Customizing your Quake Live config & how to watch demos
A well customized Quake Live config that fits your preferences well enough is the beginning of good game play. Quake is one of the few games that allows extreme config customization. This is one aspect that makes Quake, in my opinion, better than all other shooters and creates extra opportunities.
[bConfig Location[/b]]
Let’s begin with finding the config file as Id software has done a great effort hiding it for us. You can find your config file in the following locations:
Windows Vista: %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3
Windows XP: %appdata%\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3
GNU/Linux: ~/.quakelive/quakelive/home/baseq3
Please note you have to allow to see hidden files before you can actually go to this map in Windows, this is not needed for GNU/Linux.
You will find several configs in the baseq3 folder, such as autoexec.cfg and qzconfig. I personally prefer to create and customize a personal config because other methods are not optimal, yet.
[bCustomization commands[/b]]
Here you can find a few of the important commands to distinguish your config from another one.
- seta sensitivity “value” change your mouse sensitivity
- seta cg_crosshairPulse “0" 0 – crosshair will not enlarge when you pickup an item, 1 – crosshair will enlarge when you pickup an item
- seta cg_crosshairColor “2" values 0 – 7 to set the color of your crosshair (needs cg_crosshairhealth 0 to work)
- seta cg_bob “0” removes bobbing while moving (bobbing = the slightly moving up/down from your screen as you walk)
- seta cg_autoswitch “0" 1 – switch gun when picking it up, 2 – doesn’t switch gun when picking it up.
- seta cg_kickscale “0” your screen won’t shake anymore when you get hit
- seta cg_newWeaponBar “1" 1 – weaponbar constantly on the left, 0 – weaponbar above health and armor upon switching
- seta cg_truelightning “0.75" values 0 – 1 to determine the stiffness of your lightning beam. 0 considers lag, 1 is totally stiff. A good mix used by many is 0.75.
- seta r_picmip “5” values 0 – 10 to determine the level of detail of the walls. 0 being the highest detail.
- seta r_vertexlight “1" vertex lighting, this should increase your FPS.
- seta cg_fov “100” change your field of view
- seta cg_noprojectiletrail “1” removes smoke trail from rockets and grenades and increases visibility.
- seta cg_leveltimerdirection “0" 1 – timer counts down, 0 – timer counts up.
- seta cg_crosshairBrightness “1" Lower values between 0-1 will make the crosshair appear darker, becoming black at “0"
- seta r_drawSun “0" remove the sun.
- seta cg_drawGun “2" value “0" will hide your weapon – “1" value will show your weapon, but swaying as you walk – “2" value will show your weapon and it will not sway as you walk
- seta r_dynamiclight “0” remove rocket flash, etc.
- seta cg_switchOnEmpty “1" 1 – switch gun when empty, 2 – doesn’t switch gun when empty.
- seta s_ambient “0” turn off the ambient sound.
- seta model “Mynx” your model.
- seta cg_forceTeamModel “Mynx” Force all team models to be this same model.
- seta cg_forceEnemyModel “tankjr/bright” Force all enemy models to be the same model.
[bCustom HUD[/b]]
A lot of custom huds and custom crosshairs can be found on the internet. Once you found one that suits you, place the hud into your base folder: /baseq3/ui/.
Following line should then be added in your config: seta cg_hudFiles “ui/HUDNAME.cfg”
There’s a more detailed quakelive hud Installation guide on this site written by EmSixTeen as well.
There are still more possibilities to tweak your config and more ways to customize will become available soon. This post should get you started to get a decent config, though.
[bExample Configs[/b]]
If you want some examples of Quake Live configs check out the configs on our quake live configs section, which features some configs of the best players in the world such as
Fox or 
Stermy.[bQuake Live Config Generator[/b]]
To use all these commands in your Quake Live config you could give holysh1t’s online config generator or Yamanaka’s Quake Live config generator a try
[bView demos[/b]]
Playing back a quake live demo still requires more work than it should. Yet with time new features will be developed by id software that will make demo playback a lot easier.
To watch a Quake Live demo follow these 5 simple steps:
1) First go to your Quake Live demo folder[/u]
Windows Vista: %appdata%\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3\demos\
Windows XP: %userprofile%\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3\demos\
GNU/Linux: ~/.quakelive/quakelive/home/baseq3/demos
If you don’t have a “demos” folder yet, make one yourself. Read the quake live folder location guide if you have trouble finding the quake live folder.
2) Place the demo file into your demos folder[/u]
If you want to watch a demo you recorded yourself, it should already be in the demos folder.
If it’s a demo you downloaded, just place the file here. A Quake Live demo file has a “dm_73" extension.
3) Start a practice game
You still need to be inside a game to launch a demo.
4) Open the console
If you haven’t figured this out yet, here’s a step by step guide that explains how to open your quake live console.
5) Use the /demo command
To start your demo, type the following command in your console:
/demo filename
So if your demo was named fragownage.dm_73, you would have to type /demo fragownage in the console. There ya go!
PS. Don’t press too many keys during the demo because it might just suddenly stop playing. To fastforward use the command /timescale in the console. The default value is 1. A higher value speeds the demo up. There’s no rewinding though! Have fun!
original content from http://www.holysh1t.net
well, here they are:
http://www.quakescene.com/demos
http://demosquad.planetquake.pl/quakelive
http://www.esreality.com/?a=demos