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Quake 3 patch - kills mods

Tom Bramwell avatar
News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief
Published on

In the early hours of this morning our beloved Id Software saw fit to bestow upon us another Quake III Arena point release, this one numbered 1.25. Somewhat worryingly Graeme Devine labelled it as a beta, and barely minutes later Robert Duffy updated his .plan with the other half of the problem.. "Mods for Quake 3 Arena will require a recompile for use with 1.25". According to Dave Angus at BarrysWorld their leagues will not be upgrading to the 1.25 patch "due to id software being stupid w*****s" (Censored to protect your cherub-like ears -Ed). Their server chap DrChris was a little more collected.. "We will *not* be upgrading to the new point release of Q3 just yet. It's officially a beta, breaks all existing mods and, since it uses a different protocol from the previous release, clients can not easily mix versions either. We will be waiting until the source code has been released and the major mods have been updated to support it." Of course, the mods of the moment are Rocket Arena 3 and Quake 3 Fortress. An apologetic update from RA3's creator David "CRT" Wright said that "RA3 players are advised NOT to upgrade to 1.25 for the time being, as my initial testing seems to indicate it breaks RA3 in several ways. Hopefully id will release the updated game source so that I can update RA3 soon," while Q3F's Locki sent out a net-wide news broadcast to say that "All Q3F players and server administrators are advised to hold off from upgrading until the Q3F Beta 1F update is ready." If you made the mistake of installing the 17Mb file (which can be found on on Id Software's FTP) then you can either wait around for a bit (Locki does point out that he'll have a beta of a 125-compatible version available within days) or go with his unofficial removal tip. Apparently you can roll back by deleting pak4.pk3 from your "quake3/baseq3" directory and then reinstall the 1.17 patch (which is also still on Id Software's FTP). Still, there's nothing to stop you upgrading if you really want to, but you may have trouble finding willing servers. Vanilla Duel and FFA servers will upgrade in spats, with some operators unwilling while others perfectly happy to sort it out. If you're interested in what this patch adds (and it's quite a bountiful list), then take a peak at Graeme Devine's .plan.

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