A shell script to improve Quake3 performance

Jan 17, '02 11:17:07PM

Contributed by: Hes Nikke

I just updated my copy of Quake III to go with Mac OS X on my TiBook (odd that it was installed for six months but not for OS X...), and I wanted to get better performance out of it. So I made the following shell script. i used this tip to make it launchable under the finder and this tip to make it renice without prompting for a password. Lastly, to put finishing touches on it, I put the Quake III icon on to my shell script, called "run Quake III.command�

  #!/bin/sh
cd /path/to/Quake3.app/Contents/MacOS
./Quake3&
ps -ax | grep Quake3 | grep -v grep
sudo renice -20 -p `ps -ax | grep Quake3 | grep -v grep | cut -c1-5`
Read the rest of the article for a sample Quake3 config file that may help further increase your framerates...

The last thing I did was to create an autoexec.cfg in my baseq3 folder and add the following commands:

seta r_picmip "2" // default:1 // Mipmap level of game textures, the higher the number, the blurrier things get, the faster the FPS
s_chunksize 2048
seta com_hunkMegs "180" // default:56 // 56 is if you only have 64 MB, more needs extra memory!
seta com_soundMegs "18" // default:8 // see above with sound
seta com_blood "0" // default:1 // Show blood, when 0 no blood, better performance
seta cg_gibs "0" // default:1 // Renders gibs (heads, arms, legs...), when 0 no gibs, better performance

// because i run off a TiBook, i want Quake III to fill the screen!

seta cg_fov "110" // default:90 // Regular field of vision (not zoomed in)
set r_customaspect "1"
set r_customwidth "720" // default:? // or you can use 896, or 1152
set r_customheight "480" // default:? // or you can use 600, or 768
set r_fullscreen "1"
set r_mode "-1" // Default: 3 // Resolution, -1 means use settings above
Using these settings, I get much better performance in Quake III on my TiBook than I would otherwise, although since I'm running on a Rage 128, performance still sucks! And yes I know that I can put all the autoexec parameters onto the ./quake3 line of the shell script, but I like things to be modular. In reality, I have an autoexec.cfg that executes five OTHER .cfg files! :D

BTW, The shell script is also customizable so that you can go straight into your mods! I don't recall how that is done though.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020117231707956