Is this how the game is supposed to look?

[Marscaleb]

So, I haven't played Quake 3 in at least 12 years.
I thought about getting into it, and so I downloaded the demo that is available on Steam and played some single player.

One of the things I noticed is that all of the bots running around in the map all looked... choppy.
EDIT: To clarify, if they were walking forward, instead of moving a tiny amount each frame in a smooth manner, they would be in one location, stay there for a number of frames, and then suddenly appear further ahead of themselves, stay there for a few frames, and then suddenly appear further ahead of themselves, and so on. Like they moved at a different framerate than the game was rendered at.

The animations themselves played fine, I have a great frame rate, but all the players "jump" around like I have a sub-standard network connection.
But I'm not playing online, I'm playing bots, locally, on my own computer, which is more than enough to run a game this old. And it is not (so far as I know) some sort of source port that made some changes under the hood. The game itself just runs this way.

Is the game supposed to look like this? Or have I got some particular setting wrong? Why are all the bots so choppy and is there a way to fix this?

[Marscaleb]

No response? So, I suppose this is what the game actually is supposed to be doing.
I would like to ask then why is this happening? I love studying how these older games work; I can never get enough of that.
Technologically it doesn't *have* to do this, as even Quake 2 moves characters much smoother, so I'm really curious as to why this game would behave this way.

[MKJ]

it's not supposed to be doing that. there are a bunch of console commands you can use to tweak the game and fix these things tho I can't remember what they are anymore.
someone smarter than me ought to be able to answer this

[coltonquake3]

Try setting the game's network connection setting to LAN/Cable/xDSL. That might work.

[Marscaleb]

Try setting the game's network connection setting to LAN/Cable/xDSL. That might work.

Nope; it was already set to that. And it didn't make a difference when I tried setting it to 28.8 just to try it.

Maybe this is because I am just running a demo? I'm going to buy the full version but I'm not in a hurry so I figured I'd wait for the winter sale in about a month.

[Marscaleb]

So just to update the situation, in case someone cares or searches for information on this same situation:

I just bought Quake 3 on GOG, the full version, and this one plays properly and smoothly.
The demo version on Steam still plays oddly jittery, I don't know why, but the full version on GOG works perfectly.

[MKJ]

Strange, indeed.

[Ganemi]

I know that the weird interpolation thing might happen with g_synchronousclients set to 1, or a negative cl_timenudge value, like -50 or so.

Other than that, no idea what it was.