Q3 Tutorial: Basic Content Replacement

In this guide I'm going to do an extremely basic mod which, when loaded, replaces something from the game. This can actually be done for anything, models, textures, skins, sounds, fonts, and whatever else.

Why would you want to do this? I can think of 4 reasons.

1. Higher resolution content (for images and sounds (the original are quite low quality))
2. Free content (remake everything so you don't have to buy Q3A)
3. Change the overall look/mood
4. Nude mod (same as number 3)

This is also one half of creating a total conversion mod.

So we are going to take "Doom Default" and change his colour a little.

from normal green doom

to inverted purple doom

Some things to note; not only did I change Doom's colours, I also change the icon. And also the icons for the Doom set have changed places, because they get reloaded they now end up at the start of the players list.

Ok so let's start:

In our Quake 3 folder (this could be called anything depending on where you installed it) we have a few files and folders. We should have one or two executables which you click on to run the game, and at least two folders (depending if you have Team Arena as well) these are called baseq3 (Quake 3 Arena files) and missionpack (Quake 3 Team Arena files).

We're going to make another folder, I called mine tutorial, but you can call yours whatever you want your mod to appear as.

Now let's go into the baseq3 folder, in here are lots of .pk3 files, these are just renamed zip files.

Inside PAK0.PK3 we need to go in through the folders models > players > doom. And from inside doom we are going to copy out the files doom.tga (the skin) and icon_default.tga (the icon).

Open them in your favourite image editor, I used Gimp, and change it to your liking, I tweaked the "hue" on mine. And then save it.

Now we need to put those two files in the same directory hierarchy as the originals. So make some folders within folders models > player > doom, and inside doom place the two files. Now back out up to the top folder models.

Now zip models into a zip file, you can call it whatever you like, but for easy remembering call it something like doomskin.

Then rename the .zip extension to .pk3.

Now place doomskin.pk3 into the folder we made earlier, I called mine tutorial, do you remember what you called yours?

Run the game!

Now in the menu screen of the game, go into Mods.

the mods menu

As you can see in mine, I have a lot of mods, but we can see Quake III Arena (this is the normal Q3A game), missionpack (this is Q3TA), Urban Terror (that is the Urban Terror total conversion mod), a few others and tutorial (which is what I called my mod.

When you load it, it will take you back to the menu, but you are actually now in your mod, and if you go check out the doom model, he will be however you coloured him.

Things to note:

• You need a .pk3 in a folder for the folder to be recognised as a mod.
• You can place an empty .pk3 folder in there and then just have normal folders, it will recognise the model when looking at them, but when you try to run a map it will not be able to load it.
• If you're making a skin from scratch, you can use a bigger resolution, giving the final model a crisper higher quality look.
• If you modify a Q3A skin from the original game you do not have the rights to distribute it. Though John Carmack is the nicest smartest of people, he probably wouldn't mind.