Freeware FPS Alien Arena 2007 Reviewed

Alienkillerrace writes "Linux.com has reviewed the brand new release of Alien Arena 2007, giving it a glowing review. 'New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition' claims that Alien Arena is now the very best of the freeware FPS games, surpassing even Tremulous."

Comments

hmm

[nottoogeeky]

Better than counterstrike?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Counter-strike is opensource/freeware now? Including the engine? Wow I really should come out of my cave more often.

Re:hmm

[imbaczek]

Well, Urban Terror is.

Let the flamefests begin!

Re:hmm

[Nomaxxx]

Alien Arena looks more like Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament than Counter-Strike. Personally, I like Alien Arena better. ;)

Re:hmm

[beardz]

Riiiight, because having access to the source makes a games soooooo much better to play.

Re:hmm

[Oktober Sunset]

getting it for free does though. Especially when you spend the money on weed and play while high.

Re:hmm

[thegnu]

*high five*

Re:hmm

[Ticklemonster]

I'm still waiting for Unreal Tournament to be open source. I like it way better than other games based on the simple fact that I can sit down, raise cain for a few maps, then leave. I don't have time to learn a bunch of stuff just to play a game, but I do have time to sit down, get an adrenaline rush, then get up and walk away. I understand the draw that the other more complicated games have, but they aren't for me due to time restraints. I have AA on here (Ubuntu) and it's every bit as good as Q3 ever was. (a simple duh will suffice here). Frag on.

Re:hmm

[Hatta]

It sure does. Look at all the great source ports we have of Doom. Internet play, 3d acceleration, jumping, ports for any OS. iD opening the source really did make it a better game.

Re:hmm

[4D6963]

Better than counterstrike?

Errr, if it's free then where can I download it?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alienarena.org/downloads.php

Re:hmm

[nottoogeeky]

oooh yer!!! it used to be free. Now valve charge $20 :(

Re:hmm

[4D6963]

No, Counter Strike

Re:hmm

[crhylove]

Well, it's technically not Open Source, but the engine is, and it's free:

Urban Terror is MUCH better than counter strike OR Alien Arena. Play some DM on Ramelle, you will love it!

http://www.urbanterror.net/news.php

Re:hmm

[Brian Gordon]

You are kidding. Quake was unplayable after the source was released. People could compile in their own hardcoded aimbots!

Re:hmm

[jonbryce]

http://thepiratebay.org/search/counter%20strike/0/3/0

Re:hmm

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Well, if everyone has an aimbot, that simply changes the tactics one has to employ while playing, possibly producing whole new game styles...

Re:hmm

[Sigma 7]

Well, if everyone has an aimbot, that simply changes the tactics one has to employ while playing, possibly producing whole new game styles... It probably would be boring for regular deathmatch. For each kill you make, you are expected to get killed yourself - almost rare where you get a narrow escape, as each player would have a powerful insta-kill attack. (With Quake though, client 1 would have the advantage, but that's another story.)

To make something like this work, it probably wouldn't resemble something like most first person shooters. There's only one way to find out if people will play it.

Re:hmm

[4D6963]

If that's we people call free these days.. plus I guess you can't play on (most) servers with those.

Re:hmm

[nobuddy]

It was a free mod, and still is. HalfLife, required to play, has never been free.

Better than Tremulous ?

[mikesum]

Tremulous is a really good game. If Alien Arena 2007 better than that according to this guy, then it's at least worth checking out. /me is BruceCambellsGhost on Tremulous

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[BiggyP]

There's no way you can compare AA and Tremulous, Alien Arena is a simple and uninspiring FPS deathmatcher and always will be, Tremulous wins hands down for those with the mental capacity to play it.

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[generic-nickname596]

Yes, I would love to hear in what ways Alien Arena surpasses Tremulous. Tremulous is one of the most interesting team action games I have ever played, far surpassing Counter-Strike and its cronies. I have never played AA, and the article is very low on details. Some of the innovations of Tremulous include wall-walking, strategy elements and a balanced two-class system reminescent of Starcraft. The aliens play like nothing you've ever tried before, except maybe that they are somewhat inspired by Alien vs. Predator. These stats are quite an opponent to match, but nothing would be better than the sorry state of Free Software gaming getting better.

A lot of the more interesting free software games are in fact based on the GPLed Quake 3 engine. There is a pattern here...maybe we could improve things by liberating more commercial gaming software? It's either that, or someone with authority has to take a lot more responsibility in designing tools for creating open-source games. I'm thinking something along the lines of procedural content generation, the major problem is creating all the models we need for a real game. There are many awesome things happening in academia on this subject right now, for example http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/PaperBuildings from SIGGRAPH 2006. We all agree that most free software games don't work out, right? For all the interesting aspects in Tux Racer, it isn't nearly up to the standards of commercial software, and masterpieces like Tremulous are the exception in OSS.

I'm afraid I have to go off topic for a moment. But this is a thing I have been thinking a lot about lately, and I haven't heard it discussed in here before. I promise it is highly relevant to the task at hand.

The Mozilla Foundation is swimming in money from its Firefox ad programs, and I have seen little information indicating that they are using the money for the good of the entire Free Software movement. In fact, I have heard little information at all indicating what they are doing with all of their millions, except for the obvious team of programmers that are working on Mozilla software. This is one arena where the Mozilla Foundation could be much more active in participating: donating money to ransoming out commercial software. I am certain there is a lot of valuable code out there that could do good things for the open-source gaming environment. Firefox is unique in the free software world in being able to bring in huge amounts of revenue, so in my opinion the Mozilla Foundation has an obligation to help out and be more generous with their cash reserves. Firefox is free software, and its benefits should belong to all of us. We are all on the same team here!

Any thoughts? I feel that these things aren't talked about nearly as loudly as they should be, these are all important problems to both the Free Software movement and to nerds in general. Are there any big Mozilla players in here who might have some good answers?

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice post.

The only disagreement I have is with your soup kitchen approach to software development, specifically Mozilla. This isn't the Depression. If this is the Software Renaissance, commercial reward from the hands of another's art should not be what you seek.

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[turing_m]

Absolutely. I'm blown away by how good it is. (Nexuiz is pretty damn good too, way better than openarena.) And with ubuntu, it's as simple an install as typing tremulous into synaptic, check, apply.

There aren't many high quality FOSS games, but they certainly exist. For those people who think FOSS is a noble cause, and don't have ADD (or the urge to pirate) to the point where they must have whatever shiny new game is out there now, Ubuntu certainly checks the boxes.

Now, you'd best be getting out of the way of my tyrant...

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[zolf13]

Maybe try Natural Selection (free HL1 mod) http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[Das Modell]

It's just a mod for a commercial game.

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[fritsd]

Tremulous wins hands down for those with the mental capacity to play it.

I used to play Dretches, you insensitive clod!

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[Vermifax]

Which happens to be better than tremulous at doing mostly the same thing. And lets face it you can get hl1 for under $10 nowadays.

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[brkello]

What you describe reminds me of a half life mod..natural selection. Has wall walking and two distinct classes. Doesn't really sound all that revolutionary...unless it came out before NS of course.

While the game looks interesting...

[Stuidge]

This is less a review, and more a HOWTO. There's nothing there that isn't in the readme, and the only opinion is on the last line proclaiming that it is better than Tremulous. And even that has no justification.

(E-) Must try harder.

OSS games need more graphical artists

[Anonymous Coward]

While we already have very good to excellent 3d games as Sauerbraten and Nexuiz, we still are behind commercial software companies in the graphical area. Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters, maps, weapons etc. In the last two years the gap shrunk, but IMO more work is needed.

Re:OSS games need more graphical artists

[grumbel]

### Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters,

Could you name them? Most of the free software games I know have poorly designed 'everything', its not a issue of graphics, its an issue that goes from bad code, over to the lack of tools right down to the complete lack of a solid core game design (aka nobody knows what the hell they actually want to accomplish). So fixing the graphics would help little to nothing to create a compelling game.

Re:OSS games need more graphical artists

[Ilgaz]

While we already have very good to excellent 3d games as Sauerbraten and Nexuiz, we still are behind commercial software companies in the graphical area. Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters, maps, weapons etc. In the last two years the gap shrunk, but IMO more work is needed. PR is a huge problem too. I check Mac news, download sites every day and I had no clue a game like "Sauerbraten" exists and it can even be binary (dmg) downloaded from Sourceforge.

There is no entry on Apple Downloads or de-facto download standard site, Versiontracker too. If they submitted it to Softpedia, those guys would even review it. Using Apple downloads site for years, I know they would advertise it on front page as it is open source and uses OS X technologies.

I know it sounds lame but they should use Digg etc. like dynamic sites to advertise their game/work. One iPhone story less, would work for everyone ;)

Re:OSS games need more graphical artists

[celle]

Guys/gals, look at the freebsd ports games listing or the debian game repositories to get a start on whats out there. Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, AA and others are listed. That's how I found out and I've been using Slackware for a more than a decade for playing games.

Wait

[Kelz]

No warning that linux.com and /. are owned by same company?

Re:Wait

[bl8n8r]

If you know, you don't need to be told. If you don't know, you won't notice.

Re:Wait

[Tim C]

The point is that you're supposed to disclose that sort of thing, although in this case it doesn't really matter. Now if the people behind the game were also owned/paid by the same company, that would need to be disclosed.

Re:Wait

[pcgabe]

If you have it, you don't need it.
If you need it, you don't have it.
If you have it, you need more of it.
If you have more of it, you don't need less of it!

You need it to get it, and you certainly need it to get more of it, but if you don't already have any of it to begin with, you can't get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place, do you?

You can share it, sure.
You can even stockpile it if you'd like.
But you can't fake it.
Flaunting it, needing it, wishing for it... the point is, if you've never had any of it, ever, people just seem to know.

A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[Jack Malmostoso]

I am not much of a gamer, but I *really* suck at FPSs. I'd love to see some variety in games produced for linux.
Now if only we could reuse Quake III's engine for a football game...

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

There is always Aleph One (Marathon) from Bungie, it's a free download, has multiplayer and runs on Linux.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[TheRaven64]

There was a football mod for the original Quake. You had to kick a head (complete with blood trails) to the other goal. As I recall, players were armed with axes, to allow fouls.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[xoundmind]

OK, its not football, but it is the only Quake-based chess game I know of:
CHESS III ARENA

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[imbaczek]

There are some fine RTSes, a very nice one is Spring, which was once a Total Annihilation more-or-less reimplementation in full 3D, but now is much more than that.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

No variety! Come die, n00b!! :P

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

There's are simulators as well, besides the well known flight gear, there's now an world war 2 uboat simulation as well http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[nostriluu]

I was a huge fan of Total Annihilation, and TA:Spring took it in some new directions that even the big money TA successor, Supreme Commander didn't try (like deformable terrain). However, from what I can tell, TA:Spring is dead in the water. While fully playable on Windows, it's a pain to get running on Linux, and not compatible with the Windows versions, and development and forum discussion seems to have dried up.

Frustrating, but not as frustrating as the propensity for Linux games to be cheap clones of games developed on other platforms, especially boring first-person shooters which consist of wandering around dreary tunnels with a big penis^wgun in front of you shooting people.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[smchris]

I *really* suck at FPSs

Ditto. Tremulous is way too frantic for me. Try TORCS road racing or Flightgear. Flightgear has incredible potential as volunteers rebuild their cities virtually into it.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[KDR_11k]

It's not dead at all, maybe you're looking in the wrong place or something (OSRTS died but not Spring, or were you perhaps looking for TA Spring? The project was renamed to just Spring). The current release is kinda crappy though and we're hoping for the next one because the SVN version is just so much better but getting Lua for mods was a huge step ahead for the flexibility of the engine. Also Fang is back and E&E is getting developed again now so Spring is less dead now than a while ago.

AFAIK Linux players can play versus Windows gamers, I've seen it happen. The lack of a binary makes installation a bitch though, I agree.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Tremulous OK, Nexuiz great fun (esp. for slower video cards), but with Urban Terror I absolutely suck horribly. Usually I last up to 5 seconds in that game and then have to wait until everybody else is dead :-/

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[nostriluu]

OK, it's not dead, it's just... confusing. ;)

Last time I looked at http://spring.clan-sy.com/ , it sure looked stalled. Is this the right page?

Making Spring easy to work with (easy selection and download of mods, maps, etc) would go a long way towards player enjoyment.

Re:A bit of variety wouldn't hurt

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, that's the page. The community news aren't really updated by anyone but the forums are pretty alive.

the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[skzo]

what about warsow !? or even wop ? i find them a lot better than Alien Arena.

Re: the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[Hackeron]

And what about Enemy Territory? -- not opensource, but freeware. And the variety of mods available for it like True Combat. I tried this Alien Arena game and it feels like quake2 with new textures - very outdated...

Enemy Territory while based on the Quake 3 engine, doesn't feel like quake3 at all, this game feels like quake 2 :(

Re: the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[Megatog615]

It _is_ Quake 2.

Re: the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[CaptnMArk]

And that is bad why?

Q2 had the best rail ever.

Re: the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[bvimo]

Or Nexuiz from http://www.alientrap.org/.

Re: the very best of the freeware FPS games ?

[Anonymous Coward]

same, warsow rocks

Re: Football vs fútbol

[wuputah]

Association, American, or Canadian?

Where is the review?

[PMBjornerud]

All I found, was a "FPS for dummies" description of what FPS games are.

How to use the console? How to change key settings? What is "capture the flag"?

You know it's weekend when TFS aucks horse balls. Time to go out in teh sun, then!

Awesoon

[island_tux]

Pretty Cool, runs pretty smooth on Linux...

Tremulous...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that's the Gloom ripoff, right?

What license is it released under?

[mw13068]

Can anyone find details of the license this game is being released under? I can't, even in the SVN repos. I know the Quake II engine is GPL, but what about the rest of it?

Re:What license is it released under?

[hweimer]

docs/license.txt:

It is only permissible to distrubute the game data(models, maps, textures, sound, etc) as a whole, and with the intention of being used with Alien Arena. It is not permissible to distribute individual portions or items of the game data without express consent from COR Entertainment. [...] Under no circumstances ALIEN ARENA 2007 as a whole be sold or used for profit, without express consent from COR Entertainment.

If you want a free-as-in-speech shooter that rocks, try Nexuiz.

Re:What license is it released under?

[TheDarkRogue]

The original Id GPL notice is in the svn for the game engine, just as it should be.

What?

[Mr_Silver]

This is not a review, more instructions on how to play the game.

hot sweaty horse balls

[Anonymous Coward]

You know it's weekend when TFS aucks horse balls. Time to go out in teh sun, then!

Mmmmmm... horse balls....

Re:hot sweaty horse balls

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that you can auck them.

Must be a "down under" kind of fetish.

Ok...

[TheNetAvenger]

Ok, I don't truly mind that the majority of FOSS software has a geek mindset and the UIs tend to reflect and look like the UIs of the Win9x era.

However, can we ever get to the point that the 'best' horse that gets trotted out for OSS Gaming looks like the era of games released for Windows95?

It is just not possible for a high end gaming production to be FOSS?

One further sad note... I have seen games developed by newbie gaming developers that are picking up XNA and MS Game Studio and producing higher quality games in terms of playability and especially in the area of graphics/audio.

Can't we do better than your neighbors kids and his/her friends designing an XNA came in C# that runs on their PC and the XBox 360 as well?

PS. You should really have a 'review' of the game, when you write an article 'reviewing' a game, and not just a quick intro of key commands.

Re:Ok...

[ardor]

This reflects the great deficiency regarding design. XNA/MS Game Studio all have predefined stuff that gets used often. In the OSS world such presets do not exist, however. In addition, anything that does not relate to programming often just does not exist in the OSS realm. I'm talking about 2D/3D graphics artists, game designers (no, most game programmers are NOT prepared for this task), musicians, sound FX guys etc.

Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art (with a few exceptions). Usually, the artists doing things for free are usually the bad ones, and the ones demanding lots of cash are the real deal. But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish, no matter how good the code is.

So, if you want GOOD game art, start donating.

Re:Ok...

[sammyF70]

Check out Scorched3D. *VERY* fun game, and the latest version looks just great.
Armagetron Advanced is also a great free game, even though the grafics may not be your cup of vodka.

Additionally, you might find some very fun and good looking games by checking open source game- or 3D- engines. The showcase forum at ogre3D is a good start.

The point is: there are some great looking, fun Open Source games out there they don't get reviewed or advertised in such a way that you'll hear about them often.

Re:Ok...

[Ford Prefect]

Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art (with a few exceptions). Usually, the artists doing things for free are usually the bad ones, and the ones demanding lots of cash are the real deal. But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish, no matter how good the code is.

What about the eleventy billion people working on free modifications for commercial games? Yes, plenty of that is Bad Art, but there are some fantastic bits of work out there.

The motivations aren't purely financial, either - I've seen a lot of people get jobs as the result of mod work, but I've also seen people already employed in the games industry contribute stuff back to free mods. I think half of Natural Selection was built that way - it acquired fantastic voice acting, music, audio, animations, models and textures as a result. Altruism? Kinda. The whole place seems built on old boys' networks.

So if you want good game art? Stop mucking about in the world of open source and programming, and try looking at the game mods world!

Re:Ok...

[RobotRunAmok]

Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art

BANG! You nailed it, bud. Except I would not have added the qualifier "game" to the word "art."

Re:Ok...

[WWWWolf]

However, can we ever get to the point that the 'best' horse that gets trotted out for OSS Gaming looks like the era of games released for Windows95? It is just not possible for a high end gaming production to be FOSS?

As others pointed out, it's the issue of not having enough 2D/3D artists and music/sound folk. OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.

For example, take a look at the Irrlicht or OGRE screenie galleries - you see the technology is definitely getting there. You can get ye trimesh to ye rendering device, and by golly does it ever look shiny and, with a bit of work, not that bad. (More bloom! More! More!) But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.

If you want to see a project where the art and tech goes well hand in hand, try Battle for Wesnoth - top notch graphics (albeit in 2D pixel-art), sound effects and music. We can do this.

Re:Ok...

[jandrese]

Scorch is fun, but it suffers a bit from the same thing the original Scorch did. The computer seems very adept at killing you with their first or second shot, but then spends the next 50 turns taking pitiful shots at the other opponents while you sit and watch from your smoking crater. Also, like the original Scorch it has a tendency to crash.

Re:Ok...

[KDR_11k]

It's kinda hard for an opensource game to look up to date because it has a much longer lifespan than a commercial game. Its graphics may have been up to date when development started but there's just no way they're going to be current 5 years later (though I don't think AA has been in development that long...).

The only solution I can think of is going for an abstract look that doesn't show what era it's from, something like Tron.

Re:Ok...

[grumbel]

### Many artists will make things for money ONLY.

Where did you get that from? I mean sure, professional artists might prefer to work for money, but so do most professional programmers. Communities like deviantArt on the other side don't seem to have an exactly hard time to find great artists. Which isn't exactly surprising, since there are far more artists around then programmers.

I have done a lot of work for free software games (Pingus, SuperTux, Lincity-NG, etc.) and while my work isn't exactly up to commercial standards, it is 'good enough', most people seem to like it. Thing is, I am not exactly super talented, I'd say that 3 out of 10 people are easily as talented as I am or even more so when it comes to graphics, I couldn't say the same thing about people being able to program, these are far less. Now ok, having some talent, doesn't mean that you can create a texture for a game, you need to know a thing or two about graphics formats, how to use Gimp, Blender and friends, but compared to learning the ins and outs of C++, OpenGL and all that stuff, that is really the easy part.

### But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish

I personally wouldn't have a problem with games looking like 1995, heck, I wouldn't mind games looking like 1990, if they where actually good games. However that isn't the case, most games don't feel like a finished game from 1995, but more like a game that is 15% done from back in 2000. The thing isn't lack of graphics, but lack of everything. Just a random engine with random graphics and a few random test levels doesn't make a compelling game, at best it makes an interesting techdemo, but nothing more.

In the end I think there are four core problems:

1) Lack of free art resources: not every sound effect or grass texture needs to be recreated from scratch, neither does a model of some real life car or plane. Many could be reused and there are many free resources like this around, issue is that very few of them have licenses that work together with free software, some don't have any at all and trying to track down the creators and collect permission for every grass texture often just isn't worth the effort, it is often faster to recreate from scratch. The commercial world has tons of collections of textures, sound effects and stuff, the free software world has basically none that are large enough to be really useful.

2) Art pipeline: just calling for more artists is one thing, but as soon as they arrive most projects end up in deep trouble, since they don't have any proper pipeline in place to turn a model done in Blender into something that is usable in the engine. The existing export scripts are often out of date or not provided in the first place, many free engines only provide usable export scripts for 3Dmax and friends and some really don't have anything in place at all. How many polygons a model is allowed to have, what resolution a texture should have and all that stuff is often also an open question without clear answer, leaving the artists pretty much in the void. At this point in time many distributions don't even have packages of Gtkradiant, which just raises the bar even further when it comes to level creation.

3) Organisation: As mentioned, there are millions of artists around. But with a random techdemo without much concept behind it you can't really attract them. In fact many games would be better of when they would start with a clear concept/design document, instead of a random techdemo and that design document better be created by somebody good at storytelling/gamedesign or whatever the game is actually going to focus on. Programmers as you said it, often just aren't up for this task. The hard part here is getting the people with the good ideas together with those that have the knowledge to implement it. A good game isn't created by a huge set of random contributors, but by a relatively small team where everybody knows what the goal is and constructing such a team is a

Re:Ok...

[grumbel]

### OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.

Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them, still strugling to find some of those for Windstille.

### But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.

Going from a 3d engine that can render a bloomy 3d model to a fully fledged game is still a *long* way. It is a start for sure, but you need a little bit more then a few 3d models to make a game out of it, especially when it should be a good one.

Re:Ok...

[Osty]

This reflects the great deficiency regarding design. XNA/MS Game Studio all have predefined stuff that gets used often. In the OSS world such presets do not exist, however. In addition, anything that does not relate to programming often just does not exist in the OSS realm. I'm talking about 2D/3D graphics artists, game designers (no, most game programmers are NOT prepared for this task), musicians, sound FX guys etc.

The samples shipped with GSE are great for getting your engine up and running quickly, but most people aren't going to ship a game using the exact same graphics as provided in the SpaceWar sample. Take a look at the Dream-Build-Play winners (especially The Dishwasher) and tell me where the sample art, models, and music were used. While this may not be a fair comparison (games built for a contest with cash prizes and the potential to be published on XBLA vs. games built just to be built), it does go to the grandparent's point that indie developers can create truly stunning works when sufficiently motivated.

The real question is, what can be done to motivate more OSS games? The typical OSS model works around "itch scratching", which is why games like FreeCiv have done well (scratching the itch of not having Civilization-like games on Linux) while new game concepts and ports of commercial games generally haven't. Money helps, but you need a decent amount to make it worthwhile -- nobody's going to build the games you see on the DBP site for $100, but they will for the chance of winning $10,000.

Re:Ok...

[PromANJ]

It's not just about money. As a professional you might also want to work with other professionals. A really good character design can still easily be ruined by a bad 3D modeler/texture/animator guy somewhere down the pipline. Cohesion and Art direction are needed for stuff to work as well, and maybe that's harder to achieve when people are giving their free time and may not respond to criticism and refutation well.

Re:Ok...

[WWWWolf]

Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them...

I'm just trying to expand on what I've seen: Give people who are inclined to write a toolkit to play with, and they can write great stories. Or at least let someone else do the hard work of scripting and modeling and level design and whatnot.

Just take a look at the dozens if hundreds good modules for Neverwinter Nights: All it takes to create a good enjoyable adventure is a little bit of writing skill, aesthetics and story design - programming skill helps a little bit if you're not relying on wizard/generator code. Or look at the Battle for Wesnoth: As long as they don't need to touch the engine itself, folks are happy writing their own campaigns. Some are pretty good. Or see the recent work in the field of interactive fiction: a good toolkit + some decent writing skills = gold.

As for attracting writers in your case, I don't know - the best bet would be to advertise the fact loudly and try to "sell" the engine to the people. As in "we have a kickawesome engine here, all we need is someone to write some engaging dialogue to replace this awful drawl that we wrote at 3 AM..." (a completely hypothetical example, of course - I haven't checked out your project yet so I don't know how you're really doing =)

Free software or freeware?

[b4stard]

TFS says it's freeware, TFA says free software, TFPWS (Project WebSite) says its freeware based on free software. So, which is it?
I'm guessing, free software with proprietary artwork?

Re:Free software or freeware?

[Provocateur]

I'm guessing, free software with proprietary artwork?

Browsing thru some of the docs, the answer is Yes. Some of the screenshots show Q1 metallic panels; don't know if those are free. And if they say it's more Q1/Doom speed demon-ish, I'm there. Now to restore my (damaged) 'driva-with-GL *mux setup...

Anyone have a working torent going for 6.10?

[waferhead]

Google and all the usual suspects are not turning up any valid torrents of Alien Arena 6.10, just older versions.

Lets use bittorrent for what it's good for, all the std servers are hammered...

Thanks in advance!

Re:Anyone have a working torent going for 6.10?

[holgie]

Good point
http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/3840962/Alien_Arena_2007_6.10_for_Windows_-_Open_Source_FPS_-_Game.3840962.TPB.torrent
Haven't verified the authenticity myself yet

Re:Anyone have a working torent going for 6.10?

[waferhead]

Thanks!

Now we just need the Linux version ;-)

Re:Anyone have a working torent going for 6.10?

[waferhead]

Re:Anyone have a working torent going for 6.10?
(Score:2)
by waferhead (557795) on Saturday October 13, @10:40PM (#20970653)

Thanks!

Now we just need the Linux version ;-)

Wait---I think the linux/mac and Windows version are all included in the one file.

very nice..

[Danzigism]

that definintely looks pretty sweet.. one day I was browsing through the games in ubuntu's add/remove programs list and came across OpenArena and was thoroughly impressed.. my friends/co-workers who don't use linux or anything opensource for some weird secret reason saw me playing it one day and asked what it was.. when they heard it was free and had deathmatch capabilities, they were soon hooked and we were all doing some serious gibbing religiously once a week after the office closed.. this particular game based off the Q3 Arena engine does look pretty damn sweet for a freeware game.. i can never get tired of these damn things.. it's just fun!

Re:very nice..

[Anonymous Cow herd]

Wow... seriously? The levels feel like they were designed by middle school kids that forgot to take their ritalin. OpenArena even pales against the original Q3A, let alone anything released in say, the last decade.

Re:very nice..

[Danzigism]

i understand why you feel that way, it's just that its free and still equally as exciting when you kill someone..

Artists

[Zombie Ryushu]

Linux Programmers have shown incredible technical skill. The issue is artists. It is very hard for F/OSS people to get art designers. Art Designers tend not to be F/OSS and not as knowlegeable to the technical side of things to help develop the beauty side of things.

Re:Artists

[grumbel]

### The issue is artists.

Nope. The issue is for most part game design and after that simply lack of contributors, since programmers are very hard to come by too. But game design is really by far the biggest issue. As long as people just clone an already existing game engine it might work without much coordination, since the goal is clear, but as soon as you try something even just a little bit new it gets insanely hard to find the right people and communicate the ideas across the whole team or even just getting them motivated to actually work on some goal instead of just write random code.

I have seen *far* more games that struggle with "we have no clue what we want to archive" then teams that "we know what we want, but we lack artists to finish it". In fact I have yet to see a project to which the later applies, while of the former kind there exists dozens or even hundreds.

Re:Artists

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thedarkmod.com/ disagrees with you.

Re:Artists

[Hsien-Ko]

for some people like me, it's the other way around. I want to make a FOSS game project and have me doing all the art for it but there's no coder interested. :(

Re:Artists

[Zombie Ryushu]

I ran into that with a Mega Man related Project. There are existing Linux projects that need the artists. I could point you to several.

Wolf ET!!!

[Dersaidin]

Wolf:ET is the best freeware FPS released. Quite possibly the best PC game released. Also, half of the articles praise should be directed to the engine, not the game.

Re:Wolf ET!!!

[nahpets77]

I have to agree with you there; I can still play ET on my old P3/866 box. Medal of Honor, while good, was basically a rip-off of ET. BattleField 1942 introduced new gameplay, but it was/is such a resource hog I stopped playing it (buggy too).

Re:Wolf ET!!!

[4D6963]

Also, half of the articles praise should be directed to the engine, not the game.

Isn't Wolf:ET's engine the Quake 3 engine?

Re:Wolf ET!!!

[rbf]

Yes, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is one in a long list of games that use the Quake 3 Engine.

This story was accepted?

[Aabra]

Don't get me wrong, personally I love articles like this. They worked hard to create a new versoin and want more people to try out the game. Getting the story posted on Slashdot helps get the word out. Considering the game is free I've got absolutely no problem with it. It's just frustrating for me that when I've submitted stories regarding new versions of Skulltag (another freeware game, which yes - also runs on linux) they've always been rejected. Is a Doom 2 port not considered cool enough these days?

Re:This story was accepted?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's loads of Open Source games out there, probably only the biggest releases ever reach Slashdot. Anyone interested in the smaller games can, however, read LinuxGames, The Linux Game Tome etc. - actually those are only Linux game sites, but many of the games there have ports for other platforms too. Also, from what I've seen Skulltag isn't completely Open Source, in the sense that it requires files from the original Doom in order to be playable (at least that's recommended), whereas Alien Arena is completely Open Source (or is it?) independent and more or less original game.

Marketing dept. snuck one in?

[PIPBoy3000]

After yesterday's CmdrTaco interview, it sounds like he's locked in a constant struggle with the marketing department. Perhaps this was a battle lost? Or maybe their evil mind-control rays are finally starting to work?

Warsow

[Anonymous Coward]

This game really is crap compared to http://warsow.net/

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

Posted by a true Warsow troll. What jealousy. Pretty much anyone pimping another game here is someone who's part of another game community. And no, this game is better than Warsow, it's not even close.

Re:Warsow

[LingNoi]

WTF does Warsow have to do with the GPs post?

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

Uh, that was in reply to the person posting about how great warsow supposedly is. Check your threshold level, you'll see that.

Re:Warsow

[alphamugwump]

Personally, I'm staggered by the amount of flame wars, elitism, and sheer hatred in the open source gaming community. AA has been claiming to be the best OSS FPS evar for quite some time now, which may or may not be justified. Then, there was the time some sauerbraten admins deliberately took down the default listserver, in order to lock out the noobs. There's also the infamous Ogre vs. CrystalSpace wars, as well as some obscure faggotry between two Tron clones. I've also been hearing dark rumors about renegade admins in PlaneShift.

Seriously, when will all this bitterness end?

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

It'll end when the jealousy and bitterness ends I guess. Witness this story. Alien Arena gets good review, makes headline news, and what do you see? People posting about how such and such game is better and putting a link to it. It *is* pretty sad, and quite a shame really.

Re:Warsow

[Timbo]

Dude, the story that YOU posted unnecessarily quotes, "Alien Arena is now the very best of the freeware FPS games, surpassing even Tremulous."

The vast majority of this "jealously and bitterness" is created by you. If I were you I'd spend some more time working on the game rather than promoting it. Then it will perhaps get judged on merit rather than by proxy via vacuous articles such as this.

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

You know, I expected this kind of bitterness from Leilie/Hsien-ko, but you? I really didn't think you'd go there. First off, let's get something straight here. When Tremulous was reviewed by this same guy last year, you didn't see *me* posting links to Alien Arena and trashing Trem. Since day one, I have had to deal with this type of thing, with an enormous ammount of negativity thrown at me. Every single time Alien Arena got any kind of press, the communities for other games came out of the woodwork and started posting links to their games and trashing this one. Nothing has changed. Now Alien Arena gets a review that certainly ruffles some feathers out there, and maybe understandably so in the Tremulous crowd, and all I've seen all over the net is immediate posts about how much Alien Arena sucks and doesn't deserve being written about(making me wonder if they even tried this version of the game). Of course this happened the last release too when we reached the front page of Digg. I find it pathetic. I've put up with alot of crap from other game communities, so lets not get started on "who started what". As far as how much I work on the game, you have no idea how much I work on it. Maybe the 400 commits to SVN in the last 3 months or so would give you a clue. I suggest you browse it. http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena

Re:Warsow

[Timbo]

Who is being bitter? It's not me. I don't really understand why you don't get this. It's utterly hypocritical to go complaining about other people posting links to whatever games they like when YOUR post to a GLOBAL website PUBLICLY denounces one particular game in favour of your own. Now this doesn't really bother me in itself, I just find it a bit rich that you apparently want some kind of moratorium on other people posting their own thoughts on whatever game they like, when you're seemingly allowed to say whatever you like.

"When Tremulous was reviewed by this same guy last year, you didn't see *me* posting links to Alien Arena and trashing Trem."

Is the insinuation here that I have been trashing Alien Arena? I certainly don't remember doing so, maybe you can point it out. The only people that are making judgemental comments here are the players themselves; these are the people that you're ultimately trying to appease. If you're not satisfying them, you need to address their concerns, rather than criticising and blaming other developers.

And another thing. You have a pretty strong victim complex going on there. You seem to think that it's only Alien Arena which gets criticism. Look at any other news posting for any other game and you'll find the same repetitive drone of "this game sucks! X is much better!". Get over it, that's just the way it is. By complaining about this phenomenon, you do yourself no favours. You're not engendering yourself toward the players and especially not to other developers. Just let it wash over you and concentrate on making the game better.

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

I wasn't singling you out as someone who posted criticism, and I never said Alien Arena was alone it getting it. As far as players coming and criticizing, that is perfectly fine. That's not what I was referring to, and I think you know it.

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

Also, where does the article *denounce* Tremulous or any other game? Joe Barr saying he now considers Alien Arena to be the best of the freeware FPS games and mentions he now likes it better than Tremulous is *hardly* what I would call an endightment of your game.

Re:Warsow

[Timbo]

Finding promotional screenshots such as this doesn't indicate to me that you're really taking on board anything I've said.

Oh well, have a nice day.

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

Timbo, I have never had a problem with you in the past. There is no need to start some "war" over a game review. That is *not* some promotional shot, and I had nothing to do with it. In fact as I saw, it was a "joke" shot posted on an Anti-Alien Arena thread on your forums. Please get your story straight before flaming, thank you.

Re:Warsow

[Timbo]

I'm not trying to start a war or flaming. I'm trying to point out why people react to you the way they do in the hope that you'll stop making such a pillock of yourself in future. I don't think it's working.

Re:Warsow

[Alienkillerrace]

Take some of your own advice then - concentrate on Tremulous(which btw I think is a great game and have always had the utmost respect for the work that went into it) and stop worrying about what goes on with Alien Arena. As far as people reacting badly to me, well it appears it's just you and Cheapalert/Leilei/hsein-ko that have the issues with me personally. If you want to discuss this privately in email, then please let's, because this public pissing contest has gone too far IMO.

Re:Warsow

[Timbo]

> Take some of your own advice then - concentrate on Tremulous

What makes you think I'm not?

> If you want to discuss this privately in email, then please let's, because this public pissing contest has gone too far IMO.

If you say things in public they should stay in public.

Re:Warsow

[celle]

When both sides drop dead or are lynched by the rest of us who just want to play something decent. AA ain't it from my experience with behavior to much early nineties when it didn't lockup my machine(just tried it). Actually doom on slackware played better even then and I've been running into this same quality problem more often than not.

Re:Warsow

[f0rqu3]

yeah # of svn commits is the best way to calculate amount of work

Re:Warsow

[Reapy]

I find that most small gaming communities are full elitism and multiple sides trying to pull a game in a certain direction. In subspace/continuum people fight over standard vie rules and trench war game play. Investigating the Myth2 sites, there looked like a huge flame war between playmyth and marious. Reading Mount & Blade forums older posters are all over new guys when they suggest something off the "holy vision" of the game.

In the big games, each side has enough people that the two "cultures" don't mix. When the game gets small, people butt heads all the time, and one guy will have enough pull to wreck the game for 100's of other people when he is having PMS one day. Stuff like "Hey guys, some 12 year old said hurtful things to me. Nobody appreciates me, I am a god, therefore, deleted all the artwork I created for the game, k tnx bye".

The small projects are the best and worst of the gaming community at the same time. It seems like it is just human nature for things to end up this way.

Awesome deathmatch action for the price...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a great little game with nice maps and reasonable graphics. The engine is certainly WAY upgraded beyond"vanilla" Q2 standards (It reminds me more of Unreal Tournament 1) and anybody whining doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re:quake 2 engine?

[Alienkillerrace]

Alien Arena has - Real time lighting, real time shadows, bloom, reflective water, flares, per pixel lighting via bumpmapping, excellent particles and effects, shaders, etc and etc. Certainly stuff that puts it well beyond 1999 specs. Play the game before making comments on the supposed "quake 2" engine.

The new linux tagline

[kwabbles]

Linux: Allowing geeks to afford herb since '91

2 out of 3 ain't great

[666999]

Tremulous plays on OS X.

Alien Arena doesn't.

Re:quake 2 engine?

[Paralizer]

That's why id made it open source, so people could add to it. You're thinking of a mod where only the game content has changed and the engine is exactly the same. With the GPLed engine these third party developers can go in an update the engine making it more modern... and it's free. It's my opinion that game play is more important that eye candy anyhow.

Also, no one gives a shit why you don't read /. that often.

Re:quake 2 engine?

[MutantBlue]

Thanks for coming by asshole. I suggest you limit your visits to one-per-year.

better than TrueCombatElite.com? (ET add on)

[Anonymous Coward]

I love me some second-generation counterstrike TCE. I think they put me in jail for the week of 9/11 because I play it too much though. I guess security can't tell the difference between a game and reality...

Linux.com Rating System

[Blakey Rat]

Controls: 5 pts.
Graphics: 5 pts.
Sound: 3 pts.
Music: 2 pts.
Story: 5 pts.
Multiplayer (if applicable): 5 pts.
Runs on Linux: 50,000 pts.

Re:Open Source is Communism

[FLAGGR]

6.

spyware

[Deadplant]

I just downloaded Alien Arena to check it out and it seems to want to install some sort of web browser toolbar and make something called "crawler" my default search provider...

What kind of BS is this?
According to their privacy policy they want to assign me a UID and record the date/time/browser/ip/content of all my web searches on their servers in florida.

Re:spyware

[Alienkillerrace]

It's not spyware and it's not too difficult to uncheck the Toobar option during install.

Re:spyware

[Hsien-Ko]

The fact alone that you have included such drivel is quite sad by itself.

Re:spyware

[oddfox]

Yeah, it's not like popular software does this (bundles toolbars) already. Give the guys a break, they're trying to make a little bit of money and you're not going to get much sympathy from anyone for blazing through an install process with "NEXT NEXT NEXT damn the text!" as the only thing running through your mind. They're providing you with a full free game, who are you to get pissy when they ask if you'd like to install this program alongside? Be thankful it's not the forced bundling that was all the craze not too long ago.

Re:spyware

[Alienkillerrace]

Nothing is sadder than the leader of Open Arena making it a major point to spew his negativity all over this story. Nothing. Good going Leilei, cheapalert, Heisen-ko or whatever you wish to call yourself these days.

Re:spyware

[grumbel]

### They're providing you with a full free game

So what? That doesn't make installing spyware or trying to do so any better.

Re:spyware

[oddfox]

If it forced you to install adware, yes, there would be a problem. However, it does not. This is simply a deal the developers made in an effort to get a small bit of expenses rocouped. Nothing is going on behind anyone's back and to get indignant over this with a free game is really as petty as you can get. There is plenty of quality software out there that comes bundled with toolbars and other utilities most of us wouldn't seriously consider placing on our systems, but that often doesn't keep us from simply telling it "No, do not install this additional software" and using the program we wanted in the first place.

Re:spyware

[Sneakernets]

Oh yeah, I forgot, Alien Arena's project leader.

Drop it. Posting screenshots does not equate to stealing players.

Re:spyware

[Alienkillerrace]

I had in fact "dropped it" a long time ago. Unfortunately it's quite apparent Cheapy/Leilei has not, and made that much clear by showing up here with his numerous insults and jabs.

Re:spyware

[Sneakernets]

Oh, so he's coming back and stirring up a bee's nest?

No thank you

[zolf13]

I am staying with Nexuiz.

Quake Pong

[DrYak]

There's line of "football" Quake mods called Quake Pong by the way.

The goal of the game is to push around a huge steel ball into the opponents goal, hitting it with ballistic weapons to give it kinetic energy.

URLs :
Original QPong mod for Quake II. (Had wquite a few laughs with that one)
Newer QPong Arena mod for Quake 3. (Didn't test it).

Re:quake 2 engine?

[Hsien-Ko]

it also has the same bland saturated colors, blurry textures and other annoyances (10fps netcode, obfuscated hud) from quake2. Brilliant

Re:quake 2 engine?

[Alienkillerrace]

Give it a rest Cheapalert.

I wish I could try it...

[PhilHibbs]

...but it just makes my screen go crazy when I launch it. Maybe great, definitely buggy.

The only thing about this game...

[DaveCBio]

That makes it worth of Slashdot is the Linux tie in. It's an average shooter with a bunch of gameplay mutations. Nothing outstanding or different enough to make it stand above the rest.

Happy Requirements = Fun for all.

[CapnTibbz]

It's nice to see some of the free lance game developers, are leaning towards the not to picky pixel shaders and bloom effects. Makes it easier on the average consumer to load up and frag. You'll start seeing the chase for the ultimate video card killer start to slow down alittle with the newest release of Call of Duty 4, right up there with Oblivion's graphical engine, but with 3rd the requirements. Call that money in the bank.

Tremulous vs Alienarena?

[f0rqu3]

I wrote last year that "Tremulous is the best free software FPS game I've had the pleasure of playing." Alien Arena has changed my mind about that. They're both great, and both stand on the shoulders of the free software Quake engine, but Alien Arena is now at the top of my list. this is understandable because there wasnt any tremulous release since last year. it has been 15 months or so! I created a poll on tremulous forums about the release date of the next release. guess what ? massive amount of ppl selected VAPORWARE. AFAICT tremulous devs lost coordination and some of them disappeared. Even if they release a new version of tremulous, most likely it will be the last. This makes me sad Alien arena (?): they are trying to sell the same stuff as if it was something better than others - "it is an average fps using some enhanced version of quake 2 engine" - "No it is not! It is using the brand new crx technology and it has a brand new gameplay. did you ever see a game where aliens fight against humans? and you can hump our new ui" - "..." - "you are jealous!"

Re:Tremulous vs Alienarena?

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]it has been 15 months[/quote]

So what?
Just take a look at AA, they are around for longer than Tremulous, did they ever get the notion that Aliens could wallwalk?

AA is just another FPS for the brainless and those in need of mindless distraction.
It IS OpenSource, yes. But what is new? Imho nothing.
Did an AA-Dev register here, just to post a manual for AA with some very biased remarks? Yes ...

If they need such attention, then let them be. We all prefer smaller communities anyhows.

Re: Football vs fútbol

[tehcyder]

Huh? I... I don't know that...Aaaaarrrgggghhhhh!