Quake 3 patch finally released
Today's patch is brought to you by the letter "G" and the numbers "2" and "7"
After a surprisingly long respite from the flood of patches for id Software's online shooter "Quake 3 Arena", the long-awaited v1.27g patch (or "point release" as they cutely title it) has finally been released. This is the version used in the soon-to-be-released "Team Arena" add-on pack, and will hopefully replace both the official v1.17 patch which most people have been using, and the "beta" patch v1.25, which caused an uproar in the Quake community back in October by changing the fundamental physics and weapons balance of the game almost a year after its release.
The new v1.27g patch thankfully returns the physics to the way they were before, although some of the other controversial changes from v1.25 remain, such as the removal of the bug / feature (depending on who you talk to) that allowed you to inflict splash damage from rockets and plasma through the floors of maps like Q3Tourney4. As usual the patch is totally incompatible with previous versions, so you should check to see if your regular servers have upgraded before installing it, and remember that it will be at least a few days before any of your favourite mods will work with the new version. You will also be unable to view QuakeTV coverage of the Babbages CPL tournament in Dallas this weekend if you upgrade.
Apart from breaking mods and making life a misery, the patch also fixes some memory leaks, improves the bot AI, and removes the Global Rankings support which was added to v1.25 and never seemed to work. There are also some new performance tweaks, and amateur developers can now add cinematics to their mods .. but only once the source code has been released early next week. If you want to take the plunge, you can download the patch (which weighs in at 18Mb) from any of the following sites -
download from 3D Downloads
download from Barrysworld (UK)
download from File Planet