While doing research for The Manhattan Project I came across several features in the Quake 3 engine that I did not know about previously. Uninteresting as it might seem, but just what I was looking for, a mode where you control your character (or vehicle) in third-person view, control the actions with mouse side-ways, upwards and downwards to increase/decrease viewing field and a navigational arrow guiding you through the course. This is just what I was after considering the possibility to add spaceship fight sequences on certain maps.

The idea behind that is that you don’t control your character as a standard FPS-type of game, but instead while having entered your spaceship, you can choose if you want first-person, or third-person viewmode. This while controlling your spacecraft, weaponry and adjusting to the physics change and no-jumping mode (would be rather silly to jump while steering a spaceship).

Now the mod I found it in was called Quake Rally. And luckily enough they have release their source code, so here it is. Now while Quake Rally itself might not be my personal favorite modification to Quake 3, it certainly has some rather impressive, and useful, features within it’s source code.

To add some more icing on the cake, they also have a Maya -> md3 exporter script and top of it all, here is the Maya -> md3 exporter source, might be useful in a near future.

One last thing to add, Quake Rally does indeed work under Open Arena, but sounds are missing. Still, it’s worth a try and give it a good spin; it is harder than it looks.