How to: Quake 1 dedicated server

Shambler

Written 2010-December-01.
Updated 2011-May-17.

Recently I had a strong yearning for a nostalgic hit of good ol' original Quake multiplayer. I used to love the simple, raw deathmatch and co-op. Turns out that it's quite difficult these days to find information and downloads for running dedicated servers.

Here's what I did to run "original", mod-free Q1 and a dedicated server.

I say "original" but I ended up using a slightly modified version of Quake called ProQuake which provides useful improvements such as the dedicated server mode.

My environment

Required packages

Preparing the Linux server

You should now have the following. If the filenames are not lowercase, you will need to lowercase them.

quake
    sqpro                   rwxr-xr-x
    id1
        config.cfg          r--r--r--
        pak0.pak            rw-r--r--
        pak1.pak            rw-r--r--

Here's my server config.cfg (different from the client config.cfg) which contains a remote administration password and default settings like co-operative mode turned on. Note that I've made it read-only (chmod -w); otherwise it gets overwritten upon server exit.

Launching the server

Run the server from the command line:

cd ~/quake
./sqpro -dedicated 4 &

I'm running the server in the background and controlling it with Ubuntu's jobs.

Other command-line parameters you may need to use or tinker with:

Note: If you run sqpro and get "No such file or directory" this is because sqpro is a 32-bit application and your Ubuntu is probably 64-bit. You may need to install 32-bit libraries: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Launching the client

cd path/to/quake
wqpro.exe -window -width 1600 -height 1024

Once the game loads, hit tilde/backtick to bring up the console, then enter:

+mlook — enables mouse look; mine is always off by default...
rcon_password hello — password so client can use remote administration
connect xx.xx.xx.xx — IP of the server

Hopefully you'll now be connected to the server. You can test the remote administration by typing: rcon status

Server commands

The following useful commands can be typed into the running server application:

Any of these can also be done from the client console if remote administration is active, simply by prefixing with rcon. For example:

Tips

Quake map list

Information sources