This guide is intended for new people in Quake 3 Arena (and Team Arena) community who wish to set the game up properly for a functional and smooth gameplay. It is a summary of a few guides and threads you can find either on steam or on the internet. Nothing new, but having a few useful tips gathered into the same guide might help some people who do not wish to waste time looking for information for 1 hour. This guide will go through adjusting a proper display, configuring your mouse parameters, optimising your FPS in game. Some extra commands will be included for a smoother experience. Also we shall speak about popular mods and maps at the end. Most of the next sections will require to type commands into the console. To open it, press tilde (~) or square (²) in game (it depends on the keyboard layouts). You will be able thereafter to enter commands there, all starting by \

With recent Windows upadtes, a bunch of people got issues when they were trying to start the game. There is no universal method to sort this out, however something which worked out quite often is:
Go to the baseq3 folder (it should be found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Quake 3 Arena), right click on quake3.exe > Properties > Compatibility . Select Windows XP.
You can also try to launch the game directly from the local file (double click on quake3.exe) instead of launching it from steam.

Quake 3 was released a while ago, so it is not adapted to recent configurations. We can sort this out in the following way:
First of all, ensure that you are playing in fullscreen with the command
\r_fullscreen 1 (1 to activate fullscreen, 0 to deactivate it).

Then, we wish to set a custom resolution. Type
\r_mode -1
It will tell the engine to apply the resolution contained in the variables r_customwidth and r_customheight.

Now it is time to enter the resolution you wish. Let's say you want 1920*1080 (1920 width, 1080 height), then type
\r_customwidth 1920
\r_customheight 1080

To apply the changes you just made, you need to reinitialise the video:
\vid_restart

You should now have the resolution you wished.

To modify your field of view, type in the console
\cg_fov x
where x is the value of your fov. By default it is 90, but most players use an integer between 100 and 120. I suggest you try to modify it during a match until you find a suitable fov.

Having a good mouse configuration is essential in any fps game. However, I struggled a lot against Quake 3 to find a satisfying configuration. Here are the useful commands:

\in_mouse x where x may be equal to either 1 or -1. 1 corresponds to di/raw mouse, while -1 is win32 mouse. I highly recommend to use 1, but some people prefer -1, so pick the one you prefer.

\sensitivity x
It is obviously your mouse sensitivity, replace x by what you want. Default is 5.

\cl_mouseAccel x
It is your mouse acceleration. Most people leave the value equal to 0. However, if you experience (like me) for some reason strong accelerations when you move suddenly your mouse, for instance when you want to rocket jump, and or when you want to reach an enemy at the corner of your screen, then I suggest you to set x equal to a negative value. -0.015 works fine for me. If you decrease this acceleration too much, what happens is that your cursor will end up moving in the opposite direction than your hand. But -0.015 is large enough to avoid that, and small enough to prevent weird accelerations you may experience in Quake 3.

\m_yaw x (post-acceleration horizontal sensitivity)
\m_pitch x (post-acceleration vertical sensitivity)
Basically, x is going to be a coefficient multiplying the horizontal and vertical sensitivities for m_yaw and m_pitch respectively (if x equals 0 for m_yaw, and you will only be able to move your cursor vertically). If you left \cl_mouseAccel equal to 0, then there is no point modifying these parameters, just adjust the sensivity at your convenience. However if you have mouse acceleration, you may want to decrease x. Default is 0.022, I suggest something between 0.008 and 0.015.
Some people suggest to use a different value for m_pitch and m_yaw depending on your resolution ratio (4:3, 16:9 etc.). This is imo totally irrelevant as this will be fu** up your muscle memory.

Firstly, let us display your fps in-game (top right corner in-game):
\cg_drawFPS 1

You can increase your maximum FPS in-game. For that, type:
\com_maxfps x where x is your fps. You can use for example 125, 250, even higher if you wish.

Ensure that your v-sync is off: \r_swapinterval 0

But a few things need to be highlighted:
- FPS is capped to 125 online, so there is no point setting com_maxFPS more than 125 if you play online.
- Naturally, you will not get more framed displayed than your monitor refresh rate allows. But, it is useful to set your FPS higher than your monitor refresh rate. Explanations can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzp8z1i5-Hc

Some people still got low fps even after modifying com_maxfps. Here are random things which have worked out:
- Disable threaded optimisation in Nvidia control panel
- Type \r_displayRefresh 0 . With 0, it chooses the refresh rate automatically.
- Type \r_primitives 2 . Apparently it helped a few people to get good fps

\cg_trueLightning 1 : this command 'smoothes out' the shaft of the lightning gun. With truelightning activated, the shaft always coincide with the crosshair, precluding the discontinuous beam when moving your mouse with the default setting.

\cg_oldRail 0 : this is just a command to get a fancy rail beam (with colored rings circling the main beam). The two colours can be changed with the cvars \color1 # and \color2 # (where # is an integer between 1 and 8)

\cg_oldRocket 0 : new rocket style

You can find a bunch of new maps on https://lvlworld.com/
After downloading a new map, extract the folder, and move the .pk3 file into the baseq3 folder (this folder should be found at sth like this C:\(Program Files)\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Quake 3 Arena\baseq3 )
Some maps are good to practice strafe jumping, I personally like this one: https://lvlworld.com/review/id:1653
You will find the new maps in the Skirmish section of the game.
Note that some maps are available only in certain game modes, such as Capture the Flag, free for all etc.

This section deals with some famous mods. Mods can modify the gameplay, the rules, the engine etc.

- Challenge Promode Arena
My favourite one by far, the ultimate competitive mod. You MUST give it a try. It is very easy and quick to install, you can find the installation steps here: https://playmorepromode.com/guides/cpma-cnq3-installation
There are lots of active players looking for duels every day, I suggest you join the discord

- Ioquake3
I am not particularly familiar with this one, but I have heard a lot of good things about it. Here is a link where you can find more information about it: https://ioquake3.org/

- DeFRaG
Defrag is a mod where your goal is to finish 'races' as fast as you can. The community is sill very active. Here is a video so that you can get an idea of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCO9QuV-cgM
Some useful links for DeFRag:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/defrag
https://www.q3df.org/