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Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena is a first person shooter game made by id Software in 1999. As the name suggests already, the main emphasis of this game is to fight over the Internet in one of many "arenas" against other human players.

There is no single-player goal or plot in this game. Instead, it is similar to multiplayer fighting, with computer controlled bots making up the opposition instead of humans.

Quake III Arena was one of the first first person shooter games which did not support software rendering. A hardware accelerated graphics controller is mandatory to run the program at a playable frame rate.

Background music was done by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly.

Like its predecessors Quake and Quake II it can be heavily modified to support other gaming styles with mods such as Urban Terror. Quake III Arena can use (like Quake II) native shared libraries to store the game code but the preferred method is to program all modifications in pure ANSI-C and compile them with a special version of the free C compiler LCC into machine independent byte code, which will be interpreted by an in-game virtual machine. The virtual machine in Quake III Arena even uses "just-in-time" techiques like modern Java virtual machines.

Games using the Quake III Arena engine

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