How-To: Action Quake for Mac

by
Ruffin Bailey
Published: 7/26/99

Modifications are what make Quake great. There’s no question about it! For me, Team Fortress set Quake 1 apart from the crowd, and now Action Quake does the same for Quake 2. Luckily for us, while Logicware was portin’, mod makers were codin’. There are tons of mods, and by following these directions for Action Quake, you should be ready to install most any client-side Quake 2 mod.

Nobody complains much that marines in Quake 1 could single-handedly carry enough weaponry to outfit a regiment. Nor do people whine about the ability of the marines to point a rocket-launcher at his feet, fire a rocket, jump, and not die but instead access new areas of maps, completely changing the delicate balance of a game of capture the flag. Carrying one hundred shotgun shells isn’t a problem and neither is feeding them into a double barrel at the blink of an eye. It’s just ludicrous. Now I’m not asking for an end to this madness, but I have a great alternative: Action Quake.

Picture this: You throw your Hechler and Koch MP5 to the ground, your last clip emptied just seconds after you started pulling the trigger. Cursing your now worthless machine gun, you check the clip in your pistol while hiding crouched behind a trash dumpster. Just five rounds left, and the red laser site of the sniper on the roof a block and a half away has you pinned. After you finish dressing a wound in your arm, you tighten the strap on your Kevlar vest and get ready to make a break for a nearby building, gunfire resonating through the air. No rocket jumping up three stories, no shrugging the shot off to the head without stopping. It ain’t going to be pretty. That’s Action Quake, and PC users have been playing for ages. Finally it’s our turn.

We’re going to need a few items before we start playing:

• A 604e or better processor (I’m using a 240 MHz G3 and 96 megs of RAM and it’s still slow in big firefights)
• MacQuake 2 from Logicware
• Stuffit Expander v5.1+
• A Quake 2 server browser (I'll discuss these in the next article)
• An internet connection or a LAN with a Win or Linux PC
• Hours of spare time (both for set-up and play)

Installation

First head on over to the Action Quake site and download Action Quake and the updates. Make sure you grab the .zip files and not the .exe files. The .exe files are "executables", and are made to be run on a Windows PC. If you do download the .exe’s, you actually can unzip them with Stuffit Expander, but I’d suggest using the .zips.

Use Stuffit Expander to extract the Action Quake files from the. zip’s that you downloaded. Place the "Action" Folder in your Quake 2 folder with the baseq2 folder that was installed with Quake 2 (as pictured below). If you’d like, you can throw away the "action.dll" file. This is an essential file for Action Quake servers, but isn’t a file your Mac understands.

Make double sure you’ve downloaded both updates to Action Quake: 1cCLfix.zip and vwepfix.zip

Technically you’re already ready to play, but before you start you’re going to need some maps. For these, we’re going to head over to the Action Quake Map Depot. Grab the .zip files, and use Expander to extract them. Place the maps (each map should follow the format "mapname.bsp") into a folder inside Action called "Maps". If you don’t have one, just make a new folder with the name "Maps".

One of the biggest hassles of playing a mod is the amount of time it takes to download maps, especially when it’s impossible to tell which maps are worth a rip before you play them. Luckily the AQ Map Depot reviews some popular maps, and I’ve got a few I can recommend. Here are the four I enjoy the most (clicking on the names will bring up a new browser window. Clicking on another map will send the new map info to the same browser window):

1. Coventry Inn. My personal fav. Two story inn with plenty of weapons. Easily has enough size (inside and out, including surrounding area and rooftop) for 8+ players. Plenty of places to hide, but also bright enough to make it tough to bandage. The restaurant’s kitchen area even includes a Hobart dishwasher with two pistol clips and working doors. Great level.
2. Museum. Another decently large level. The interior is not quite as interesting as the Coventry Inn, but there are a number of giant rooms for open firefights, and enough tight hallways for great chases. The roof is well done with access to below through skylights, and the slippery-when-wet floor (complete with warning sign from the janitors) is a nice touch.
3. Sludge. More like a Quake 2 map than Action Quake, this level allows for incredibly quick "changes in elevation". It doesn’t take 10 seconds to zoom up from the floor level to the 3^rd, and even less time to go from the top level to the bottom (two quick jumps to the right place). Great for 3 man free-for-all’s.
4. Highrise. This map did a great job of having interesting (not just functional) interiors as well as plenty of skyscraper roof-tops from which to snipe. There are many tight corridors for the handcannon, and firefights on the ground floor aren't uncommon. Great balance of eagle nest sites for sniping and close quarters for eye to eye firefights.

You’ll probably also want to grab the urban levels, which are pretty popular but for handcannon specialists like me, not all that enjoyable. Urban levels tend to favor snipers perched atop skyscrapers to the detriment of eye to eye combat.

Two quick maps notes: You can download the "map paks"; if you’d like, which include several groups of popular maps rolled into one file. For a while, servers would take these paks and run through the maps in one particular pak in succession over and over so that the one download would provide for a good deal of play time. Unfortunately the map paks that are up at AQMD are getting a bit old, and most servers are playing other maps.

Do note that Stuffit Expander can unzip .exe files. You will have to place the maps and/or paks in their proper places (the Action folder for .paks and the Maps folder for separate maps), but other than that think of .exe’s as .zip files.

Secondly, it is possible to download the maps from some of the Action Quake servers after you connect. This is a tedious and slow process, and often once you’ve finished your download, the map that’s being played has changed. It’s best to spend some time on the AQMD up front. You’ll spend more time playing this way.

One more thing we need to do in our set-up before we start trying to play, and that’s set up our config file. You’ll need to open up your autoexec.cfg file. You’ll find one (or should) in each Quake 2 game folder (examples of game folders are baseq2, ctf, and action). This file is read by the Quake 2 application each time you start a game that maps to the folder in which the autoexec.cfg file lives. The config will set up which keys on your keyboard do what… what causes your player to move forward, shoot, jump, crouch, etc.

Lucky for us non-machine language reading types, the config files are all text! Open one up in SimpleText or preferably BBEdit Lite and start hacking.

I could spend quite a while telling you how to make the perfect config, but for now what’s most important is that you map some Action Quake specific commands to keys in your config file. Here they are, in no particular order (NOTE: Make sure you edit the autoexec.cfg file in your Action folder. If you modify the one in another folder, the changes won’t necessarily happen when you play AQ. By the same token, bandaging in vanilla Quake 2 deathmatch isn’t a very efficient use of time ;):

• Reload – no more seamless insertion of shells. When you run out of bullets in your clip, you have to take the time to slam in a new one. And if you reload before a clip is empty, you’re basically throwing away whatever bullets you have left in that clip. None of this recycling partial clips through telekinetic powers a la the N64’s Goldeneye.
• Weapon – many weapons have a second function that’s invoked by the weapon commands. Knives change from a strong grip for slashing to a loose grip for throwing. Machine guns go from fully automatic to three round bursts. Shotguns, well, stay shotguns.
• Opendoor – Opens doors, no less. The doors don’t open when you get close like you’re an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. You have to take the time to open them. And some of them open inwards, some outwards. Don’t get jammed up behind a door you just opened and get fragged like a fish in a barrel. You’ll look stupid and feel stupid, because that was stupid. ;^)
• Bandage – Now this is an important one! If you’re hit you’ll bleed and continue to lose life until you put your gun away and bandage your wounds. And you can’t abort a bandaging attempt. If someone walks around the wall with a sawed-off double barrel and you’re wrapping a wound, well, now you were just wasting time!
• Dropweapon – You can only carry one weapon other than your pistol at a time. If you’ve been carrying a sniper rifle and see an assault shotgun on the floor, you’re going to have to choose. One ploy I’ve heard of is to throw an empty gun down on the ground and wait for people to pick it up. Once they do, they’re automatically out of ammo (or they at least have to reload) and you can pick them off.
• Dropitem – By the same token, you can only carry one special item at a time. Kevlar vest, bandoleer, stealth slippers, laser site… you’ll have to choose one. If you later decide you’d prefer to use the item sitting on the ground in front of you, you’ll have to drop the one you’re presently holding.

Just to make things easier, and because I'm in such a giving mood, here's an example binding of these functions from my Action config. Notice the grenade bind. You can switch to grenades as a seperate weapon, but with this bind you can be nasty to several people much quicker...

bind x "drop item"
bind g "bandage" 
bind mouse2 "reload"
bind o "opendoor"
bind mwheeldown "use M26 Fragmentation Grenade"
bind z "drop weapon"
bind mwheelup weapnext
bind y weapon

Welp, that’s going to have to be it for today. You're ready to play deathmatch Action Quake, but not quite ready for Team Action Quake. For that you're going to need to download some skins so that you can tell who's on your team and who isn't (right now everyone will look like a "Reservoir Dawg"). If you're ready for team play and can't stand to wait on me, head on over to the Actor's Guild and pick up skins and models for playing Action Quake.

In the next installment, I'll go over some of the popular skins, and what different models mean to you in Quake 2 (remember that we only needed skins in Quake 1; now the frame for the skin can change as well!). I’ll also explain server browsing on the web for those of you who haven’t yet gotten used to that, as well as explain some of the "finer" points of Action Quake. Until then, feel free to bug me with any questions, and happy fraggin’!

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