Mod problems after "installing" PC Quake III on a mac

[kayv33]

A request for help!

I used to play Quake 3 back in the day, and discovered Quake Live earlier this month. I was never really that serious about playing online when I was playing the original game (slow, crappy connection), and so I've been working on strafejumping and suchlike for a while using QL's tutorials (hall 3 is utterly effortless now EXCEPT for b2r which is freaking impossible ).

Decided I wanted to download DeFRaG and maybe play excessive, so I ended up cheekily installing Quake 3 onto my mac from the PC CD: if you create the framework and directories by downloading and installing patch 1.32 for mac first, then manually move pak03.pk3 from \baseq3 on the CD to \baseq3 under \Applications\Quake 3, you end up with a working copy of Quake 3 Arena on your mac. I'm pretty sure some people must have tried this on here.

After some initial random crashes, the game works absolutely fine, except ... ironically ... when I want to load a mod. I've unpacked Excessive Plus to the correct place, and the Mods screen recognises it, but whenever I attempt to load any mod, including the mission pack thing that comes with the point release, Quake 3 unexpectedly quits just after the screenfade (when you'd expect the selection screen to appear).

As far as I'm aware, pak0.pk3 should be identical regardless of what platform the game is on (I know that Quake 3 Gold was a hybrid CD), and it's pretty much self-contained, so despite the hotwired installation it should work fine. The only other problem I can think of is that the original CD had a minuscule scratch on it, but I doubt it would have copied (first to a new CD, then pak0.pk3 to the hard drive) if anything were corrupted.

Has anybody ever come across this problem, or can anybody see something I'm missing that might cause this to happen? I'd much prefer to get my legal, well-worn copy of Quake 3 working again than have to download a naughty copy of Q3G. Workarounds would be equally appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Eraser]

Yeah it should be possible to install Q3 from a PC CD on a Mac, as long as you have the right executable and dll's, which the point release installer installs for you.

Could it perhaps be a punkbuster related problem? Is punkbuster installed? Is it enabled? You could also try deleting q3config.cfg from your excessive folder.

[^misantropia^]

Try starting the game from a terminal. When it crashes, it'll produce a console dump / stack trace. Post it here, please. It might tell us something.

[DTS]

I don't know how Macs deal with shortcuts, but in Windows you can create a shortcut to Q3 that launches it with a certain mod. If you can do that on your Mac somehow, I suggest trying that.

E.g. in Windows, to launch Defrag I have a shortcut like this:
"C:\Program Files\Quake III Arena\quake3.exe" -nosplash +set fs_game defrag

The fs_game command refers to the mod folder name "defrag", the -nosplash prevents the intro cinematic from playing.

[^misantropia^]

That first part is correct but -nosplash is not a valid switch, you're probably thinking of +set com_introplayed 1.

[DTS]

Oh maybe the intro is handled seperately, from your config.
Well it stops the logo from playing, that's for sure.

I've had it set for so long I forgot exactly what it did

[Eraser]

I think the -nosplash thing works because Quake 3 tries to execute the command and fails and because of that aborts playing the video. Try replacing -nosplash with -blahdiblahdiblah and see if that works as well. It just might.