I was just talking about it over in this thread, last month: Unreal A3D?

The short answer: yes, they patched it out.

Asaki wrote:

So far, the only A3D supported game that has impressed me was Quake 3, but it has to be a REALLY old version of the game. I'm not sure exactly which versions...I know v1.0 works fine, and the demo works fine...a few newer revisions worked okay but had the stereo reversed. The Gold version seems to have had all of the A3D 2.0 support ripped out.

Edit: I'm skimming through the Q3A source code right now, and it looks like all of the A3D stuff is still in there, it's just commented out. I'm really tempted to try compiling this. Athough, when I was looking at different versions of the game before, it looked like some of the A3D information was hard-coded into the BSP maps, so I'm not sure how much good it would do. I could be wrong, however.

ioquake3 patched it back in iirc

I think it's still present in 1.16n, so you can still enjoy A3D and have the game at a later, patched version 😀.

A3D gets removed in 1.25 (Sep 2000) and all versions afterward don't have it

jarreboum wrote:

ioquake3 patched it back in iirc

Wrong

leileilol wrote:

jarreboum wrote:

ioquake3 patched it back in iirc

Wrong

Oh? I thought they did. Must have been confused with something else.

Would be cool if they do at some point.

F2bnp wrote:

I think it's still present in 1.16n, so you can still enjoy A3D and have the game at a later, patched version 😀.

I think I tried that one and it wasn't working correctly. Maybe that's part of why they dropped support.