This is my hobby project, Quake III Champions. It's a recreation of Quake Champions gameplay using open source code of Quake 3.

Code

So, what is under the hood? As the starting point of my project I've chosen the famous ioquake3 project. It's opensource effort to improve the original Quake3 GPL code. Initially the idea was to create a Quake 3 mod and in this case one could play the game using their favorite Quake 3 client - there are plenty of them. Unfortunately, during the developement I ran into mod API limitation: for example, the server game code has no idea whether a player is zooming in or not. Whithout this there's no way to implement the Heavy Machinegun firing modes: it works differently when zoomed in. There were also other limitations and eventually I've decided to modify the client. Strictly speaking it's not a Quake 3 mod anymore: it needs its own game client. 

Network code

As many of you know, the vanilla Quake 3 is not too great when playing with high ping. Some mods address this problem and feature improved network code: one of greatest examples is the famous CPMA. Unfortunately, its source code is not open so I cannot borrow its excellent networking code. Fortunately, there's another approach to improve Quake 3 network code and it's opensource: the Unlagged. At this moment I stick with it: so far it looks fairly great (though some tuning is yet needed).

What's done

Currently I have three champions, one for each weight grade: Anarki, Ranger and Keel. They have their respective active and passive abilities, different speeds, different hitboxes.

For the game content, the Awoken map has been recreated. Much effort has been put into making it as accurately done as possible. The visual style differs, the map author  and I decided to leave some room for our own creativity here. 

Other things which are done: item respawn times, starting values for health/ammo for the champions, rules to account for health and armor, new items - hourglass, universal ammo, tribolt weapon and its ammo.

Game types

At this moment the game supports only two modes: Deathmatch (aka FFA) and Tournament (aka Duel). 

What's next

The first public release is planned to be at the end of August, 2022. By then I plan to update some in-game UI icons for items, champion portraits. Spectator UI has to be implemented as well. I'm also going to fix a number of smaller issues, like "callvote" display, scoreboard bugs and so on.