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GPL First Person Shooter Released

Posted by Zonk on from the tux-with-a-gun dept.

Lisandro writes "Nexuiz v1.0, an fast paced deathmatch FPS, has been released under the GPL. It uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 1 engine, with real time lighting/shadowing, improved particle effects and more. It looks really good and it's available for Windows and Linux, with a Mac version said to be coming soon."

70 comments

  1. GPL'd game... by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 4, Funny

    But "This website was designed for Internet Explorer 6 and higher"!?

    --
    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
    1. Re:GPL'd game... by NitsujTPU · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not all people make sense you insensitive clod!

    2. Re:GPL'd game... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With other browsers, you can put a page together and, if you know what you're doing, it should look pretty much like you expect. With Internet Explorer, many times you have to "design" around all its problems so the page will look passable. Often the "design" that fixes how it displays in IE makes no logical sense from a layout / markup perspective.

    3. Re:GPL'd game... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Firefox is higher than Internet Explorer 6... What are you complaining about?

    4. Re:GPL'd game... by FidelCatsro · · Score: 2, Funny

      You pretty much have to be High to use internet Explorer

      --
      The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  2. Mac version by daeley · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to a post on their forum, there is a Mac app in the download, but it is non-functional out of the box -- they are working on including some libraries with the download that will alleviate the need to compile anything. They "expect the patch to be out within a week", so that's cool.

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  3. Too late! by JoeSmack · · Score: 0, Troll

    Frost Pissed...

  4. Not bad. by Seumas · · Score: 1

    It looks pretty good (for a free game). Of course, the real test is how many peopel will play it. There are a lot of "would-be-good" games that fall by the wayside because there's nobody to play with if you just want to jump online from home.

    On the other hand, a good community can make a good game legendary. BZFlag, for example

    1. Re:Not bad. by Baloo+Ursidae · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Of course, the real test is how many peopel will play it.

      No, the real test is how many people will play it and like it enough to become developers for it.

      --
      Help us build a better map!
    2. Re:Not bad. by FidelCatsro · · Score: 1

      Its got one major advantage(warez scene aside) its free (libre and gratis) .
      If its good enough, it will take off , and if development keeps on improving it I see no reason why it would not succeed.

      People do love a free meal , and hopefully if they like it enough they will start to contribute , The community can make FPS games with mods and maps

      --
      The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  5. This looks good! by CreatorOfSmallTruths · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Reminicint of classics like Quake 3 Arena and others.. I wonder what engine is used here (Darkplaces?)
    It doesn't say anywhere what platform is this for ?

    1. Re:This looks good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >>It doesn't say anywhere what platform is this for ?

      Jesus. Besides on the web site, it says what platforms in the DAMN FOUR LINES THAT MAKE UP THE STORY. How dense can you be???

    2. Re:This looks good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It also clearly states what engine is used.

      He am not too smrt.

    3. Re:This looks good! by CapnOats.com · · Score: 1

      I wonder what engine it uses?

      http://wiki.quakesrc.org/index.php/Engines

    4. Re:This looks good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      There's quite a good article here that goes into this in quite some detail. The engine is apparently a modified Quake I engine, and the website also lists the platforms (Windows and Linux, apparently, with a "Mac version coming soon")

      I know you didn't ask but it also tells you what license the program is released under.

    5. Re:This looks good! by bcmm · · Score: 2

      Now I'm not a sad fantasist who thinks people actually RTFA, but you could read the /. summery. It's available for Linux, Mac and Windows (in other words anything, given someone who wants to port it), and it runs on a modified Quake 1 engine (the screenshots make it look very heavily modified; it looks more like UT2004 than Quake 1).

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    6. Re:This looks good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It does use the Darkplaces engine, which is a heavily modified version of the Quake1 engine.

    7. Re:This looks good! by CreatorOfSmallTruths · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I know, it does :(

      The sad thing is that I got a flamebait moderation (and was called a "not so smart guy") just because I *actually did get* to the main page of the home page and *did download* the zip file (which ignited the whole thing to begin with- who is using zip for linux). It turns out that the zip contains *all* the binaries and you should run something like
      >linux-86-glx
      to start it...

      And it sucks, btw... the thing is so slow you wish you died... if this is a quake 1 port (on a 2.4 GHZ with Nvidia 5700 on Gentoo) it is one hell of a bented one.

    8. Re:This looks good! by Sigma+7 · · Score: 1
      Now I'm not a sad fantasist who thinks people actually RTFA, but you could read the /. summery. It's available for Linux, Mac and Windows (in other words anything, given someone who wants to port it), and it runs on a modified Quake 1 engine


      I know that this is a little old, but the fact it runs on the Quake 1 engine is the game's greatest weakness.

      While it's true that you can do programming in Quake C to make the game play as you want, most of the game activity takes place in the binary file - if you want to make a mod involving force fields that one team can pass through, you'll have to tweak the engine.
  6. BLOOOOOOM! by Galaga88 · · Score: 2, Informative

    If by "Looks really good" you mean "Looks like they tried to recreate Unreal Tournament with the Quake engine and turned the bloom up to eleven" then sure. I'll wait until I can find a server with a good ping before I judge the netcode.

    Seriously, it's not really bad. It's basically just Quake with enhanced graphics support and awful weapon models, but having everything be GPL is nice in theory for mods. However, I could see people not wanting to release their mod to the world under GPL and thus giving this a pass.

    It's a nice effort.

    1. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by slux · · Score: 1

      Come on, it does look significantly better than Quake and the engine is pretty far from the original Quake one at this point.

      Unreal Tournament 2004 is basically just Unreal with enhanced graphics etc. It's true since the engine has evolved from the original AFAIK.

      Compared to Quake, Nexuiz has completely different physics, netcode, renderer, uses different map and model format, all the content is new and so on and so on.

    2. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Compare it to current quake1, not original quake1. Q1 has been enhanced a ton since the original days. Compared to the original winquake/dos quake, sure this looks great. Compared to the duel I had earlier on dm6, it looks about on par. I'm judging only by screenshots of course, I'm about to play it now. One thing that looks especially nice is I think I saw md3 player models. Q1 is capable of this in its current moddified form, but noone uses it as it breaks netplay compatability.

      Forking a new game like this so as to not worry about netplay compatability is nice for progression, but does come at a cost. When my 1.9ghz 1gb ram gf5600 gaming box died and I was stuck on a 350mhz 128mb of buggy sdram with 8mb onboard sis.. I just had to to turn off all the particle explosions, dynamic lighting, cut the res down, etc and still had a great game. Once you start forcing people into one modernized client you start to screw over the older ones.

      Off to go give it a test play. I wonder if it still uses original quakec, or if they used the FTEQuake mods to load quake2 or quake3 dll/qvm's.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
    3. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by MoogMan · · Score: 1

      Everything you have said is right. It plays more like UT than Quake 3, but is wow, it is definately on par with both in terms of graphics. Ok, so we're about 2 years behind in graphics at the moment. BUT! Its a very good start.

      I had to chmod the executables (the download is a zip), but once running them, everything seemed to have that polish you'd come to expect from a professional game.

      Two minor screwy issues though:
      @ The scrollbar on the input controls is backward. Scrolling the mouse up makes the scroll "bar" go down and vice-versa. Secondly, it doesn't look like a scroll bar, and the colours are inverted.
      @ Pressing to turn off the advanced lighting (which my g/card can't handle) should have an "Apply" or "Back to game" button on the bottom of the screen.

      Keep up the good work!

    4. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by G-Licious! · · Score: 1

      I fail to see that polish. I recon this is free and very well done for it's (non-existant) price, but it's not even up to par with the original UT if you ask me.

      Simple things like the trail effect a minigun has in UT lack and I can't even see whether I'm being shot at in Nexuiz. You have to rely on the sound effects.

      I don't think the weapon balance is all that good either, personally. The rocket launcher (or whatever it's called) is pretty darn overpowered.

      But I agree that this is a very, very good start. I'd like to see what this brings in the future.

      I will probably stick with UT though (future iterations, that is. I hardly play the original anymore, UT2004 most of the time), because I'm especially fond of the weapon set in it, the movement, and just generally 'small' things that identify an FPS these days.

    5. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, I know there are tons of mods out there, but I'm wondering which one your were playing dm6 on. So which one (url)? I kind of miss that and dm4 even playing new games. dm4 on a full server is a fast pased, insane level.

    6. Re:BLOOOOOOM! by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 1

      KTpro is pretty much standard for playing against humans. It lets anyone connected admin it via votes. For example, if everyone does a /dm6 in console the map goes to dm6. Similar for setting all the other options.
      http://servu.quakeworld.nu/ is good for finding an empty server to go play a friend on.

      Or get a copy of FrogBot and play some bots, thats suprisingly fun too. quakeworld.nu/forum is a good place to look for all things modern qw. (clients/mods/maps/etc)

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  7. Cube? by Je-Tze · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ..how do y'all think it compares with Cube? http://www.cubeengine.com/

    --
    jz (Je-Tze)
    1. Re:Cube? by Lisandro · · Score: 4, Informative

      I like Cube, but it's a slower game, and more oriented to single player as far as i've tried it (never played it online; all servers i've found are outside my country and ping kills me). However, it has nice (yet basic, a bit cartoony, but quite likeable IMHO) graphics and an interesting engine which lets you do things like editing levels while playing the game.

      Nexuiz is quite more fast paced; think of it being Quake 3 and Cube being Serious Sam, and you'll get a basic idea. It boils down to personal taste :) The downloadeable clips give a good idea of how Nexuiz plays, IMHO.

    2. Re:Cube? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or Sauerbraten: http://strlen.com/sauerbraten/

    3. Re:Cube? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 1

      From the website, Cube looks like a pretty shameless ripoff of Serious Sam, from the look of the maps, to the look of the enemies, to the way the graphics engine works. (That whole "outdoor optimized engine rendering indoor scenes" thing looks exactly like what the Serious Sam engine is doing.

      Now, it does look better graphics-wise than this "Nexuiz," but I'd prefer to see more originality. (Not to say that Nexuiz is more original-- I haven't played it yet-- but if it is a ripoff, at least it's less blatent.)

      And for God's sake, when is an open source project going to pick a good an pronouncable name! What the hell is "Nexuiz?" Neck-squeeze? Nex-ease? Next-ooey?

      --
      Comment of the year
    4. Re:Cube? by RealNitro · · Score: 1

      Cube _is_ original. It is the only FPS that allows you to edit the map in the game itself. Don't judge Cube by the screens, play it.

      And the online gameplay of Cube is very fast. The fastest I have played to far.

    5. Re:Cube? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 1

      I'm a Tribes and MechWarrior man. I don't like fast games, I like some strategy.

      But if they're original, they should work on making their art as original as the gameplay, because I bet most people (who have played Serious Sam) had the exact same first impression that I had.

      --
      Comment of the year
    6. Re:Cube? by Voxus · · Score: 1

      Ney-schwa, perhaps.

  8. Cube, anyone? by vga_init · · Score: 1
    The game looks and feels good, but I couldn't get hardware acceleration to work out of the box, so it ran too slow for me to actually play it.

    From what I did see, however, it doesn't look like you can reload. Personally, I think half the fun of a good FPS is reloading. ;)

    As it stands, Cube is my favorite open source 3D FPS. It's very entertaining, and multiplayer can be a blast with the right people. The game is simple, but the graphics are gorgeous in spite of this. It has a sort of surreal and cartoonish feel...very arcade-like, but that's one thing I like about it. It's not as dark and dismal as many other FPS games, and doesn't seem to take itself too seriously.

  9. wtf -- ugly by Synic · · Score: -1, Troll

    Oh my god.
    http://www.nexuiz.com/public/12.jpg

    that looks good? he looks like a mutant freak, not a human being! (and I mean the guy in the foreground, dumbasses)

    1. Re:wtf -- ugly by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 1

      Can you do better? :)

      --
      Pretty Pictures!
    2. Re:wtf -- ugly by FidelCatsro · · Score: 1

      It think its the style ,Ever seen the game timesplitters it kind of reminds me of that

      --
      The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    3. Re:wtf -- ugly by hey! · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, part of it is a faux "wide angle lens" effect, but you can see the art is a bit crude and cartoonish. If I recall reading this correctly artwork on professionally developed games is as or more expensive than the programming.

      I'm not much of a gamer myself; does having really refined artwork make that much of a difference after you've been playing for a while?

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    4. Re:wtf -- ugly by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      nope.. graphics don't mean jack after the initial perioid, especially if you're playing it against other people.

      (functional graphics start to matter more the more you play, so you'll end up turning off effects like grass in games pretty often).

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:wtf -- ugly by AllUsernamesAreGone · · Score: 1

      If I recall reading this correctly artwork on professionally developed games is as or more expensive than the programming.
      Significantly more expensive in many cases - game programming teams are often not that big for various reasons and they tend to be outnumbered significantly by the artists, level designers and other content creators.

      This is actually one of the biggest problems facing OSS games: finding capable, experienced coders to produce engines on the cheap is usually not that hard but finding good quality artists and musicians willing to produce significant quantities of professional-level artwork and music for nothing or nearly nothing is virtually impossible.

    6. Re:wtf -- ugly by jspoon · · Score: 1
      nope.. graphics don't mean jack after the initial perioid, especially if you're playing it against other people.

      That's easy for you to say. On the Mac version (not ready for prime-time yet, they acknowledge) after 10 minutes of loading the level only the HUD comes up.

    7. Re:wtf -- ugly by Zenex13 · · Score: 1

      It clearly states on the website that Mac support isn't ready yet. It was a accident that the broken mac build was released at all.

    8. Re:wtf -- ugly by jspoon · · Score: 1

      It always makes me happy when people reply to my posts except, of course, when they fail to read what I write.

    9. Re:wtf -- ugly by GrievousMistake · · Score: 1

      Prosedy^H^H^Hidure^H^H^H^H^H^Hcadu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
      Computer generated content is kind of promising in that regards. It won't do proper art, but it is used succesfully for simple level design in roguelikes.

      --
      In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
    10. Re:wtf -- ugly by petsounds · · Score: 1

      All of the artwork in Spore is procedureally created and it looks quite good, so I think that type of art is one solution to the problem of exponentially-increasing costs (most of which lie within the art asset creation) of making a AAA videogame. No, you won't replicate realistic features, but it can work for stylized styles as Spore as shown.

  10. Awesome by chrisxkelley · · Score: 1

    As long as there are people to play online, I'm game.. i'm waiting for the mac patch to come out so i can try it... i'm to lazy to custom-compile shit... the more mac games, the better :) especially a gpl

  11. Farm Team? by hey! · · Score: 2, Informative

    If it's reasonably fun to play and gets enough attention, I can see this project attracting contributors looking into an alternative to modding as a way to break into professional game development.

    I wonder though whether people programming cheats will undermine its attractiveness for network play? Maybe people working on this should be aiming for careers at RSA instead of EA?

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    1. Re:Farm Team? by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      don't play with assholes.

      assholes will more probably play commercial games anyhow, and thus be cheating there.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  12. Looks Interesting by miyako · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The game looks interesting, though the artwork looks like it could use some work (maybe after the summer of code is over with I'll contribute some artwork), too bad I'm not really a big fan of first-person shooters.

    --
    Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
  13. You pretty much have to be High by wakejagr · · Score: 1

    You have to be high, or at work . . .

    --
    Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
    1. Re:You pretty much have to be High by wed128 · · Score: 2, Funny

      or high at work

    2. Re:You pretty much have to be High by Cornflake917 · · Score: 1

      i wish

      --
      Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
  14. Excellent! by VStrider · · Score: 1

    The screenshots are amazing! It looks like Unreal Tournament. It certainly looks promising.

    For those interested, here's the Dark Places engine.

    My favorite FPS so far is ETF. It's a mod for Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory(free as in beer).
    Cube is not bad either.

    --
    VStrider.
    1. Re:Excellent! by ggambett · · Score: 1

      I couldn't stant ETF for more than 5 minutes... I went straight back to Enemy Territory and I'm enjoying it thoroughly after playing for over a year. 2003 graphics? Who cares!

      A new map by Splash Damage would be cool though... there are a few very good and very popular user-made maps but none has the playability of the original 6.

      --
      My website
  15. How modified? by Adapt+or+Die · · Score: 0
    It uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 1 engine...

    Ooh! Does this mean that they've discovered new shades of brown? ;^)

    1. Re:How modified? by DesScorp · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I know this is a modified quake 1 engine, but still...those hardware requirements seem awful steep for this. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is based on the Quake III engine and requires a 600 mhz cpu, and it looks better than this game. I'm all for GPL'd first person shooters, but it looks like something went awry in the code for requirements to be that high. It's not Doom 3 territory, but considering that Linux runs on many older machines, you'd think they'd keep that in mind during the development process.

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    2. Re:How modified? by Chilltowner · · Score: 1

      I played it on my 2GHz Pentium 4 (1 Gb RAM, somewhat older NVidia Card with 64 MB RAM), and it was really slow out of the box. But, there's a lot of effects enabled by default, like real-time lighting and shadows, bloom, etc., that you can turn off. Once I did that, I was able to play just fine. It's pretty fun.

  16. Whoah. by WWWWolf · · Score: 1

    Not bad at all! The only thing that distinguishes this from other modern games is that the models are a bit worse - not much worse, just could use a bit of touchup and this might pass for a commercial game. I particularly liked the werewolf player model. Game-wise, this seems just as fun as Q3A.

    And any deathmatch game that includes a remake of Q1DM6 has to be good. =) (and one of those maps definitely rang bell. One of the Half-Life DM maps, right? Not really touched HL in years so I can't really tell, but it seemed the same...)

    1. Re:Whoah. by phxbadash · · Score: 1

      A bit worse....ummmm....the heads on some of the models are freaking triangles. I'm sorry but if you think this game passes as a decent fps game I feel sorry for you. The wall textures are flat and low rez, the gun models are horrid, and there don't seem to be any distiguishing features that differentiate the game from being a q1/ut clone. And why use the q1 engine when the Id has also released the source code for the q2 engine to the general public (I'm 99% certain they have but could be wrong)

  17. torrent by Puggs · · Score: 1

    Bah, /. you killed it

    Use the torrent:

    http://www.torrentspy.com/download.asp?id=319937

  18. I was going to give this a go... by Toby_Tyke · · Score: 1

    but the website appears to be slashdotted.

    --
    "I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
    1. Re:I was going to give this a go... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah I guess it was

      http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=81584&package_id=153676&release_id=331243

      You can still download the game there

  19. really annoying glitch/bug by cyrax777 · · Score: 1

    randomly people will just start running around with just a gun model visable. really annoying when one goes to pick up a gun it moves and shoots you becouse it was a player whos model glitched out.

    1. Re:really annoying glitch/bug by Kyouryuu · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I saw this too. At first I thought it was some kind of weird cloaking device.

  20. I know what it means, maybe by iridium_ionizer · · Score: 1

    I think Nexuis is supposed to mean "Next you is" as in Next to die. Anyway, just by comparing screenshots I would have to say that Nexuis seems more asthetically pleasing than Cube. Maybe its that the characters seem less ugly artistically.

  21. Compare by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can anyone compare this to the sources of Q3A available from ID?

  22. Good addition for various distros by sabit666 · · Score: 1

    It would be a great addition to TuxRacer in various Linux distributions.

    The developers are not focusing on bot support at this moment. If they could add some bot support in the next patch it would be really nice. Anyone played it with one of those plugable bot mods (Frikbot)?

  23. hahhahha.. thunk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not funny fuckhead.

  24. When a team fortress mod comes out for it... by StormKrow · · Score: 1

    ....I'm there.

    (everyone loves a kamakaze engie with a hot EMP) :-D

    lol..and slashdot is bugged this morning:

    "Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

    It's been 14 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"

    --
    Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
  25. xbox anyone? by chasingporsches · · Score: 1

    mac port, good stuff, but what i'm REALLY interested in, when does a version for a modded xbox come out?

    not that i have one, or anything... but playing that with a controller would be so nice, and over the internet with Win/Linux/Mac players...

    i haven't played it yet, as i'm waiting for the mac version, but it seems great, esp. considering it is open source and community driven!