As an avid quake 3 defrag player, this project started out for me as a tool for Quake 3 and Q3 mods that would solve some of the issues that the in-game UI has. It is essentially an external launcher for the game built with Tauri v2.
Where this launcher shines is it lets you toggle your Quake 3 client exe and with 1 click the launcher is now targeted to that mod (servers / demos / levels refresh). Note there is a nice GIF of the app in the readme of the repo
The project uses Tauri (webview) which some people scoff at - and I get it. Although I think most of the webview stigma is due to electron apps bloating everyone's PC. In any case - I tried my damndest on the UI :).
So try it out - this is for all the Q3 old heads!
Benefits over in-game UI below:
Faster server browser, Ability to favorite servers, Ability to trash servers (this is useful as many servers advertise using fake players which pollutes the in-game browsing experience - trashing these resolves this), Ability to add custom servers that are not advertised on the Q3 master servers, Unlimited number of demos/levels can be displayed (Q3 client exes have hard limits on the amount of demos / levels that can be displayed in the in-game UI), Ability to play demos on a loop (a feature inspired by the old Demo Show Creator tool https://alt.3dcenter.org/dsc/index_english.php), Ability to auto-close the client at demo end, Managing the EXE (basically closing and re-opening the client on subsequent launches), More data is parsed from demos, levels, and servers and is displayed in a nice fashion, You can read back the console activity in demos (chat history etc) without having to play the demo. I don't think this has been done before in any other tool
vintagedave•4mo ago
How many Quake 3 clients exist and are used today? I haven't played for years, but have great memories.
endless-r0ad•4mo ago
There are so many but I think Quake3e has taken over as the most popular vanilla client. IoQuake3 is still used but dev is not as active. I found another really cool client actually while making this called Lillium arena classic - which is a client for the early 1.16 protocol of Quake 3. This is the version that was distributed to sega dreamcast and there is actually still an active community (around 50 servers) that play on this version.
But once you get into mods like cpma, defrag, urban terror - as you probably know a lot of them distribute their own client - and most of those are based on Quake3e or ioQuake3