Quake3Quest: Q3 in Virtual Reality

[Eraser]

I know Discord is the hot new thing but quake3world.com can't go without someone mentioning this thing.

Quake3Quest is a Quake 3 Arena port for the Oculus Quest 2. It means you can play Quake 3 Arena in its full glory in Virtual Reality. The Quest 2 is a standalone device, so you don't need a beefy computer to connect it to.

[youtube]2Z_ns5kwNZk[/youtube]

I've installed this thing on my own Quest 2, initially being s bit skeptical because eh, aiming must be terrible (I had visions of playing Quake 3 Arcade on my XBox 360) and it must be a puke machine, seeing how fast the gameplay of Quake 3 is (including its dependence on jumppads and the like).
Turns out I couldn't be more wrong. Quake 3 feels so natural in VR, it's amazing. Aiming and shooting is perhaps even easier and feels more direct than with a mouse and keyboard. Yes, you need solid VR legs to handle this, but weirdly enough Quake 3 made me feel less wobbly on my legs than Doom 3. It's definitely comfortable enough to play for longer stretches of time.

Performance of the game is solid. It hits the 72Hz refresh rate easily, although DrBeef (the author of the port) said some if the larger Team Arena maps (I guess he means the terra maps) show some framerate drops. Haven't checked those out myself yet though.
Oh, yes, Team Arena works as well! The same goes for multiplayer. I played some matches yesterday and that goes really well, even in a map like q3dm17 (The Longest Yard). There's a special VR master server set up where the game takes its server list from, so that's cool.

Controls are simple enough. Left analogue stick to move/strafe, right analogue stick to turn in X degree increments (where X is configurable). The right stick is not necessarily needed as you can turn but looking in that direction. Right motion controller is used to aim (so the crosshair isn't necessarily in the center of the screen, which sounds weird but is immediately intuitive and logical). Buttons on right controller are used to jump/duck, left controller to taunt. The right grip button brings up a weapon-wheel for weapon selection. All I really miss is next/prev weapon buttons. Not sure why the left controller buttons weren't assigned to this. The game doesn't offer customizable controls as far as I know, but I am going to see if a little q3config.cfg hacking might help out here.

Now if you've watched the trailer you'll see it mentions mods. Don't get your hopes up though, as they're confusing the use of this term as we used to use it with any sort of custom content. This means the game does allow custom maps, models, textures, sounds, etc. Custom code, however... nope, haven't gotten that to work with my own mods (EntityPlus and wofreloaded). I'm getting the impression this is also not easily doable, so that's a bit of a bummer. Granted, Team Arena works fine, but I guess they've prepped something in the port specifically for the missionpack to get that to work. I am going to do a bit more research to see if there's any chance of getting actual mods to work. Getting to play EntityPlus in VR is kind of the dream here.

So besides that, the whole experience is pretty solid. There are a few small rough edges (like some UI elements not playing nicely with some geometry where z ordering gets messed up but that's not a big deal). This is just a 1.0 release and DrBeef usually puts out some updates for his ports.
It's quite amazing to be able to walk through levels I built 20 years ago in VR. It's pretty surreal. I know all these stock and a lot of custom Quake 3 maps by heart, seen them a million times, but to actually be in them like this and get a real sense of scale just adds a whole new layer to it.

[Pext]

It's pretty surreal. I know all these stock and a lot of custom Quake 3 maps by heart, seen them a million times, but to actually be in them like this and get a real sense of scale just adds a whole new layer to it.

<3 <3

seems like it's time for me to get a VR soon.

does it only work on a quest?

[Eraser]

Yes this was specifically made for the Quest 2. Supposedly it runs on Quest 1 as well but you need a different version due to some rendering bugs or something.

[CZghost]

I can't check it out in work, but it does sound tasty. I guess mods will work if they're made specifically for the VR port, or ported for it as well. Isn't your EntityPlus or WoFReloaded mod(s) opensource? I guess somebody could take the mod source code and modify it to work with the VR. But I guess it's going to be no easy task.

[Mat Linnett]

How do you do a backflip?

[Eraser]

By doing a backflip of course!

[Eraser]

I checked with the DrBeef discord and the conclusion is that it isn't trivial to get real mods to run on the game. So that's an avenue I won't pusue with EntityPlus unfortunately.

[CZghost]

Understood. It may be caused by proprietary drivers for the VR that require untrivial modifications to the code. But if DrBeef figured it out, there must be a way to do it. But if it's too hard to figure it out, then yeah, I wouldn't bother, eighter.

[Eraser]

The problem is that the server, client and ui code contain changes required to make the VR and controller input stuff work. Because existing mods are based on the Quake 3 SDK rather than the custom Quake3Quest code, all those VR related changes are missing. Because of this, Q3Quest ignores custom qvm files and always loads its own code (which is compiled to a system-native .so file. Think dll but for Linux).

So I could attempt to port EntityPlus to the Q3Quest codebase and compile the cgame, game and q3ui projects to .so files, but Q3Quest would still refuse to load them. I'd need to repackage and distribute all of Q3Quest with the EntityPlus changes. This is just not feasible. And that's assuming porting the code isn't hell itself.

[CZghost]

That would be copyright infringement actually, this is an issue for legal reasons as well.

[Eraser]

That would be copyright infringement actually, this is an issue for legal reasons as well.

It's not. Quake3Quest is completely open source.
The assets (the .pk3 files) are not distributed with Quake3Quest. So you need to buy your own copy of Quake 3 and copy over those files to be able to play it.

[CZghost]

Ok, that was a little bit unclear. That's good.

[obsidian]

I tried it on my brother's headset. It runs exceptionally well and aiming with the gun in my hand is surprisingly accurate.