Graphics Unlike most other game engines released at the timeincluding its main competitor, the
Unreal Engineid Tech 3 requires an
OpenGL-compliant
graphics accelerator to run. The engine does not include a
software renderer, unlike id Tech 2. id Tech 3 introduced
spline-based curved surfaces in addition to planar volumes. The graphical technology of the game is based tightly around a
shader system, where the appearance of many surfaces can be defined in text files referred to as shader
scripts. Shaders are described and rendered as several layers. Each layer contains a texture, a "blend mode" that determines how to superimpose it over the previous layer, and texture orientation modes such as environment mapping, scrolling, and rotation. These features can readily be seen within the game, with many bright and active surfaces on each map and even character models. The shader system goes beyond visual appearance, defining the contents of volumes (e.g., a water volume is defined by applying a water shader to its surfaces), light emission, and which sound to play when a volume is trodden upon. To assist calculation of these shaders,
id Tech 3 implements a specific
fast inverse square root function, which attracted a significant amount of attention in the game development community for its clever use of integer operations.
Networking Like id's earlier titles
Doom and
Quake,
Quake III Arena features multiplayer support via features built into its engine. id Tech 3 uses a snapshot system to
relay information about game frames to the client over
UDP. The server updates object interaction at a fixed rate independent of the rate that clients update the server with their actions, then attempts to send the state of all objects at that moment (the current server frame) to each client. The server attempts to omit as much information as possible about each frame, relaying only differences from the last frame the client confirmed as received (
Delta encoding). All data packets are compressed by
Huffman coding with static pre-calculated frequency data to reduce bandwidth use even further.
Quake III Arena has an integrated and relatively elaborate
cheat-protection system called "pure server". Any client connecting to a pure server automatically has "pure mode" enabled; while pure mode is enabled, only files within data packs can be accessed. Clients are disconnected if their data packs fail one of several integrity checks. The cgame.qvm file, with its high potential for cheat-related modification, is subject to additional integrity checks. Developers must manually deactivate pure server to test maps or mods that are not in data packs using the PK3 file format. Later versions supplemented pure server with
PunkBuster support, though all the hooks to it are absent from the source code release because PunkBuster is
closed source software and including support for it in the source code release would have caused any redistributors/reusers of the code to violate the
GPL. ==ioquake3==