Open Source Shooter Nexuiz 2.5 Released

Michael writes "A new version of Nexuiz, a GPL-licensed, first-person shooter, has been released. There are over 3,000 changes in Nexuiz 2.5, including new maps, new game-modes, enhanced graphics, new audio, and other major changes. Phoronix has posted a preview of this Nexuiz 2.5 release, with screenshots showing the impressive graphics and how it has raised the bar for open-source gaming. Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge."

Comments

Bizzaro-UT

[im_thatoneguy]

Are all of the maps UT maps or just all the the ones in the trailer?

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[Firehawke]

Well, I certainly recognized Facing Worlds, but I saw a lot more Q3 than UT in the videos in the map overall.

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[esteel]

Actually there are only two q1/q3 alike maps in Nexuiz, all the other 20+ included maps are new to Nexuiz. Quite a few custom mappers were inspired by ut/q3 maps though.

First PS

[Bromskloss]

Many games claim to be the first person shooter. I don't know whom to believe.

Re:First PS

[dns_server]

I guess it's just a matter of perspective.

Re:First PS

[v1]

Depends on what criteria you want to use. Doom was probably the first contender but lacked almost all notion of the 3rd dimension. IMHO bungie hit it first with Marathon, with improvements over Doom too numerous to list. Some of the key additions were vertical aim, lifts, reloading, reasonable ammunition limits, bundled map AND physics editors, improved mob AI, and of course the big winner, networked multiplayer deathmatch. I personally think that last one is a requirement, though there have been some very good FPS that lack multiplayer. (Deus Ex my fav) The only thing Marathon lacked at the time was "jump" and "climb".

Re:First PS

[Blakey Rat]

That's ok, I can never tell the real time strategy games from all the fake ones out there, either.

Re:First PS

[genner]

Wrong, the original Wolfenstien was the first FPS. Doom was the first multiplayer FPS though.

Re:First PS

[AKAImBatman]

Try again. Ever hear of HoverTank 3D, Ultima Underworld, or Catacomb 3D?

Wolfenstien was the first popular FPS.

Re:First PS

[Phasma Felis]

ken's labyrinth, Catacombs 3D for sure.. then Wolf-3D.

Nope. Ken's Labyrinth was just another Wolf3D knockoff; it came out a year later. Catacomb 3D wasn't even id's first FPS (that would be Hovertank 3D).

OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[ZeroNullVoid]

This should run on crappy systems and good ones based off the system specs and engine.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[sortius_nod]

HL was Q2, not Q1...

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[yelvington]

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.

I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.

The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[TheSambassador]

Actually, I found the mouse lag to be due to Vsync. Try turning it off.

Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating. Server side checks and such can of course be implemented, but what prevents someone from just turning all the enemies bright red?

With the source, one could even make a rather effective aimbot (Or just write a bot that plays completely by itself) and it would be nearly undetectable since any countermeasures are also open source.

I understand that even a closed source game will have its fair share of cheats, but open source is almost begging for them.

Re:Cheating?

[struppi]

Yes, but how do you notice someone is cheating? Because he is good? In counter strike, any time someone enters a server who is much better than all the others, people start shouting "cheater". That doesn't necessarily mean they are cheating.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

Re:Cheating?

[Tei]

Some QW engines use a closed source module. Since QW is GPL this is a small violation of the GPL no one care about.

I don't know how to handle this Nexuiz. Has to be easy* to pick the Darkplaces engine and compile a version with wallhacks. Most probably this is managed by real humans on the other side banning ip's and the sort.. and with a nice enough community where cheating is rare or non existant.

* to tell the truth.. DarkPlaces is (sort of...) a total rewrite of the Quake engine. It has interesting tecniques to speedup the rendering, and use today technologies. This complexitude will act somewhat like a "unintended obuscation" to make writting wallhacks somewhat hard.

Re:Cheating?

[windsurfer619]

I actually find it a complement when I'm kicked for "cheating" when I'm actually not :)

Re:Cheating?

[ion.simon.c]

...how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

I saw a social solution to this problem. Back in the day of Descent and Descent ][, (Both of which were closed source apps at the time.) folks would host matches explicitly for folks who wanted to cheat. If you ran into a cheater in normal play, you either ignored him, or generated another game. (IIRC, there was no kick/ban feature.) D1 and D2 were P2P games, not server/client, so it was trivially easy to cheat. Very few people did.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

What one of the developers had to say about cheating: http://www.nexuizninjaz.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=428&pid=3267#pid3267

To add some technical stuff to this emotional matter:

Basicly only a few cheats are possible: auto-aiming (which aims for you and SHOULD be able to hit perfectly), wallhacks (which allows you to see through walls) and speedhacks (which allow you to run faster). Stuff like health, armor, weapons you posses are TOTALY in control of the server and can't be changed by any client. So if you suspect people to be unkillable this usually just means they collect lots of health/armor and as you can collect them almost without limit it can be hard to kill someone really stacked. Being able to change health/armor/weapons would require a custom setup (recompiled) server, so if you play on the 'well-known' servers you should be fine. In theory it might be possible to hack a server but thats totally unheard off. So, nothing to cheat here..

Speedhacks usually point to some bugs in Nexuiz and while there were such bugs in the past they should all be fixed now, which should make speedhacking impossible. If there are still bugs in Nexuiz the developers should be told about! For the fun of it, due to network changes a certain Nexuiz version acted as speedhack on certain older nexuiz servers, but again, thats all fixed now and also helped to get server admins to update :-) So, nothing to cheat here..

Wallhacks are also impossible with the default settings because Nexuiz uses a clever anti-wallhack. Basicly most games tell the client the position of all other players and items and when using a hack to make walls transparent you can see those players and items in the whole map. Nexuiz in turn only sends info about players and item only if you could possibly see them. So even if someone WOULD use a wallhack and make walls transparent there would be nothing to see. This means wallhacks are USELESS in Nexuiz, nothing to cheat here... (Unless someone changes the default settings to save SERVER cpu power). One can also usually notice a wallhack when spectating as the user of such hacks tends to aim at players behind walls. However notice that good players tend to do 'prediction shots' aka shoot were they think someone might be or go to. Their experience is good enough to make this tactic work very well.

Which leaves us with aimhacks or autoshoot hacks. First the bad news, in theory there is nothing to REALLY stop them. Some games, companies TRY to run programs to find KNOWN aimhacks but thats a arms race and can only be lost. Programs like punkbuster will only hog your system while searching for known hacks, they can not find UNKNOWN hacks and a few month ago there was a big uproar as someone found a way to get MANY (iirc tenthousends) people banned via punkbuster though they did not cheat at all :-).
Now the good news, aimhacks can usually be spotted very easily if you spectate. Also, as i said they should be able to hit perfectly but they do not. Most of the hitscan (point-and-frag) guns in Nexuiz have spread. For example the shotgun and mg. Also while playing online there is ping which changes slightly and thus some shots are missed. Other weapons are projectile based which can be evated. Thats an area were good players with lots of experiance can even be better then aimhacks because they are better at anticipation and can 'feel' were that guy will move to :-). Also players that use aimbots usually do so because they are not as good as they would like to be so you will notice a big difference in movement and aiming. As for autoshoots, thats a hack which 'fires' if you move the crosshair over an player. That thing can be harder to find in an demo or spectating but it will ONLY work with hitscan weapons and is also not perfect. If its a bad autoshooter you will notice it fires rockets or similar guns when the crosshair meets the other play

Re:Cheating?

[KDR_11k]

And the modified client could just do the same thing except do the hashing on a copy of the original executable instead of the one that's actually running.

Re:Cheating?

[K.os023]

Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

While interesting, that statement is very poor in actual information. At the very least, a link to some page will let people easily see what you're talking about. Actually saying that it had "an anti-cheating mechanism using an RSA-based public key cryptography authentication system that also attempts (with limited success) to detect and prevent Man-in-the-middle attacks." is even better, especially if you give references. Now I know wikipedia is not the best source but it does give more information than simply saying it had a primitive form of DRM.

Re:Cheating?

[Phyvo]

Kicking people for not being good is just bad. Yeah, noobs are a pain when they're on your team, especially in Tremulous where feeding is a problem. But for most cases, at least when I've played, you can votekick people who are really feeding or newbies who won't listen to reason.

But I really don't like automatic newb kicking, a.k.a. "winner stays on". If you're a really competitive player, than sure, having a newbie on your team sucks. Ideally you shouldn't have one and there are so many players that there's some kind of matchmaking system, or ranked/unranked servers. But the instant you start alienating new players who are trying out the game that you're playing is the instant you start strangling your game to death.

New players are, in a sense, the next generation. When you're small community you can't afford to give up your ability to grow. Can you imagine if that newbie rule was in place, 1.2 was released, and a bunch of newbies joined, but were subsequently kicked out of every other round? Most would just stop playing then and there. They don't want to be second class citizens, then ones you want just want to suck at the game in peace.

Maybe I'm conjecturing too much. I honestly don't think that being nice can actually save Tremulous, or any other game, by itself: the developers are the natural leaders who make stuff happen, and it is hard to do anything without your leaders.

Also, "loser stays on" is also kind of a bad idea, as it's really easy to fake being worse than you actually are just so that you can stay on. It wouldn't be as great in Tremulous as you'd be directly making the other team stronger, but I can still imagine people who would rather lose than be forced to not play because they're too good. The point of people playing your game is so that they can play your game! Not sit out...

What type of DRM do they use?

[Anonymous Coward]

What type of DRM do they use?
Because EA has taught me that playing games without DRM is stealing and wrong ... very wrong.

Unless this installs some horrible boot-sector-writing DRM to my computer, it isn't up to EA's commercial quality standards and I don't want it.

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[MrNaz]

It's not often that I feel it's appropriate to say this, but this is one of the rare occasions where it is:

You want it? Go code it yourself!

(Oh, and before you whoosh me, I know the OP was joking.)

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

You want it? Go code it yourself!

So that's why some people want companies to open up DRM! It's because they do a clearly superior job compared with open source equivalents!

Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Seriousity]

I've tried to run Nexuiz on my ubuntu desktop and each time it's crashed the X server, hopefully I can share in the glories this time around! :D

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Artemis3]

Don't use full screen mode (use windowed) and it works. Hopefully this has been fixed...

Re:Tool can be used as a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

If the stores didn't sell so much proprietary bread, this wouldn't be a problem!

I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[emanem]

Come on, I'm plying on the PS3 at Killzone 2 and Resistance 2. The graphics is not comparable at all... Are we sure, Michael, that this is a new game? Cheers,

Not Very Impressing

[aaaaaaargh!]

Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[physicsphairy]

First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid. While Nexuiz might not be an innovation to the genre, and might not smitten you with the highest res graphics, it still proves the concept of open source by taking something that already existed (the original Quake 1 source code) and continually improving it with user contributions. Hardcore gamers will definitely appreciate the never ending flow of UI and gameplay improvements. And if someone ever has a better idea, they can take Nexuiz and expand on it, whereas without that open source foundation, not only would they be delayed by years of extra work, they might not even start.

And I'm sure if you go to the trouble of reading the changelogs, you will have a much greater appreciation for all the work that has gone into it than you do just as some guy who plays the latest console releases.

Meanwhile, checkout TA: Spring for a RTS, and Wesnoth or Freeciv for turnbased strategy. If you aren't impressed, I suppose you aren't in to strategy games.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[dave420]

That sounds lovely and all - I appreciate the immense amount of work the developers put in, but they ended up with a game that looks 10 years out of date. So what you're saying is that FOSS FPS games are made by people with the best intentions and skill, but end up being terrible when compared to closed-source commercial games.

FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[John Betonschaar]

Kudos to the developers and for someone who likes this kind of games it's probably good fun to play, but seriously, you can't really call this 'impressive graphics' or 'raising the bar for OSS gaming', can you?

It looks like they just took the Quake 2 engine with Quake 3 sound clips and recreated all the levels en textures.... badly...

Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.

I can understand it's hard to create something that compares to a commercial game in terms of graphics and content, but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay. There must be some guys with really crazy ideas they can try out.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[gbarules2999]

Some people like this type of gameplay. Who are you to judge?

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[Patch86]

http://openbve.uuuq.com/en/index.html

I somehow feel a train sim posted in an offtopic comment might be immune to the traffic bombardment of slashdotting...

Looks like FUN

[BLKMGK]

I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games. I say "So What?!".

I like FPS and own all of the UT series of games as well as some of the older id games. I still find myself going back to UT2K4 over and over even though I have a later "better" UT3. Why? It's not the graphics, it's not the engine, it's not the sound - it's the gameplay. UT2K4 is FUN for me. Fun doesn't require super duper grpahics it simply requires engaging gameplay. With all of the custom maps, weapons, and other things added to UT2K4 it's a ton of FUN to play. Looking at the movies for this game it looks FUN just like the old Quake games were. Okay maybe the graphics aren't quite as good as a modern shooter but I don't appear to be paying $50 for it either AND honestly many of those bells and whistles found in expensive games don't add to the FUN. Kripes I had FUN playing the original Wolfenstein. the original Quake, why couldn't I also enjoy this one? Folks don't like the maps? Build better ones - just like what has been done with UT, Quake, Doom, and others. Stop bitching about that stuff and fix it if you really have heartburn with it...

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

They've now managed to get where Windows gaming was a decade ago.

What Open Source game looked like this on Windows a decade ago? This is not about Windows vs Linux, this game is available to both of those platforms _and_ OSX. The comparison here - if you absolutely need to make one - is Open Source vs Proprietary games. And it's amazing what people are able to produce without getting paid for it.

Good job at bashing people who work on stuff on their free time. And yes, Wine owes you to work flawlessly with whatever Windows game you decide to throw at it, because you paid for it, right?

Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremulous

[PNP_Transistor]

I don't see how a game like this can compete with something like Quake Live. Quake Live (still in beta) is free and has comparable graphics and gameplay. Yet it already has a much larger community, more polish, and runs more smoothly.

I understand that it is difficult for an open source game to have the same playerbase and polish as a professionally developed, ad-supported game. But at the very least Nexuiz should run more smoothly and should differentiate itself from other games that have already been released.

I'd say that a better open-source game might be Tremulous. Runs much more smoothly on my computer, and I often want to play it because its gameplay is different from other games I already have. Perhaps that's why there have always been more Tremulous players than Nexuiz players in my area.

Just consider it a new aspect of gaming...

[jopsen]

Why don't we just consider it a new aspect of gaming... ?
- May the best hacker win...

Re:GPL? Where's the source code?

[esteel]

Source is included in the zip file.. Stupid trolling on your part.

Elo rating

[tepples]

In counter strike, any time someone enters a server who is much better than all the others, people start shouting "cheater".

Tetris DS solved this by giving players Elo-style ratings centered on 5000 and then only matching players with similar Elo ratings. It also shows the other player's screen: if the other player is obviously getting only I pieces and not getting garbage, then he's using the "always Starman" cheat.

Noob player but addicted

[bucketoftruth]

I get violently motion sick when I play FPS games, but I can't stop playing this one. It's screaming fast and really fun. I think what makes it desirable to play is that it lacks the polish of the commercial titles but plays incredibly fast on my dated hardware. What it really comes down to is well designed maps and textures (for me).