Table of Contents
The traditional game mode. This is the classic “story” mode in which you fight your way through four episodes of monsters in various evil hideouts. You're encouraged to read id Software's MANUAL.txt
file if you want to know the full “plot” of the game.
The basic idea is that scientists have created devices called “slipgates” that allow people to travel to other dimensions. Sadly those that go through seem to come back in some form of rage (if at all). It is down to you to dive in, get to whatever is in charge of all this destruction and kill it.
There are four episodes in Quake. Each one starts on Earth, in one of the four slipgate facilities. When you've fought your way through these facilities, you leave to the dimension that the slipgate points to. At the end of each episode, you collect a “Rune”. When you have all four of these, the door to Quake's domain is opened!
At the start of the game, there is a special map that allows you to chose your skill level and episode. To open it, bring down the console and type:
sp
For power users, the above is equivalent to entering the following three commands...
deathmatch 0 maxclients 1 map start
This disables deathmatch mode and loads the map. You'll be facing three corridors. The one to the left sets the skill to EASY. The one in the middle to NORMAL and if you are able to survive the right-hand corridor, it will set the skill to HARD as you walk down the corridors, you'll be told this. When you get to the end, step through the teleporter to be taken to the next chamber.
Choosing which episode to play is done by entering one of the four doors in the room you'll now find yourself in. As with the skill corridors you just walked through, the game tells you which episode you're attempting to enter. Episode 1 is forward a little and on the left as you arrive here and is a good place to start. (It's up some stairs; walk forward a little, turn to your left and go forward to find it.)
AudioQuake provides fairly decent accessibility on some of the game's maps. We are hoping to create a number of custom maps at some point so that you can experience a fully accessible singleplayer episode. Users who've played accessible games before, however, may find that they get on OK with some of the real Quake maps.
Please tell us which maps you like and we may be able to combine them into an accessible Quake episode! The maps are named “eXmY” where X is a number from 1 to 4 and Y is a number between 1 and 8. Episodes 2 and 3 only have 7 maps so that second (map) number is lower for them. The last map is always the secret one for that episode (i.e. it is found via a secret area on one of the other maps).
To load a map in single-player mode, type
deathmatch 0 maxclients 1 map e1m1
(for example) into the console. The command shown would take you to the first map of episode 1. Of course, this is not how you are meant to play the game, but we thought it best to let you in on this information so that you could at least find maps you like to play.
The skill setting has been touched on above. By default, if you start AudioQuake from the launcher and tell it to jump straight in to a certain episode, the medium (“normal”) difficulty level will be used. If you are new to the game, it can be quite hard. To switch to the “easy” skill level, bring down the console and type:
skill 0
This will set the game to a slightly less unfair skill level. Some monsters will disappear and other monsters' attacks will not harm you as much.
You must re-open the map you want to play on after changing the skill level. The new skill level will then take effect until you change it again (set it to 1 for medium, 2 for hard and 3 for nightmare difficulty).
As you progress through the game and collect bigger, badder weapons and the almighty runes, you'll want to preserve your progress. To save and load games, use the console. Here are the commands you'll need to know about:
This command requires that you type in a name for your game. You can save as many games as you like. They'll end up in the agrip/
directory under your AudioQuake installation.
This command is used to restore games saved with the save. Remember to supply the game's name when you use it.
The commands only work if you've previously used “maxclients 1” as described above. That forces the Quake into single-player mode (allows only you to enter the game) and makes saving of games possible.