🎮 game · total conversion · revival in progress

MFQ3.
Fly it, drive it,
or fight on foot.

Military Forces (MFQ3) is an early-2000s total conversion for Quake III Arena: a vehicular-combat game where you pilot planes and helicopters, drive tanks, or take the fight on foot. I'm bringing it back from the original 2006 source — rebuilt on a modern machine, headed for ioquake3 and ultimately the Steam Deck.

↓ Download — coming soon

What it is

MFQ3 started life in the late 1990s / early 2000s as a community total conversion built on id Tech 3 (the Quake III engine). Where most Q3 mods were about running and gunning, MFQ3 was about machines — physics-driven aircraft, ground vehicles and weapons, on big outdoor maps. The version being revived is 1.09 Alpha (internally MF 1.0.9).

It's fully standalone — you don't need a copy of retail Quake III. The mod ships its own base data, so the rebuilt game boots straight to its own menu.

  • ✈ Planes
  • 🚁 Helicopters
  • 🛡 Tanks & ground vehicles
  • 🪖 Infantry (on foot)
  • id Tech 3 engine
  • standalone — no Quake III needed
   runway
     │  spawn on foot
     ▼
   ┌──────┐      get in
   │ pilot │ ───────────▶ ✈ plane
   └──────┘
     │  fly out
     ▼
   [ target ] ──💥──▶ destroyed
     │  return to base
     ▼
   ✓ "Mission 1 complete"
▼ Revival status

It builds. It boots. It renders.

The 2006 source compiles and runs on a 2026 machine — original engine and all.

✅ done

Builds from source

The original x86 codebase compiles and links into a single MilitaryForces.exe with modern MSVC (VS 2022). New CMake build; original Visual Studio projects long gone.

✅ done

Boots to the menu

The rebuilt executable launches straight to the MFQ3 main menu using the mod's own standalone data — no retail Quake III required.

✅ done

Renders live maps

The 2003-era OpenGL renderer runs happily on modern hardware (OpenGL 4.6). Loads a real map, drops you into team/vehicle select, and flies.

▼ Latest — content & tooling

New aircraft — and a pipeline to add more.

The newest work: a model-conversion pipeline that turns free 3D models into in-game MFQ3 aircraft — complete with spinning props, retracting landing gear, and even VTOL.

SR-71 Blackbird, F-35B Lightning II, C-5 Galaxy and MQ-9 Reaper rendered from their in-game models
Four new aircraft added to the revived build — converted from free CC-BY models into Quake III's MD3 format.
✅ new

A model pipeline

A toolchain that bakes a downloaded glTF/OBJ model into Quake III's MD3 format — auto-solving orientation (yaw/pitch/roll), splitting textures per-material, and rendering the result offline to check it before it ever loads in-game.

✅ new

Aircraft that fly

An SR-71 Blackbird, F-35B Lightning II, Avro Vulcan, C-5 Galaxy, MQ-9 Reaper and F-22 Raptor — each correctly scaled, textured and oriented, and added to the vehicle-select roster.

✅ new

Animated parts

Spinning propellers, landing gear that retracts on takeoff, and full VTOL on the F-35B — lift-fan, swivelling nozzle and bay doors all animate as it shifts from hover to wing-borne flight.

F-35B VTOL transition: lift-fan doors open, nozzle swivels down, gear extends
F-35B VTOL. Engaging hover: the lift-fan doors open, the rear nozzle swivels down, the gear extends and the lift-fan spins up — then it folds back for wing-borne flight.
SR-71 landing gear retracting, rendered from the in-game model
SR-71 gear retract. Its gear was buried inside the body mesh, so it was extracted and rebuilt as a 48-frame animation — verified with an offline model renderer.
Avro Vulcan with landing gear down, rendered from the in-game model
The Avro Vulcan — RAF camo, animated landing gear.

❄️ A new Cold War game mode

A fourth game set alongside Modern / WW2 / WW1: Cold War — NATO vs Warsaw Pact. Pick it in the server menu and the roster filters to the Cold-War aircraft: the British Avro Vulcan V-bomber, the SR-71, the Mi-24 Hind — with more to come.

Also taking shape: a from-scratch aircraft-carrier map over open sea, a playable submarine, and the single-player mission spawner with the first training missions.

▼ The little people are ALIVE

Boots on the ground — the 2003 dream, running.

The original team left infantry ("the little people") 80% finished and never shipped it. Twenty-two years later, it works — and then some.

The infantry soldier standing beside a parked F-16 on the runway
"Press F to board." A little person and his F-16 on the Norway strip — Mission 1, step 1.
✅ new

A soldier who walks

Spawn on foot with a fully animated soldier — walk, run, crouch, jump — after fixing five stacked bugs that had kept the infantry broken since 2003 (including corrupt model files that crashed the GPU driver).

✅ new

Walk up. Get in. Fly.

The mechanic the original team never finished: walk up to a parked jet, press F to board, and the runway mission turns into a flight. Missions can now park aircraft as props with Behaviour parked.

✅ new

EJECT! EJECT!

Press F mid-flight to punch out: you drift down under a parachute canopy while your abandoned jet flies on, trailing smoke, until it ploughs into the landscape. Then walk to the next plane.

Eyes in the sky — drones & the Drone Cam

Alongside the MQ-9 Reaper there's now a purpose-built quadcopter recon drone — a gimballed camera, a small gun and four spinning rotors.

The new trick is the Drone Cam: a picture-in-picture feed in the corner of the HUD that renders a second viewport — a straight-down (nadir) view from a friendly drone — while you keep flying. Toggle it with dronecam, pick a feed from listdrones, zoom the lens with dronezoom. It's a genuine second 3D render, not a faked overlay.

  • 📡 picture-in-picture feed
  • 🚁 quadcopter recon drone
  • ✈ MQ-9 Reaper
  • 🔭 zoomable nadir camera
 ┌─────────── cockpit ──────────┐
 │                  ┌─────────┐  │
 │                  │ DRONE 1 │  │
 │        ✈         │ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ │  │
 │                  │ ▒▒ ▓ ▒▒ │  │ ◀ nadir feed
 │                  │ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ │  │
 │                  └─────────┘  │
 │  SPD 620  ALT 821   HLTH 100% │
 └───────────────────────────────┘
   dronecam · listdrones · dronezoom
▼ Where it's going

The roadmap.

Modernise the engine first, then switch the lights back on for features the original team built but never shipped.

  1. Port onto ioquake3

    Move MFQ3's gameplay onto the modern, maintained ioquake3 engine — better OS support, networking, and a clean base to build on. In progress.

  2. Infantry on foot ("little people")

    The original team left a near-complete infantry mode disabled in the code. Reactivating it — plus a single new enter/exit-vehicle mechanic — is the keystone.

  3. Bots & NPCs

    AI opponents that can crew vehicles and weapons, reusing the existing target-tracking and missile-seeker code. Boats are easy; flying a plane is the hard part.

  4. Single-player missions

    The in-game mission editor and file format already work — the gap is the server-side spawner. Goal: a proper single-player campaign.

  5. Native Linux / Steam Deck

    The end target: a native build that runs on the Steam Deck for handheld vehicular combat.

The north-star: "Mission 1"

Every piece of the roadmap points at one 60-second loop:

Spawn on a runway as a little person → run to a plane → get in → fly out and destroy a target → return to base → "Mission 1 complete."

That single experience touches every dormant system at once — infantry, enter/exit vehicle, AI targets, and mission objectives. Nail it and the rest of the game follows.

StepSystem
Spawn as a little personInfantry / LQM
Run to a plane, get inEnter / exit vehicle
Destroy a targetBots / NPC AI
Return to base, "complete"Missions / objectives
▼ Multiplayer

Servers — coming when it's playable online.

MFQ3 is a multiplayer game at heart. Once the ioquake3 port is stable, public server details and a server browser will be listed right here.

StatusNot live yet — single-player and local play first
Server addressTBC
Game portTBC (Quake III default is 27960/UDP)
How to connectInstructions will appear here once a server is up
▼ The basics

Fact sheet.

GameMilitary Forces (MFQ3)
Version reviving1.09 Alpha (MF 1.0.9)
GenreVehicular combat — air, ground & infantry
Base engineid Tech 3 (Quake III Arena) → porting to ioquake3
Retail Quake III needed?No — standalone, ships its own data
PlatformsWindows today · Linux / Steam Deck planned
DownloadComing soon

The revival is happening on YouTube.

Getting a 20-year-old game building again, the ioquake3 port, and switching the dormant features back on — all on camera, including the bits that don't work.

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