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Free Software FPS Games Compared
An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."
Wolfenstein, I still love you!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
...coming back to frag you once more! I do like World of Padman...funny story, funny graphics....aw heck...funny game. Community 3d games are actually a lot more fun when they try to be themselves (original, don't have to conform to much of the real deal), look at Bz-flag....crap graphics...still fun as h*** to play and there are still hundreds of servers with thousands of players playing it.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
They missed AlephOne - the OS marathon development... Still very playable even on very lightweight equipment.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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Open source and free are not mutually exclusive as most of us know.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is free, but I don't think is open source. Maybe it is, it is based on either Q2 or Q3 engine, and Q2 engine is open sourced (or GPLed), maybe Q3 engine is as well.
But anyway, it seems as if the summary equates open source with free and free with open source.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
What about Urban Terror? http://www.urbanterror.net/ . Just released a new version. It's a pretty fun game.
While the site seems to be down, here is a draft copy of the article text, I cleaned up the grammer before the actual post but didn't save that version because I was stupid. Original had pictures to keep you distracted. About two weeks ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled "New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition" yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games. This was done in the same style as Barr's previous feature, "Tremulous: The best free software game ever?" which described Tremulous but also lacked comparisons and relations to other games. This feature hopes to be a thorough comparison of the major free software shooters. There have been many free software first-person shooters (FPS) projects over the years, from modded Doom and Quake engines to enhance the existing games (ezQuake, EGL, ZDoom), to free art packs such as OpenQuartz or OpenArena. In 2002, along came Cube, a single and multiplayer FPS based on its own engine, including artwork, maps, models and an ingame map editor. In the freeware (and Linux compatible!) world a little-known game called Legends, a Tribes-inspired game, appeared yet remained closed-source. Filling the FPS gap in the open-source world has usually been left up to commercial companies who release their games with Linux support (i.e. Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Loki Software's work) or freeware games produced by commercial studios(i.e. America's Army, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) or simply running Windows games run via wine. In the last few years a few built-from-scratch community-based FPS projects, most built on the GPLed Quake engines, have popped up, among them are Tremulous, Alien Arena, Nexuiz, and Warow. Some have kept their art assets under a closed license (Warow), while others have also released their art under an OSS license (Nexuiz), I consider both categories free software since well, software refers to programs, code and procedures, not artwork. For this comparison, we'll take a look at active, robust and community-developed free software shooters. Most released free software shooters are designed for multiplayer, a logical step for a game developed in an online community, however most also feature a bot-based single-player mode. While others have compared such games before, this feature seeks to be a little more thorough and go a step further, ranking the following seven games: Alien Arena, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Warow, and World of Padman. In ranking these games, gameplay, design, innovation and presentation (in that order) will be held as primary criteria. 7. Sauerbraten Sauerbraten is basically Cube 2, the sequel to one of the most influential free software shooters released to date. The engine is completely reworked with brand new graphics rendering features rivaling that of Quake4. Like Cube, Sauerbraten has a built-in map editor that allows player to edit maps from within the game, making this one of the friendliest games for content-creation. The latest version of Sauerbraten, 2007-09-04, is little more than a subversion snapshot packaged and stabilized for wider distribution; the game is still in heavy development. Sauerbraten gameplay drastically differ from anything Cube offered, with simple Quake-style weapons, game effects, and the same Quake3-like FFA action. It is worth noting that Cube (and Sauerbraten) give you a weapon when you pick up the appropriate ammobox; there is no separation between ammo and weapons.While it has some cool features, the game still feels like more of a concept demo than an actual game, and with only 20-30 servers, half running instagib, there isn't much of a community following. Single player is reminiscent of Quake1, with enemy monsters in a variety of maps. The menu is actually one of the coolest I've seen implemented in a game, it spawns as an object ingame and faces you, however the lack of a main menu upon load adds to the tech-demo feel. Despite the tech-demo nature of the game, Sauerbraten has a good soundtrack, lots of maps, good quality models, well-done artwork
I have yet to see one game that works correctly on a Linux box with Xinerama. At least in full-screen more. Some of them won't even let you change resolution at all, let alone tell them to run in a window.
When they run in full-screen they tend to span the displays and have all the action right in the middle so the important stuff is split in two.
And quite a few games crash on the weird resolution.
I'm not saying I've seen Windows games work on dual-head or ever support two monitors, but at least they have the decency to just pick a screen and use that one.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
What the hell are you on about? There's not even a link in my first post.
They missed Q3A, surely the best free game out there. In 2005, id Software released the complete source code under the GNU GPL. The copyrighted textures have been duplicated by way of Open Arena. With Q3A/Open Arena, comes many amazing mods such as Challenge Pro-Mode (CPMA) and Urban Terror (UrT).
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Wow, another list of free games? The last three articles weren't enough?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
most of these shooters would be considered pretty good...in 1996.
I think that's a little unfair to say when most retail games have multi-million dollar budgets and these games are made by volunteers.
I can't guess as to whether you went to college or not, but most colleges have a competitive formula SAE team. The team is made up entirely of volunteers, and some of the primary goals for being in such a project is to learn more about what goes into building a functional vehicle and for sheer fun -- it's hobbyist work. Notably, these cars aren't too technologically advanced, and Ferrari with their massive F1 budget could make a mockery out of these SAE cars with one of their F1 cars. But, we all know that comparing an Formula SAE racer to an F1 car would be unfair. But we also know that the Formula SAE teams are breeding grounds for some of the best automotive engineers for tomorrow, and most car companies know this and try to peg their interest by sponsoring these teams.
It's the same case with these open source shooters. They don't have the financial backing to hire skilled artists that are willing to work full days, however I would say that say that a lot of these projects are breeding grounds for tomorrow's John Carmack's and like the SAE teams, companies like id try to do their part in supporting the community.
How is it not opensource?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Animoog.org
already posted bug report, its in hand.
me: D2 Reply to hidden parent appears joined to previous thread
pudge: Yes, this is known, and we know it's a problem. We have plans to deal with it.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1849018&group_id=4421&atid=104421
liqbase
Tremulous is a very fun game.
The article is wrong though, there are a lot more than eight maps, and they didn't copy off Natural Selection. Both Natural Selection and Tremulous copied of Gloom.
I've tried these three games. I'm a FPS fan and when I moved to Linux I wanted some free shooters, so I took a look at these three, in the order in the subject. Nexuiz: Good but gameplay doesn't seem solid. The sound effects were pretty bad on my system at least and the weapons are weaker that Q3 I think. After a while I had this problem where all the textures were replaced by weird looking patterns and I gave up trying to fix it. An ok game but nothing really special. Alien Arena: This is the first free game that I played that I actually like and would play seriously. The controls are solid and the weapons are well-balanced. Graphics are good although on my main system they sucked cause of graphics card drivers. I had to play on lowest res and lowest detail settings though. Great level design and pretty good bots. WoP: I hated this game. The weapons were unintuitive and the levels were too dark, and adjusting the gamma didn't help. The sound effects were annoying and most of the levels were of the open type where bot aim held superior. even on the easiest level I was wiped out. I also have a valid copy of Q3 which I tried a while ago and it ran the same as it did on Windows. Alien Arena is the only one I found worth it.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'm sorry but other free software is slated as comparable or better then closed source software so why not games? These games suck.
bzflag is a good free game, which just goes to show that fancy graphics have nothing to do with how good a game is.
expandfairuse.org
Maybe because a game is not just a piece of software and most decent games have hundreds of full time graphics programmers, mission designers, texture artists, concept artists, AI programmers, skybox artists, effects artists, animation engineers, networking programmers etc. These kind of resources just aren't available to open source games, at least not to the same level as commercial games.
Nice comparison, thnx :D
seeing as 6 out of the 7 games are Quake-based :P
It strikes me that open source has a reputation for really good code and half-assed presentation, so I wonder why there aren't many free-from-day-1 game engines :-/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Right on! Because lord knows top-notch games like Portal never get their start from small-budget hobbyists working in their spare time.
Oh, wait...
the problem with myminicity (and indeed most such sites before it) is that they do not consider it spamming. In fact, throwing that URL out as much as you can - on your blog, on forums, in your feeds, by IM and so forth and so on is the whole -point- of that site... as it is visits that cause the 'city' to grow.
:\ )
Good luck finding rules on where a 'player' is allowed to post the URL(s). Even more luck to you finding a 'report abuse' page or contact address. Good luck getting any response whatsoever from contact@ ( if you do get something, by all means follow up here
... is Urban Terror. But as others have pointed out, did you mean free as in beer or open source? Free by itself is pretty misleading. At any rate Urban Terror pwns those other ones damn hard. Especially the new version with all the great new maps.
Much Love,
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Quake was released in 1996. OpenArena uses the Quake III engine.
Saying OpenArena "would be considered pretty good...in 1996" is like saying the SR-71 Blackbird would be considered "pretty good" in 1935.
It's such a ridiculous understatement that the only possible explanation is that you're British.
Also see dim3, a free open source 3D game engine with tools. Runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
http://www.klinksoftware.com/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Those listed are almost all graphics-related. I really don't care too much about the visuals, but some deep, engaging gameplay would be nice. Linux gaming today means playing free rip-offs of games that were cool in the mid-90s. (Civ2, Quake, SimCity, etc)
All the mentioned games seem to be about network deathmatches. What would you suggest for someone who prefers story-driven single-player games?
(having an OSX version would help a lot too)
Circumcision is child abuse.
Until they have way too many WW2 FPS games. Amirite?
But seriously, in many ways I'm surprised at the lack of progress in the gaming areas.... the games do look quite mature, but nothing comes close to Crysis. One can argue that, yes, Crysis has huge dollars behind it. But open source games should never need to reinvent the wheel... doesn't that count for something? Shouldn't that mean the games evolve constantly from the same rich base?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Cry more. :)
But seriously, those one-hit kills are pretty well balanced in TF2 by a few simple facts:
Sniper: Yeah he gets one-hit kills, but has to be scoped for a few seconds, can't see much else, and isn't useful in any other situations.
Spy: Useless when not cloaked/disguised, can be easily detected by shooting since there's no friendly fire, and Pyros are meant to check teammates for spies in the midst. Also, disguised spies still collide with enemies, so if you try to run near/by someone and you stick a little, let loose on them.
Play it again. A coordinated team of humans are great. It depends on one thing though. When Sudden Death occurs, the humans should still be able to build armouries, as the aliens are still able to evolve.
Great game. Just finished a round right now. Best game I've played in *years*
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
My problem with one-hits in general is that if you give someone any way at ALL to create a one-hit opportunity, certain players will spend all of their time figuring out how to abuse it. The spy's invisibility power gives him the ability to run behind a line of rushing players, uncloak and eliminate them all nearly instantly. There's no way to defend against this short of reducing the effectiveness of your rush by having everyone be constantly watching where they came from instead of concentrating on the enemy that they're trying to rush against. A good spy forces a team to be constantly preoccupied with watching their backs, reducing their effectiveness against conventional attacks. A single player simply shouldn't have this kind of power. Removing the spy's invisibility would fix this problem for me. I've never played a game where giving players complete invisibility didn't completely ruin class balance, and giving that player a one-hit kill as well is just blatantly bad game design. As for the sniper, there are plenty of places where a good sniper can completely shut down an offense without giving them any chance at retaliation. That's the most frustrating part, if it were *possible* to kill the sniper before he got you, I wouldn't have a problem. That's the problem with long-range, highly accurate one-hit kills, there's simply no way to defend against them, because there's no way to get close enough that your own weapons become effective. The most ridiculous example is that even a medic'd heavy with 450 HP gets taken out by a headshot. This shouldn't be possible, a medic is supposed to increase the survivability of the player he's healing, and no other weapon in the game comes even close to doing that kind of damage. My view is that sniper damage should be affected by distance like all of the other weapons in the game, and at most should do 150 when fully-charged, multiplied to 300 for a headshot at *close* range.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
What about the RTS genre? Nothing better then building a base, an army, and storming into an enemy base.
I played many games over a several days. I almost never saw the humans win unless there was a huge skill stack on the human side. Far more often I saw the aliens win, and occasionally a sudden death which inevitably went to the aliens.
What was the most frustrating for me was not being able to buy upgrades or evolve because I hadn't killed enough people yet. Especially at later stages in the game where practically everybody had evos and upgrades, it was incredibly difficult and frustrating running around as the weakest player in the game trying to kill players far more powerful than me so that I could get the upgrades I needed to be able to take out these powerful players. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It's the same problem I have with counter-strike, if you're on the losing team with no money, how are you supposed to take out people with body armor and AK-47s when all you have is a pistol? This kind of problem is frustrating and I consider it to be bad game design. I vastly prefer games that level the playing field by giving players equal abilities and not penalizing teams for losing.
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I know what you mean. But if you think about it, a good part of open source software is filling a "need." There is a need for a java IDE that has x features. There is a need for a full featured text editor with extra utilities for editing code. There is a need for convenience installers for linux programs. There is a need for games. Wait, what kind of games? There is where it becomes very open ended and not well defined. The passion of wanting to develop an open source application to fulfill a need does not mesh with the artistic vision of commercial game developers. So they can implement bland imitations of popular games, or games that just don't have widespread appeal. It would help if when someone was inspired to make a ground breaking game, they would say "I'm making this for linux, screw making money." After this point I'm guessing, but it seems more likely that given significant inspiration for a game, someone will go to work for commercial companies. At that point making a linux version becomes laughable among bean counters who only see numbers of customers, and don't share a passion for free software. There's probably more to it, but that is my initial take on it.
your comment would be considered insightful... in 2005.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Yea, except the new version of Urban Terror removed bots. Lame. I'll stick with 3.7, TYVM.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Ya, because why would anyone want to play a game where one side had an advantage? Like chess. No one plays that anymore. Who wants to play black?
Seriously, asymmetry is the point of trem. It's not just team play. It's team play with *really* different teams. I play trem a lot. I think aliens win about 2/3 of games. I don't care if it's not 50:50.
You make a good point. Once you get to sudden death, I think aliens win about 80% of games. But that's cool -- it just means hummies need to attack early. Hummies are usually stronger in the first two stages of the game.
As for your other point, most servers allow you to accumulate creds/evos by just not dying. So if you're poor, just play defense for awhile.
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Unless you're really trying to push the limits of your target platform hard, programming is a drop in the bucket compared to the work done by the artists and level designers. The level designers probably have more to do with good gameplay than the programmers.
Level design is also a REALLY tedious process. Making a good level requires replaying the level over and over slightly tweaking things to get them just right. It gets old fast, and you get really sick of the level in the process. And of course you have to deal with the issues that come up from playing the level that many times. It's very easy to memorize the level you're working on, and end up making the level way too difficult because of that.
Having played Trem and Natural Selection (which is free, but not open). I vastly prefer Natural Selection.
But it still has the same issues that you don't like in Trem.
And fwiw, TF2 is brilliant.
Vermifax
Logout
I certainly can't find it in this bunch of Q2/Q3 clones ...
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Why not? Ultimately, it's just personnel resources, whether it's commercial or OSS. Are there not graphics programmers, mission designers, texture artists, concept artists, AI programmers, skybox artists, effects artists, animation engineers, networking programmers etc. available to the OSS community?
"most of these shooters would be considered pretty good...in 1996."
Unfortunately, the same can be said of most modern commercial games as well. They've all turned into insanely expensive incremental updates on the same game play. Game companies need one of three things (and possibly all three):
1) An innovative new gaming genre along the lines of the switch from 2D to 3D. I'm not holding my breath here. Nintendo has come closest to this with the Wii controller, but this was a glancing blow, and won't last forever.
2) Game players who were born after 1995, and therefore don't know any better. This is cheap and easy to come by, so this is probably where game companies are placing their bets.
3) People with more money than sense. Also fairly easy to come by, but not quite as easy as 2.
While multiplayer is fun to play, at least for me, it get's old in a few days. Those games are lacking story modes.
The in-game logic source code was released in 2004 to aid 'modders' but the game engine itself remains closed to this day (although it may eventually be released).
I know it sounds paradoxical but W:ET was never derived from GPL code (in the licensing sense) because id Tech 3 was under a closed license when it was licensed to SD (This may lead to issues with SD/Activision ever being able to relicense the source)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
With regards to spy invisibility, I've never had too much trouble seeing the ripple effect a spy gives when they're invisible. Then again, I play the engineer class the most and we get paranoid like that.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Well that seals the deal for me. I won't even bother trying Tremulous because I tried Natural Selection and thought it was awful.
Mind you this was a few years back; I don't know how much has changed in that time. But NS to me took the concept of twitch reflexes to such an extreme that it was completely unenjoyable. I just read on the Tremulous forums about how their recommendation is that your mouse sensitivity should be set up so that you can do a full 240 degree spin with a single hand swipe. My god I do not want to play a game where it's important for me to be doing 240 degree spins. I really enjoyed Socom 2 on the PS/2 when I played with a group of friends, and also Jedi Academy on the PC. Both games require good aim and good evasion but neither required the ridiculous levels of twitch reflexes that NS did when I played it. I spectated as other players in NS and I couldn't even tell what the hell was going on. The dude was flying around so fast that everything was a blur. Then when I played, people were whizzing around me and killing me before I could even tell what was happening.
Sure, if I played the game for weeks and developed my twitch reflexes I suppose I could hold my own. But I don't really want to play a game for weeks just to start to have fun with it. And I don't want to become good at a game where good means just being able to spin around really fast and line up aim at the other dude before his ultra reflexes can do the same to you. I appreciate some degree of reflexes in games - which is why I don't play MMORPG's, their combat systems bore me to tears - but I think it's a fine balance and NS (and probably Tremulous) are just comical in how far they go overboard with twitch reflexes.
My favorite multiplayer game of all time was Jedi Academy in seige mode. It is so cool for each team to have multiple objectives each game, and it makes each game interesting because you're not just doing the same thing for 15 minutes straight. Also I think the balance of reflexes vs. strategy was good. The only thing that bugged me was losers who played dark jedi and used force choke. So boring to just sit there while you're being carried around and choked and there is no way to break out of it. If I ever saw someone getting choked on my team, I made it my priority #1 to shoot the dark jedi who had them to stop the choke. Also snipers sucked because they turned a fun game into a 'wtf just happened' experience.
I guess that sums it up for me. The more 'wtf just happened' moments a game has, the less interesting it is to me. And NS (and probably Tremulous) was just one long sequence of 'wtf' moments for me.
Err no
I wish that wasn't true but it is. I'm a FOSS game developer, this month a saw a musician advertise himself on one FOSS gaming site and he was asked by at least three different projects to work for them. Programmers outnumber artist something like 10-1 or 100-1. Most of them are not Geeks or Nerds like us programmers who spend our life on the Internet. They seem to be in different communities and speak in different groups to us. Not to say we don't get along with them they are just not like us. Also they view some licensing issues different to us because they are artists of a different sort.
BTW in your list the people tasked with the jobs of graphics programmers, AI programmers, networking programmers are all available but because most FOSS projects are small in size it is hard to find specialist like these when you want them. Most programmers in FOSS game development have to wear multiple hats.
If the sides are asymmetrical, you introduce a mechanic that forces both teams to play each side over the course of a match and whoever performs better over the course of playing both sides is declared the winner. This is basic game design here. If Team A wins as aliens in 8:47 and after switching sides Team B wins in 10:47, that doesn't mean "both teams have won," that means "Team A won faster so they win the match." This is a mechanic that needs to be introduced into the game itself to reinforce this concept.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
As engy it's pretty easy to keep your back to a wall and keep your eyes peeled. As most other classes you're moving around the map leaving territory behind you that a spy can use to get into your blind spot. The problem is that if you're constantly checking your blind spot, you become more vulnerable to enemies in front of you. It's a no-win situation.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Don't get Warsow either. It left in all the movement quirks of the Quake engine that you saw NS players using and even adds a few more, so to be decent you have to spend all your spare time practicing movement skills. A lot of the game too is switching weapons depending on the situation, and because of all the movement the appropriate weapon for the situation can change every couple seconds. The upside is that you can take a lot of damage so there's no real WTF "moments" as much as WTF "spans of several seconds." It's a very well-designed game, but places too much emphasis on movement skill for it to be really fun for me.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
It's the same problem I have with counter-strike, if you're on the losing team with no money, how are you supposed to take out people with body armor and AK-47s when all you have is a pistol?
This isn't as much of a problem as it might seem. You can always just save money for a round, that will give you enough money to buy pretty much anything.
A bigger problem with CS is that some maps are clearly stacked in favour of one team (eg dust is a major CT map).
meh
Well, money's just one of the many, many, MANY problems I have with Counter-Strike, including the other one you brought up. Yes, you can do a pistol round to save up more money, but the very idea of a counter-terrorism organization sending an operative into a situation with just a pistol and no body armor is ridiculous to me. It wouldn't be as bad if the game had a less realistic tone to it (i.e. TF2), but as it is the bizarre mix of attempted realism (including incredibly annoying things like weapons that can't decide whether they're accurate or not) and blatantly unrealistic elements (such as jumping around a corner and headshotting someone standing halfway across the map) just ruins the game for me. Decide whether you want to be realistic or not and go completely in that direction.
And for the record I hate realism in games. When I play a game I want to have fun, and while dying to a single bullet may be realistic, it reduces firefights to a simple matter of whoever sees the other guy and pulls the trigger first, which really isn't all that fun at all. It's far more interesting to play a character that can take some damage without dying, making firefights last more than just a couple seconds and giving me the ability to turn a bad situation around through superior skill and tactics.
I'll put it this way... If throwing a touchdown pass in a football video game were as difficult as throwing a real touchdown pass against an NFL defense, nobody would want to play it. So why do people insist on realism in shooters?
Anyway, regarding the issue of asymmetrical balance, you would think that somewhere in game design 101 people would learn that when you make a game where the teams have asymmetrical roles, such as offense and defense, you should make sure that the game forces players to assume both roles at various points in the game and determine the winner by comparing how well the teams perform when they switch sides. Think like football, when Team A's offense scores a touchdown against Team B's defense, you don't declare A the winner, you put B on offense and see if they can score against A's defense.
All CS tournaments score matches this way, but in my opinion a mechanic needs to be built into the game itself that will switch the sides every once in a while to make sure pubs are balanced as well. Many many more people play CS in pubs than in tournaments, and I think a game should cater as much as possible to public server play even if it is sometimes played in tournament settings.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I was looking for free MMORPGs and found out this one. http://www.auteria.com/
Surprisingly it runs on Linux and FreeBSD
and only 100MB in size.
Pictures included. http://mu-in-f104.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.linux-gamers.net/smartsection.item.81/comparison-of-free-software-shooters.html [There are other cache servers at google.com, try f100, f101, f102, or f103 if f104 is unresponsive]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That doesn't work if you're not playing a jedi character.
The funny thing about user-created content (and it really shows in every single one of these examples) is that the maps tend to look incredibly bland and undetailed - not to mention these in particular look like they're all based on the Quake 3 engine, circa 2001.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
or FPS
I'm not going to bother about some of the things I feel are erroneous in Sepht's assessment of Alien Arena - it's the man's opinion and he's entitled to it. I will however, leave you all with something to make your own minds up with - especially in regards to the graphics/engine of the game. These shots are taken with the game as it currently stands in SVN. Alien Arena 2008 is set to be released likely in late winter 2008, and you can see here from the shots what it will look like. http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_1.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_2.jpg http://cor.planetquake.gamespy.com/arena/aa2008/aa2k8_3.jpg http://red.planetarena.org/
Well said, when you're winning, you feel better and then you do better. That should be the only advantage there is to winning, none of this: "Wow, good job killing everyone on the other team, here are some better weapons, to make sure there'll be absolutely no challenge for you in the next round!"
How is it offtopic? I'm discussing the games linked in the article. Metamods had better catch this.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Exacto-friggin-lutely. I've always liked the Mario Kart approach to game balance. Where Counter-Strike consciously emphasizes the difference in skill between the two teams, Mario Kart tries to minimize it by giving better powerups and more speed to the players in the back of the pack, creating a close and competitive race even between players of different skill levels. This keeps the game fun and exciting for all players instead of simply handing an easy victory to the better player. Lopsided games are *never* fun for anyone involved, you always have the most fun in a game that's so close you don't know who's going to come out the winner. It's a shame that more game designers don't understand this.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
OpenArena uses resources from Cube? That's news to me. Thanks for lying, TFA.
We haven't exhausted the possibilities of the current interfaces, there's not really a need for a new one. The thing a new interface does is change the rules, most publishers got a list of "safe" game designs but if you change the interface that list becomes useless and they'll look for new game designs. It changes the mentalities more than it really changes the games.
However, it's hard to get a new concept off the ground if you're not a one man dev team. Even if it's not about money it's much easier to recruit other devs for "let's clone our favourite game!" than "I've got this new idea and hought we should try it". I'm pretty active on the opensource engine Spring but despite all efforts to get beyond the initial plan to "remake Total Annihilation in 3d!" most of the playing still happens in TA mods which haven't even bothered to update their 3d models from the old 1997 material and many people still think about changes to the engine in a TA context (there's a lot of whining how some feature would be unfit for TA mods despite the feature being completely optional and only meant for use by mods that are not TA).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
So I might as well give a mention for Odamex, which is more or less Doom 2 with proper netplay (actually ZDoom with all the non-GPLable bits ripped out). I like Sauer and Nexuiz and all that, but the more features they pile on the more unplayable the framerate gets. I know my 9250's old, but seriously...
Apparently building a game with AI and Free Software are incompatible for the time being: I don't know any Free SW games which has an AI say equivalent to the quality of Half-Life (the first) for example.
Oh absolutely, I didn't realize how essential level design was until Nexuiz's mappack was released. It was basically a rehash of a lot of older quake maps (that I personally would not have had the chance to come into contact with), and they were very noticeably more playable than anything I'd ever seen in that game. Which isn't to say that I didn't like the original Nexuiz maps, but these were much more natural to learn and frag in.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
It might sound like a troll, or my question might answer itself, but why bother with trying to create FOSS FPSes, considered how high the big game studios set the bar in the FPS domain? Sure, the effort behind Sauerbrauten is admirable, but what does it bring? What sets it apart from the Quake, Unreal, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Deux Ex, Soldier of Fortune series? Its price?
Here's my point : we have limited means, limited resources, there's only so much quality content we can create, FAR less than big game studios. What are our advantages? We have all the imagination possible, we can do whatever we want (within the realm of what's humanely possible, there's so much we have yet to create which would only take one coder, one vision and a few weeks), we're pretty much the only ones out there who can afford to create something completely new!
So why put so much efforts into projects which require none of our advantages, and try to compete on big studio's gaming field, knowing we can't do something better than them by merely following them? Why do we do that? Is it because we don't actually have that much imagination? Do we like to start coding without thinking for ourselves first? Do people go "Boy was Quake III cool! That'd be awesome if I could do something even a hundredth as good as that!"? Is video game making such a mature art that we have the feeling that there's only a few kind of games we can create, and that thus people choose to create what they like best among the limited number of choices? Do we look at the proverbial box we don't think out of and go "This spot is the best spot in the box"? Are we aware there are better spots outside this box that are yet to be explored? Will people in the distant future still be devoting most of their play time to multiplayer FPSes with the most realistic graphics/physics then possible?
Wow, I should totally have more hangovers, that makes me kind of deep I guess..
You just got troll'd!
There are more indie FPS games listed on Mod DB if anybody wants to give some different ones a whirl. There are also a few listed in the Mod of the Year Top 100 if you're looking for popular ones.
(Yes, I do admin there and this is a shameless plug which is why I've turned off my karma bonus for this post).
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Even if it's posted anonymously, i find that comment very insightful.
They are all just quake 2 or quake 3 clones with replaced graphics, as far as i can tell. Well, Nexuiz implemented some of the thinsg that don't suck about Unreal Tournament.. but still.. pretty much just a Q2 clone.
The engine has enough stuff in it that it can bring my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo to it's knees, though.. but the art pipeline isn't near good enough to make it look like it should be doing that.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/