🙃 New Quake Game?

On March 3, ZeniMax Media renewed the Quake trademark. Today, July 6, reports emerged that Bethesda will be focusing on its five core franchises — with Quake among them.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Microsoft's restructuring of Xbox will see Bethesda focusing on a handful of franchises going forward: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. These five franchises are expected to be a priority, with at least three of them already having games in development.

Sources:
🌎 IGN → Bethesda focusing on Quake
🌎 godisageek → The Quake trademark renewal
🌟 Image

🐇 New DeFrag Launcher

Neyo has introduced the new DeFrag Racing Launcher, featuring powerful demo playback and a range of quality-of-life improvements. 🙄

➡️ Instant demo playback - click any demo and watch it right inside the launcher with your own config, YouTube-like timeline: scrub, pause, slow-mo, frame-by-frame stepping.
➡️ Compare up to 4 demos side by side - perfectly synced engines, great for studying routes.
➡️ Automatic demo backup - optional feature - every demo is automatically uploaded to defrag.racing. Never lose any demo ever again!
➡️ Render demos to YouTube straight from the demo list
➡️ Maps tab - full online live map list, instant offline play VQ3 & CPM, automatic map downloads, offline map scanning
➡️ Servers tab - live server browser, connect from the app or the website, server & map history
➡️ Records tab - live VQ3 & CPM leaderboards
➡️ Notifications synced with the website

It would be amazing to see this kind of demo playback implemented directly in the Quake 3 engine. 🫠

sources:
🌎 Defrag.Racing → Download
🌎 Discord → DeFrag Channel
🌎 YouTube → Video Guide

💀 Secret Rocket Mode on Freeze!

🎮 Q3MSK Freeze server has a hidden Rocket Mode, and it's an absolute blast.

📴 To enable it, simply type:
/callvote map Longestyard
"Polish Space Program" 😁

You can also callvote 💀Instagib or ☣️Promode physics—both are fully compatible with Rocket Mode.
I also suggested adding two more CTF Rocket maps. Since CTF maps have symmetrical team spawns, they could make for some really interesting matches. 🙄

sources:
🌎 YouTube → Da Vosk Docta - Gentrify
🌎 YouTube → Reupload

🙃 Quake 3 Champions (Bloodrun) Update

🙄 Bloodrun is a mod that ports the gameplay of Quake Champions into Quake III Arena. It features most of the well-known champions and maps, including their active abilities and passive skills. The mod also introduces several original ideas that are not present in the original game.

🙄 Recently, the developers released a major update featuring:
→ 3 new champions,
→ balance changes,
→ map optimizations.

🤮 The Biggest Weakness
The biggest downside of Bloodrun is its online and multiplayer. 🪦
➡️ There are only three active multiplayer servers, all hosted in a single location (Moscow).
➡️ All of them are Duel-only servers, focusing on a single game mode—which, in my personal opinion, is the least enjoyable one.

✨ The Strongest Points
The maps are one of Bloodrun's biggest strengths. They are exceptionally well made, featuring:
→ high-quality visuals,
→ impressive attention to detail,
→ numerous easter eggs,
→ regular updates based on players' feedback.

👎 The mapper Obsessed uses a different lightmap compilation technique that most classic Quake 3 engines cannot handle. Currently, only DirectX 12-based engines fully support this lighting system. Because of this limitation, these maps are still unavailable on standard Quake 3 multiplayer servers, as they are incompatible with many players' configurations.

🙃 Quake III Arena has survived for more than two decades thanks to its open-source nature and thriving modding community. Deliberately dropping support for standard Quake 3 engines is a 🟥red card for the author. It creates unnecessary gatekeeping and limits access to maps.

🔞 User Interface
On the other hand, the GUI feels surprisingly unfinished.
For example:
➡️ the mod still uses the default low-resolution font from pak0.pk3 (console and frag messages),
➡️ the in-game menus remain almost completely unchanged - many configuration options still require manual console commands.
It's surprising that such a professionally developed mod lacks these basic quality-of-life improvements.

🤩 Suggestion

I also suggested creating a simple launcher. It could:
→ simplify installation,
→ verify the installed version,
→ notify players about updates,
→ display server status and player counts,
→ show player statistics,
→ browse screenshots from the game directory.
A launcher like this would significantly improve the overall user experience.

sources:
🌟 Bloodrun

😁 Meme of the Day

💀 Every self-respecting shaft enthusiast aimer plays only like this.

#Q3MSKMeme

sources:
🌟 Q3MSK

🌎 Better Quake 3 Localization?

🌚Divoc was inspired by an idea posted on the quake3e Discord and started working on a feature that allows 🙃Quake 3 to load .ttf (TrueType) font files.

🕳️ From a technical standpoint, the engine converts a TTF font into just three texture atlases at different sizes (each containing 255 glyphs at fixed positions), which Quake can then load dynamically.
Compared to the original bitmap fonts, FreeType-generated fonts look much cleaner and scale much better.

ℹ️ Another major advantage is that TTF fonts can contain far more characters, making proper localization possible. This could allow support for languages such as:
→ Polish
→ German
→ Cyrillic alphabets (Mongolian) 😁
→ Possibly Simplified Chinese
→ Maybe even Arabic. 🪦

⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️
✝️ Technical details (skip if you're not interested in programmer babbling)
Unfortunately, TTF fonts are loaded by the engine, not by the mod itself, so this feature probably won't be available in 🌚OSP2-BE unless Cyrax (the author of Quake3e) agrees to add the necessary engine support. The current alpha build only supports TTF fonts in the UI and cgame, while the console still uses the old bitmap font. 🌚Divoc asked Cyrax about adding TTF support, but there hasn't been a definitive answer yet.

🙄 How it was implemented

Inspired by your implementation, I added TTF-to-bitmap font generation to the engine for use in cgame. It turned out decent, though there is still room for improvement. I'd love to render all characters directly from the engine's renderer, but it would require too much refactoring in cgame. — 🌚Divoc

🤪 Compatibility concerns
The main downside is that players using older clients—or clients without the required font file—won't be able to see the new characters correctly.

💬 I've seen servers that use a console translator to automatically translate players' chat messages into English. A similar approach could potentially help with localization and serve as a fallback for users with outdated clients.

🌟 Useful command
/in_forceCharset 2 → Forces Quake to use the US keyboard layout, so you don't have to switch layouts every time you launch the game.

Sources:
🌎 Discord → original discussion
🌎 Streamable → video from the original author
🌎 YouTube → VØJ, Narvent - Memory Reboot
🌎 YouTube → reupload