I had a surge of nostalgia recently and bought Quake 3 Arena on gog recently. The game has been a big part of my childhood, I used to go to internet cafes with friends to play q3a FFA, paying per hour, sometimes even using money stolen from my parents1.
The game has always been a pretty much perfect arcade experience - easy to learn, but hard to master, very dynamic, and honestly beautiful for how well it worked on any hardware.
My gaming PC has recently been commandeered to serve as a kubernetes node in my homelab and run open-weight LLMs, so my access to AAA games is limited. Fortunately my devmachine is more than capable of running 25-year-old games, so I had a blast playing the “single player”2 q3a campaign.
All that lead to me hosting my own q3a FFA server at q3a.nietaki.com:279603 for the benefit of friends, family and other creatures of the sea. I hand-picked the map rotation to include only the most memorable and enjoyable maps of the era.
At some point in time I’m going to post some key config values here to make sure y’all are not missing out on any crucial competitive advantage in this classic game. In the meantime you can see the evolution of my config here4.
As always, the whole thing is managed/configured in my private Ansible script repo named after the cutest animal of them all, the Afro-Australian fur seal. The server is a Dell Optiplex SFF running Fedora5.
- I don’t do that anymore 😅 (steal or lie)
- Not really “single player” if you’re playing against bots on a multiplayer map, is it?
- If you can’t connect to it, it basically means my home internet died.
- Most of it is based on some ancient Polish scriptures
- …which used to be my Linux devmachine I carried to the office daily, as a weird protest against the Apple tyranny of macbooks everybody else was using.
