
When playing the game there are very few things that you will notice which are different. If you use the in-game VOIP you will see a small volume bar up the top of the screen when recording, but there are no menus to set up VOIP you have to do it all from the command. I do believe there is some sort of plan for more menus to allow easy set up.
There are only a couple of menu changes.
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| Graphics menu from Q3A | Graphics menu from ioq3 |
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| Sound menu from Q3A | Sound menu from ioq3 |
As you can see there are a couple of extra options for setting screen resolutions and sound systems, I can imagine a VOIP menu being easily implemented.
To get these settings you have to make sure you are using the new ioquake3 .qvm's or .so's (or .dll's if in windows). You can either put a folder in the baseq3 folder called vm and put the 3 .qvm's in there and run the game, or if you prefer to use the .so's you have to put the 3 of them in the baseq3 and make sure you set vm_cgame, vm_game, and vm_ui all to 0, in the config file, and it is probably a good idea to set sv_pure to 0 as well. If you are using the .qvm's these are set to 2 (except for sv_pure it is 0 again, to turn off pure server).
One other major visual difference would be if you were using stereoscopic 3D. There are options for all different coloured glasses:
1. red cyan | 2. red blue | 3. red green | 4. green magenta | 5. cyan red | 6. blue red | 7. green red | 8. magenta green
I've listed them twice as they are their corresponding numbers to select them. The green/magenta and vice versa option is not available in earlier versions.
On the note of extra menus, I recall a menu mod (advance ui) that laid things out much easier particularly when it came to setting up skirmish games and multi-player games, allowing to select an order of maps as well as specifying game settings such as gravity.
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| red cyan anaglyph |
A full menu change up might not be a bad idea, but it depends how close you want to keep things to the original, a new menu wouldn't change game-play, it would just make set up-easier.
Mumble is a great feature, though I still haven't gotten the chance to play with it. I've used it on its own, but never with positional audio, which I think would be it's highlight.
ioquake3 is almost 7 years old, and you can see the full list of features on their website, and I'm sure you can find their complete list of bug fixes in their subversion directories thingy...