Here are a couple of recent tweets John Carmack made about Quake 3 at the end of April this year:

twitter.com/ID_AA_...597032778264578

twitter.com/ID_AA_...597036385452033

It's great to see one of the game's main developers still cares about it! 🔥✨ What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think today's options to play Q3 are suitable for playing on older and newer OSs? Is VR Quake 3 a good idea?

You know John, if you didn't step down as CEO then you could have been the one to decide that.

@KommissarReb (SW12): When was John a CEO?

VR is cool and sooner or later I'm sure I'll get a headset of my own. Kinda waiting on Valve to release a second generation headset before I take the plunge.

Anyway, right now I'd mainly just love to see id Software create a patch for Quake III that adds support for modern resolutions to Vanilla Quake III. To accompany that some sort of official version of the neural upscale textures and proper HUD support for new resolutions as well.
For example the only way I can play in 21:9 while keeping aspect ratio correct (image is not stretched and I don't have horrible fish eye camera) is through the Spearmint source port. Which I really enjoy using, but it would be great if I didn't need to go that route. I'm also using UI mods that polishes things up a bit so the game still looks crispy at 3440x1440.

So yeah just a basic modernization patch.

I'd take some of the extra medals available in Quake Live as well. Might be a fun bonus for gameplay.

@themuffinator: Sorry, co-founder not CEO. But IIRC John Carmack still had clout when he was still in iD Software seeing as he was the one responsible for Doom 3 being a horror game instead of focused on action the way Doom 1, 2, 2016, and Eternal were.

@Whatscheiser : Standard Quake 3 engine could support that screen size (not 100% sure), but the HUD is a mess (same commands as below if you wanted to test).

With ioquake3 and ZTM's Flexible HUD mod you can set the screen size with:

\r_mode -1
\r_customwidth 3440
\r_customheight 1440
\r_fullscreen 1
\vid_restart

@Tig : Thanks, though I believe I've tinkered with it in the past. I just never could get it to look right. It seemed like there was always some give and take to it. Weapon models tend to get weird with their screen placement and dialing the FOV in to suit the resolution was just never quite right either. The pixels at the extreme sides of the image always stretched to the point that it would just look "off" and it never seemed resolvable. I'd also run into problems with camera placement for the winners podium when playing the campaign. A lot of it ends up cropped out of the screen. Spearmint just seems to deal with all of that right out of the box.

I probably should give ioquake3 a shot again though. It has been a decent stretch of time since I installed it.

What's a little ironic is that Carmack wanted proper widescreen support in Q3, but went against it because it'd mess up consistency with all those "config experts" and such regarding the fov command.

Also supporting 1280x1024 5:4 aspect was a problem for widescreen, and there were more 5:4 screens available than 16:9 by that point... The only game that had decent wide support in 1999 was Battlezone II.

The "just works" of Quake3 as is from John's reminisce is only from the video drivers keeping things fixed (either the vendors, or Microsoft WARP'ing GL 1.1 to DX11/12), and probably didn't inspect a skybox. heh

(disclaimer: i do not subscribe to carmack worship- especially considering that recent article)
Edited 48.45 minutes after the original posting.

Like Tig said I've had great luck at high resolutions with ioq3 + ZTN hud. Also works great to get rid of nasty aliasing.
Say what you want about Carmack but I've always respected his work ethic. Obviously it got him through a lot at id.

I'm not going to comment on the controversy that's trying to stick to him, as I don't want a return to the days where entire threads and comment sections got derailed with Barrens chat/COD lobby arguments given I don't feel the same way about him other people will. I don't "worship" him evidenced by me disagreeing with some of his decisions related to iD, but still appreciate that he still keeps an eye on Quake 3.

I just wish he did the same for Doom 3 seeing as Doom 3 introduced a lot of cool things like movable objects, an interactive GUI instead of just pressing 1 button, and was the first official 3d take on the Doom series. I guess he gave up on it since his "spooky horror shooter" take on Doom didn't catch on.