Hi lvlworld, first, thanks for your awersome work! we owe you many pleasant hours of LAN on this huge monument of quake 3!

But, we have got a big problem, we are using more than 40 additionnal maps (overwhelmingly downloaded on your site), they all works perfectly (of course^^)...
but after installing our latest find (the excellent "QuakeZero" map pack, the maps from Quake Live) we reaches approximatively 50~60 additionnal maps, and some maps previously installed have now a buggy icon (a black icon with the Quake symbol and the title of this ones are buggy too)
and are unloadable we deduced that quake 3 does not support more than (approx) 50 additionnal maps, in the console we can see a strange message "trying levelshots/"

So we find ourselves forced to remove our old maps to play on Quakezero maps and vice versa, we must remove quakezero maps for playing all our previous maps.
assistance from you, Q3 modders, in understanding this problem, would be welcome ^^
...Would there be a method to Q3 that supports more than 50 maps? or is it a lost cause? or the problem is elsewhere? thank you in advance for your attention to our request!

I have no idea what the "QuakeZero" map pack is. It is not something from ..::LvL. My guess is there is a broken shader in one (or more) of the pk3's. This is causing a chain reaction of minor to major errors.

There are limits to the engine, however I would have thought that 90 maps would be fine. Maybe someone else (leilei would be my first guess) knows the true limits here.

If you are not already using ioquake3, I would suggest trying that engine as there are heaps of fixes and improvments included - ioquake3.org/

Re, thanks for this quick response, ioquake3 works very well, I did not know this engine! its amasing we no longer need to go through the console commands to correct the screen resolution and brightness bug =p

...But unfortunately, the problem is not corrected, I recounted the number of maps, we can have only 80 maps maximum (20 pages, including basical Q3 maps) ie 54 additionnal maps not more, after the page 20 (80th map) the bug is still here from the 81th. Some weeks ago I had already tried to solve this problem by joining all our best maps in one .pk3 file, it had no effect too, impossible to have more than 80 maps (54 additional) hence the fact that we are obliged to disturb professionals...
anyway, at least we won a great engine for Q3 thanks to you sir ^^

I stay tuned if you or one of your colleagues have an idea about this thorny problem^^
(Note: the QuakeZero map pack is from moddb he works good, the bug appear only if we pass the 80th map in the list)

Edited 13.15 minutes after the original posting.

I never had any need to play all maps from Quake Live even in standard mode without additional arenas, nor play them in classic engine or ioquake3. I have my favourites and I test some, I sometimes do a clean up which means moving non-played maps to archive folder to play them later, but to save loading memory...

.....

Going by .h files, stock Q3's maximum maps is 1024. Team Arena has a smaller maximum - 128 X(

Also there's a maximum of 1024 bots, and a maximum of 1024 pakfiles. (Seeing a pattern?)

The shaders messing up is definitely a human error from one of those .PK3s you downloaded, and has nothing to do with reaching the limit of something

also the "quakezero" repack is illegal and sounds very incompetently put together

Edited 3.07 minutes after the original posting.

TL;DR; version:
Yes, there appears to be an issue with the Quake 3 menu system at 80+ maps. The solution, use the console to load a map.

Full version:
I loaded up a heap of map packs at random, then used the skirmish menu to browse them. There was a problem for sure around the 80 map mark. I could browse 20 "sheets" of 4 maps. The last sheet contained 1 to 3 maps on average (so 77 to 79 maps in total).

I did not look into possible script errors - bit hard with this many maps! What I did discover however was you can still load all the maps from the console - even if they are not on the skirmish menu - without a problem.

With ioquake3 you have TAB completion so this is not too hard to do (you can almost always guess the file name).

The issue appears to be related and limited to the menu system only.

Yeah I remember 10 years ago when I was downloading tons of Quake 3 maps and I remember I couldn't load some maps from skirmish menu, it was very annoying! I also remember when I installed hundreds of maps into baseq3 (the Quake 3 folder had about 2 GB I believe) and then suddenly I couldn't load anymore a map or just the last map I downloaded. It said something like "Bad Command Monkey". Anyone know what exactly happened here?

Five years later... Does anyone know a fix for this? It seems such a weird restriction and totally fixable.
Alternatively, does anyone know a mechanism to make the map list rotate every time you load quake 3? Say, to select 54 maps (the extra ones allowed, it seems) at random from your baseq3 folder?

Let me answer myself. The latest version of ioquake3 (only accessible from compilation) seems to allow for more maps. See discourse.ioquake....ish-menu/1055/8, which discusses the change introduced some years ago. I guess I could manually increase it further to allow for even more maps.

@raspatan clover.moe/flexible-hud-for-ioq3/ - That is the patch that includes the increase to the .arenamemory. So long as you are running ioquake3, just drop the pk3 in your baseq3.

There are also a number of nice tweaks and other changes. Personally, I use Flexible HUD for the other changes (like 8 maps instead of 4 on the menu and more). I only have a small number of PK3 files in the baseq3 at any one time.

@Tig Hey, that is super useful! Thanks for sharing. My only concern is that online servers might kick you for having "non pure" files (for fear of aimbot, wallhack, etc). I will check it.

You can make a mod of this PK3, then load it when playing bots and keep your baseq3 directory clean for online.

Tig, apologies if this is a stupid question, but can you link me to how I can do that?
...or is it as simple as creating a folder and shoving PK3s into it?

@zedmelon: You got it.

Make a folder at the same level as baseq3 and add the extra PK3s that you want in that "mod".

@Tig: Awesome, tyvm--that's handy.
Was hoping this could be a means to sidestep the map limit--since it also carries the drawback of rendering maps inaccessible during "modded" play--however alas it is not. I'm too lazy to discern how many of my files contain more than one map, but with 494 pk3s my ioq3 still runs, while adding a dozen or so new downloads does not.
Time to cull the herd I suppose...bummer.
PS: The battlezone LoofLirpa map is a treat! Excellent work my friend!