Quake 3 Arena on Live CD

[Sole]

I'd like to have a DVD with q3a on including mods, xqf, xchat and whatnot

Any tutorials to do this? I havent found much information yet.

Thanks

[Harry Kuhman]

Although the sources have been released, the artwork and other materials are still copyright and the game is thus still considered copyrighted. It can not legally be released on a Live CD or DVD.

This obviously would not prevent you from putting your own valid copy on a Live DVD for your own use, just from releasing it for others. That should pretty much be a matter of installing the Linux version and doing a remaster. Of course, that's easy for someone who has never done a remaster to say.

[Sole]

that's just it, how do I install my own q3a on a live dvd?

[Harry Kuhman]

I would suggest that you start by reading over a lot of the old posts in the remastering forum, and there is also a Knoppix remastering section in the wiki (documentation link near the top of the page). I'm not at all clear that this is a very wise or useful move though. Quake III loads a lot of info from the pk3 files both when it starts and when a new maps starts. A slow device here like a DVD drive will have a big impact on game play (I would expect that by the time you get into the game other players would already have several kills). Also Quake wants to be able to modify the config file and perhaps other files (at the least a games.log file). And the Q3key file seems to be writen to even though the key never changes (looks at the last modified date on your Q3key file).

I'm a big Q3 fan, but this doesn't seem the most partical thing to attempt. At the very least I would suggest copying your entire Quake III Arena and baseq3 files to a read only media like a DVD and trying to run quake from there. If you can't run it and get acceptable performance that way then it doesn't seem like you are likely to do any better putting the OS and Quake III on a live DVD (which will be a larger resource drain on the system). Easy to determine if the concept is viable before getting into a complete remaster.

If it does work, or even playing Quake from a baseq3 saved on DVD works, please let us know.

[Harry Kuhman]

Other problems that I see likely to be an issue with Quake III on a Live DVD if it works at all:

• Everytime the group that you play with wants to add a map or even a skin, you have to remaster.
  
  You can't make configuration changes (or at least can't save them), including video settings, control settings, sensitivity adjustments, key definitions, music volume, and so on. This seems something that you very well might need if your intention is to have a copy of Q3 on Live DVD that you can carry from system to system. (UnionFS might help you here, but that involves more overhead.)
  
  Other applications that you use with Quake III like XQF, xchat, Teamspeak may have their own need to write to their setup files.

[Sole]

Thanks for the reply,

I will not give up yet
going to try to get it to work on a usb drive.

[Harry Kuhman]

going to try to get it to work on a usb drive.

Well, my first thought was that even a hard drive on USB2 would be too slow (I sure hope you mean a hard drive and not a USB flash drive). But I decided to test this, particularly since I had just copied my Quake 3 arena directories to a USB drive in preperation of changing out the hard drive in my notebook. Here's what I learned:

Running from the OS on the main hard disk and then running Quake III from the USB2 hard disk, Quake starts noticably slower, but it does start and if you can live with the slow start it's not bad. Switching maps is somewhat slower, but not as bad as I expected (I have a very low opnion of USB). I didn't see any problems at all during play (I didn't expect to, but was wondering about it none the less), so as long as you are talking about a hard disk and a USB2 (not USB 1.1) interface, then Quake is playable. As far as booting frm USB goes, good luck, many people can but I've not been able to boot from USB yet, even on a notebook that has a USB boot option. As long as you have better luck booting from USB than I, this approach should work.