Author: Todd Hollenshead Quake III: Team Arena FAQ Last Update: 12.22.00 Q: "Team Arena drops the last two digits of my CD Key when I enter it in the menu. WTF man ?" A: The last two digits of your CD Key serve as a checksum for the preceeding 16 bytes. They are not essential for online play, and their purpose is to verify that you have entered your CD Key correctly. If you have entered your CD Key correctly either in the TA setup program, or manually in the TA menu, you should not have any problems with having an invalid CD Key. The last two bytes are not written out to the q3key file, and as such, do not appear in the menu. Don't panic =) --- Q: "I'm trying to play TA online and I'm getting an 'Invalid CD Key' message ? WTF is up wit dat ?" A: Team Arena needs both a valid CD Key for Q3A and Team Arena entered. If you are getting an 'Invalid CD Key' message whilst trying to connect to a Team Arena server, more than likely what has happened is that you have reinstalled Quake 3, installed Team Arena, but forgot to enter your Q3A CD Key. Almost all CD-Key problems can be solved by re-entering your Quake III Arena CD-Key with the Q3A menus, and then re-entering your Team Arena CD-Key through the Team Arena menus. --- Q: "Dude! I have both my CD Key's entered, yet I'm still getting 'Invalid CD Key'. WTF IS GOING ON?!?!!!!??? A: More than likely, you have mistyped your Q3A CD Key. We don't do any verification of the Q3A CD Key like we do with Team Arena, so please ensure that you have entered you Q3A key correctly. Be sure to check for obvious mistypes such as "zero" and "oh". --- Q: "The Q3TA Setup program says it can't find my quake 3 installation, but it's in c:\quake3. WTF is it's problem ?!" A: More than likely what has happened here is you've either installed a new OS which has blown away your registry settings, or you have moved the Q3A directory from it's original installation directory. The Q3TA setup program checks the registry for the location of where Q3A is installed based on the original Activision installer for Q3A. If your setup program is acting all wonky and won't find your Q3A installation, the only recommendation I can make is to reinstall Q3A off the CD to a new directory (Don't forget to enter your Q3A CD Key!) and then install Q3TA. --- Q: "Dude, my shaders are all fux0red and I'm getting nice white blocks everywhere. WTF ?" A: Q3TA and Quake 1.27g are much more stringent on checking pakfiles now. More than likely what has happened is you have an older mod somewhere that is replacing some shaders in memory and you're getting all sorts of ugly looking graphics. My recommendation is to just bite the bullet and install Q3A to a *NEW* directory. I can almost guarantee that if you reinstall Q3A, Install either TA or 1.27g, then install the latest 1.27g compliant mods, most if not all of your graphics wierdness will go away. --- Q: "When I run Team Arena, I sometimes see missing graphics and textures disappearing. What is going on?" A: Shader parsing in 1.27 is much more strict than in past versions of Quake3, we no longer accept invalid keywords and we require matching braces etc. This means if you have a pak file from a model or a mod or a map that contains a missing ending brace on a shader def, the remaining shaders in that pak will NOT be visible to the game. This change was made as it significantly improved level load times. If you are missing shaders or textures you need to remove NON-id content pak files ) until the problem goes away or do a clean install from CD an then add-in your community content until the problem shows up. That is the quickest way to isolate where the problem is coming from. --- Q: "I have a system with more than 64MB of RAM, is there anything I can do to make the game take advantage of that?" A: com_soundmegs and com_zonemegs can be adjusted to provide better performance on systems with more than 64mb of memory. The default configuration is set to allow the game to run on a 64 MB system. On a 128 MB system we would run with the following: com_hunkMegs - 64 com_soundMegs - 16 com_zoneMegs - 24 A dedicated server will not benefit from com_soundMegs and it can be set to something like 8.