Quake 3 Arena Server Browser
June 15, 2025The Application
💥 Feed your next fragging addiction at The Necropolis
The Motivation
The built-in server browser in Q3 is rather primitive… in fact, it hardly works anymore. It’s also not threaded, so you can’t even browse the servers unless you tell it to stop searching first. Brutal!
Finally, the desktop applications that were once used to find servers (think GameSpy) are now completely defunct as they point to the wrong master server, or are closed-source executables, which is a serious taboo in 2025.
The Solution
A basic web application in SvelteKit that is hosted on Vercel and calls an API backend written in C++, which uses a combination of threading and UDP to find existing servers and pull the basic specifications like user count, map, etc. Nothing complicated, a single clean page where you can instantly copy the connection string and paste it into the Q3 console.
Future Idea
Let’s be real, there are very few human Quake 3 players online these days. It’s mostly bots, although they are unusually fun to play with. Nonetheless, it would be compelling to have a heuristic identify common bot names or refer to ping times and organize the servers based on the percentage of bots.