... Player's Guide: Custom Weapon Order ...

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First a little history... Quake2 had a locked weapon order, but back in the days of the original Quake each player could choose their own order. So in Quake2 the BFG was the "best" gun, then the rail gun, then hyperblaster, then rocket launcher, etc. But in Quake you could choose your any order you wanted.  So what cool weapon switching features did Quake3 bring us? None; sadly. In Quake3 you have two options: auto switch, and manual switch. Autoswitch means that any time you pick up a weapon you will automatically use it. Even if you've got the BFG in hands and you pick up a Shot Gun you'll be forced to draw the Shot Gun. Talk about lame... and manual switch is even worse! In manual mode it never forces you to draw a gun. So you have to manually switch to the guns as you pick them up.  Neither of the methods in Quake3 is acceptable to the hard core gamer. So I did something about it : )  Each user now has a cvar "cg_weaponOrder" that controls their weapon preferences. If you're not big on using the Q3A console, then you're either going to have to work past that, or not bother with changing the order until the full release of Assim2 comes out (the weapon order stuff will be customizable via an easy to use menu). Bring down the console in Q3 with the ~ (tilde) key and type \cg_weaponOrder and hit enter. It should (assuming you've played the game at least once) print out "1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9". If it doesn't you can manually set it to the default weapon order by typing \seta cg_weaponOrder "1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9" and hit enter. So.... what does that mean? Each weapon is assigned a number corresponding to the key on the keyboard that draws that weapon: Gauntlet Machine Gun Shot Gun Grenade Launcher Rocket Launcher Lightning Gun Rail Gun Plasma Gun BFG 10K So cg_weaponOrder is really just a simple list of where you want the weapons to go. For instance the default is "1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9" which means gauntlet (1), then machine gun (2), then shot gun (3), etc. with the BFG being the last weapon in the order. The further a weapon is in the list, the higher it will be in your weapon order. So the command I use \seta cg_weaponOrder "1/2/3/4/6/8/5/7/9" means my weapon order will be gauntlet, machine gun, shot gun, grenade launcher, lightning gun, plasma gun, rocket launcher, rail gun, and finally the bfg. When you pick up a new weapon in the game, it does a simple check to see if the new weapon is higher up in your weapon order than the weapon you're currently holding. If it is, you will automatically switch to the new weapon since you have defined that weapon to be "better" than the one you're currently using. Cool huh? Like I mentioned earlier, the full release of Assim2 will contain a simple menu system for quickly setting your weapon order.   Did you find this section to be helpful? Confusing? Please send comments my way.