Amazing

[DRuM]

I just installed XP on a new harddrive recently because my pc wouldn't boot into windows. I installed my old drive as a secondary slave and transferred my 30GB game folder to the new drive, including Q3 of course. Today I decided to reinstall my games, about half a dozen I hadn't finished. All reinstalled and save games back in place.

So I'm looking inside the Q3 folder at 2.73GB of files and folders and thinking what a pain it's going to be to reinstall the game, patches, osp, point releases, cpma, defrag, etc. At least my q3 configs are all there so that was never going to be an issue. Then I realised that I can't even find my Q3A installation disc which is in my house, but, I dunno where.

Anyway, I decided to double click on the quake3.exe still sitting inside the folder and expecting nothing to happen, but wtf, it all started up as normal, showing all my mods installed. Everything working as it should be including my q3 and autoexec configs. How the hell does that happen, considering it's been ripped out of the old harddrive and just plonked into a new drive with a new windows installation. Isn't it meant to be reinstalled in order to be to rooted into the windows system to actually work? Did I get lucky or is this normal? Tell me I'm lucky, it'll make me feel good. Talk about a game with balls, it sure doesn't like to let go easily!

Seismovision had to be reinstalled though (that was never inside the Q3 folder). Which brings me to a question. Is there a way to get seismo to play my baseq3 and osp demos in the osp mod, and play my cpma and defrag demos using the cpma mod without having to manually change from one mod to the other? This is when I double click on a demo and it autoloads seismo rather than using the demo playlist thingy.

In options, where it says "select the mod you want to use to play this demo type" if I select cpma, it'll play baseq3 demos, osp demos, defrag demos and cpma demos in the cpma mod. If however I select osp, it'll play baseq3 and osp demos in the osp mod but not defrag demos or cpma demos. For defrag and cpma demos, it'll load the seismo splash screen, then q3, but not play them. And if I select no mod, it'll play baseq3 and osp demos but also wont play defrag or cpma demos, it'll say mismatch baseq3/cpma or couldn't load maps. Is there something I can type into the additional command line parameters box to tell seismo to play baseq3 and osp demos with the osp mod?

I tried this from the seismo FAQ: " Q: Seismovision can't detect a certain mod that I have installed. How can I force the mod without selecting it?
A: In the Additional Parameter text box enter this '+set fs_game <MOD>'. Where <MOD> is the directory name of the mod. For Quake 3 Arena based games only."

I did '+set fs_OSP' but all that does is override the CPA mod and cpma demos don't open. I also tried '+set fs_game OSP +set fs_game CPMA' and that just overrides osp, making osp demos open in cpma mod.

[4days]

dunno about the seismo stuff but drag and drop is normal for q3.

[speaker]

Anyway, I decided to double click on the quake3.exe still sitting inside the folder and expecting nothing to happen, but wtf, it all started up as normal, showing all my mods installed. Everything working as it should be including my q3 and autoexec configs. How the hell does that happen, considering it's been ripped out of the old harddrive and just plonked into a new drive with a new windows installation. Isn't it meant to be reinstalled in order to be to rooted into the windows system to actually work? Did I get lucky or is this normal? Tell me I'm lucky, it'll make me feel good. Talk about a game with balls, it sure doesn't like to let go easily!

Quake 3 is a fairly simple program in this respect. It does not depend on registry settings and uses only standard Win32 components (DLLs, etc.) that are always present in any normal Win32 installation and are backward compatible (mostly). Actually, the install process of Quake 3 simply copies the files from the CD to the HDD. I have a CD to which I copied the whole Quake3 folder (EXE files, baseq3 folder with PK3s and custom maps, everything) and can install my specific flavor of Quake 3 on any Win32 machine by just copying the CD to a suitable location on the HDD.

It is even possible to put Quake 3 on an USB stick and plug-and-play. I have just tested this and it works. The only problem is that the USB stick is continuously accessed (the LED blinks all the time). I am not sure whether it is reading or writing data (probably reading textures and other resources, which is harmless to the USB stick). If you use an external HDD with USB interface then you don't have to worry about excessive repeated data writes (harmful to USB sticks on the long run). Of course, if you want to use the stick on different computers, you will have to make specific 'auotexec.cfg' files for each machine and use scripts (batch files) to start the game with the proper CFG.

[DRuM]

Of course, if you want to use the stick on different computers, you will have to make specific 'auotexec.cfg' files for each machine and use scripts (batch files) to start the game with the proper CFG.

That would be pretty cool taking quake3 anywhere on a small stick in your pocket. If you've copied all q3 files to the usb stick, including your autoexec cfgs, wouldn't that execute automatically on any machine?

[speaker]

@Drum:

It is the video driver that may give you problems. The game makes a note in 'q3config.cfg' about the last used video driver, something like this:

seta r_lastValidRenderer "GeForce 7300 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!"

Now if the next machine has let's say an ATI Radeon with a completely different video driver, this _may_ cause problems. I am not sure, this is something that should be decided by actual testing.

If there were such a problem with drivers, I would put all my personal config settings (including render options like full screen/windowed, resolution, color depth, etc.) in the 'autoexec.cfg' and would start Quake 3 using a batch script like this (located in the Quake3 folder):

del .\baseq3\q3config.cfg
quake3.exe [com-par]

where [com-par] stands for the usual command line parameters (if any).

Deleting the old CFG will ensure that the game always searches for available video drivers and will use the one installed on the machine. I am not sure if the render settings in 'autoexec.cfg' will work or not in this setup. It may happen that you will have to set these parameters from the console every time you start the game. :-(

Hope this helps.

Speaker

[^misantropia^]

If you've copied all q3 files to the usb stick, including your autoexec cfgs, wouldn't that execute automatically on any machine?

Yep. About the only thing that could mess it up is r_mode or r_displayrefresh being set to something the monitor doesn't support. The thing with r_lastValidRenderer is not an issue, the machine just needs to support OpenGL.