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Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released
Alienkillerrace writes "The open sourced, freeware FPS game Alien Arena 2009 has been released (Windows and Linux). The improvements to the game engine are very significant, and have surely raised the bar for free games of this genre. All surfaces in the game are now rendered using GLSL, not only improving the visual quality, but the performance as well. Interesting new effects like post-process distortions using GLSL have been implemented, as well as light volumes, better per-pixel lighting (reminiscent of UT3), and shaded water. Equally notable is that the sound system has been completely rewritten using OpenAL, allowing for effects such as Doppler, and adding Ogg Vorbis support. The game is free to play and available for download on its official website. It has a stats system and a built-in IRC client in its front-end game browser."
I am a casual gamer and tech-average slashdotter, but what the heck is GLSL ???
It looks, plays and feels just like Nexuiz!
The main site seems to be slashdotted out of existence, but I was able to find a download link as GamersHell.
Love sees no species.
But is it fun?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Sorry, had to ask. The Linux world always bitches when something ignores them. Just seemed right.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Just fair warning, if you let their crap-ass installer do its think it'll put the game on the root level of your C: drive. I don't know whether it's 32 or 64-bit, and since the installer's busted, I have absolutely no clue where to install it on my 64-bit Vista machine.
Quality work, as always, from the open source game front.
Comment of the year
No, actually, I think you'll find that its *Windows* that is broken - Windows simply isn't ready for Linux software, and doesn't have the resources to be installed 'properly', as it would be on a Linux system.
Not only does the installer pick the wrong folder to install in, it tries to install a spyware toolbar for IE. (What is this, 2001? Seriously, guys.)
Then when you run the game, it presents a poorly-designed dialog in which you're forced to type a username. Well, fair enough-- then you end up in something called "Galaxy." Is this the game? I thought it was an FPS! All I get is unreadable green-on-blue gibberish. (I tried to copy and paste some of the gibberish, but of course copy and paste doesn't work.)
I refresh servers, it's impossible to sort by number of players. Oh and every time you click in the window, it beeps for some reason. Now my screen blanked and I'm looking at some kind of green-screen CLI or something? I have absolutely no clue what to do here.
I've yet to see any way of changing the screen resolution, putting the game in windowed mode, setting the controls-- hell I've been at this a few minutes and I've yet to see a single 3D model!
I tried typing "Run" into the green-screen CLI-ish thing, "unknown command." So I tried typing "play", and got "use STOPSOUND". WTF!
And now I give up. Congratulations, you've made Battlefield: 2142 look like a paragon of video game quality. Hell, America's Army 3 has a better user experience, and I've yet to successfully log on to it.
Comment of the year
From changelog ...
17. New player model, Slashbot.
I thought it to be funny.
Furthermore,it`s free. Ill try it.
I wish everybody would give their time and knowledge for free,
( as opposed to charging someone 80.000 $ for 1 !! mp3 because we need an example and someone felt cheated )
the world would be so much more beautifull and people might actualy be happy and feel good about them self and each other.
I bet these guys feel pretty good.
there's also a torrent available of the windows version:
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2701466
I just watched the video, and all i saw was a Quake clone... so they worked so hard to make us play their own version of Quake arena?
Unfortunately pulseaudio has significant problems rendering sound from OpenAL apps such as the RTS game Glest. Sound is very choppy and maxes the processor making the game unplayable. Hopefully either pulseaudio gets its shit together or "mainstream" Linux distributions dump it altogether.
I just tried running it on Ubuntu 9.04 and it segfaults on sound initialization. Meanwhile, my sound works perfectly well in anything else I try. It's stupid problems like this why linux isn't ready for the desktop. Don't give me excuses about searching for howto's or configuring it right. If I run a mainstream distro, on extremely common hardware (Dell Inspiron laptop), everything should be fucking flawless.
when I try to run it, all I get is command not found stangely enough even though the executable is there
% ./crx
./crx: Command not found.
Exit 1
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Ignoring for a moment that doppler has been supported in Q3 engines since 2000 anyway, it really makes me cringe to see uninformed people touting OAL as an "upgrade" to ANYTHING, just because of its name. Pasting from a post of mine from our engine forum about a year ago:
(apologies for Wall Of Text if it comes out that way: /. seems to want to use HTML whitespace consolidation even in POT mode)
>>>
As some of you have noticed, over the years we've gone from "openal is off by default" to "openal is excluded from builds" to, finally, "openal is removed completely".
In many ways, this irritates me a lot. I like the CONCEPT of openal, and I especially like the idea that we could have HRTF etc in hardware someday "for free", and ideally I'd like to make oal the ONLY sound backend we supported and get rid of the "ugly" direct-DMA stuff.
There's just one tiny problem: openal simply isn't very good.
As I mentioned in the 1.43 notes, we've made some very significant speedups in the last year or so, and sound is one of the key contributors to that (aside from actually, yknow, WORKING properly now too :P). With my standard config, there's now NO difference in timedemo rates between having full sound and disabling it completely. If you've been around Q3 for a while, that's pretty staggering. Even if I drop to a quarter of that resolution and essentially take the graphics card out of the equation, the numbers are 478 fps with sound disabled, and ... 474 with it on.
That's 96 channels, and they're ALL used when timedemoing "four".
I tried one of the openal test programs, and clocked it at ~6% CPU, which I'd probably just about be willing to accept, except that it was only mixing 64 channels, and the entire thing was static (i.e. this is an absolute "best possible case", where it could potentially pre-mix to an absurd degree because it wasn't doing any dynamic spatialisation).
6% CPU vs 0% CPU, for 64 channels rather than 96, puts it *at a minimum* at ~10% CPU overhead when you're talking apples to apples, and that's not very encouraging. I don't expect it to MATCH cnq3's sound code by any stretch, but that's a pretty big difference and it's even worse if it IS using lazy spatialisation.
There are also questions about how "timely" it is. If positioning etc only updates 30 times a second, or sounds don't actually start playing until 50-100ms after they're added, that's fine for WoW but absolutely shit for Q3. There's no guarantees in the oal spec, or even ANY documented indication of what the "reference" implementation's behavior is, which means we'd have to wade through a bunch of (frankly, pretty sloppy and mediocre) code to actually find out. I have no intention of moving to oal just to end up spending weeks fixing it for Creative.
There are several other issues too: the bug that Q4 has with looped sounds is a direct result of bad design that would have to be worked around at the app level; likewise, oal requires app-level culling of sounds despite the fact that the app CANNOT do so correctly because only the oal implementation actually knows what the 0-volume falloff distance for any given sound is. That's just utterly incompetent design/implementation.
[snip]
Happily, Timbo (ioq3's developer) was kind enough to run the tests for me, and the numbers very nicely match the observations I've made here:
131.6 fps 2.0/7.6/35.0/3.6 ms no sound
113.5 fps 3.0/8.8/82.0/5.4 ms dma
104.1 fps 3.0/9.6/72.0/5.7 ms openal
So, "normal" Q3 sound (with some of our fixes from 141/142) is about 16% slower than no sound, which is historically what you'd expect; and oal is another 9% slower than that (while mixing only 2/3 as many channels, so the truth is more like 14%, for a total of ~30% slower than cnq3).
And that's why we no longer support oal at all.
I MAY someday revisit this. I doubt there are too many cases where the "missing" 32 channels are actually going to matter, simply beca
I played Alien Arena for a month or so and at the time there wasn't a problem with cheating. I run a server for Assault Cube now and here it's about as bad as it was with the last big commercial game I played (Team Fortress 2). Playing on a well admined server with any game helps tremendously.
Quack, quack.
This works perfect on Ubuntu for me after...
I had a seg fault on boot until I installed libopenal-dev as found on their forum.
http://corent.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=crarena&action=display&thread=4026
I also found on some resolutions I would always look up.
Another forum post also fixed that issue.
http://corent.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=crarena&action=display&thread=4025
Everyone having issues look at forums.
Plays great on my Dell Inspiron e1505 and looks great for FOSS/x-platform
PirateBay is where I do all my shopping.
It's free. Why would you even ask if it is fun?
Well Timmy... here in the adult world, we tend to value our time. There are many things that are free and are definitely fun that we adults could be doing. This game has to compete with the other free, fun things that we already do. If very few of our peers find it fun, why bother wasting the time when we'd likely come to the same conclusion? We'd rather keep doing our other free, fun things. Or perhaps new free things that our peers have found to be fun.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Does this game have multiplayer cheats available for it?
I was excited when I installed Urban Terror for the first time a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it for a day or so.. before noticing that some guys were pulling off unbelievable sniper rifle kills, suspiciously high head-shot percentages and the like. Five minutes with Google confirmed the worst- There is a wallhack + aimbot available for both Windows & Linux, it's absurdly easy to find and operate, and works like nobody's business. It just sucked the enjoyment out of the game.
Part of the problem with all these multi-platform games built on the id software open-sourced engines is that.. bots have been available for those engines for years, and the bot coders have very little updating to do in order to make new bots for the latest X, Y and Z mods running on those id engines. The people making the new games or mods have limited time or resources to put into staying ahead of the bot coders. Sad panda.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Someone forgot to include instructions. There's no listing of keys/commands. At least they remembered to classify it as a game. (I saw an object at WalMart recently whose box didn't give any hint what it was used for...)
lol: added new player model slashbot
is the keygen included?
The main site got slashdotted, literally to the brink of death. COR has moved the site to a temporary location until things calm down and the original site at Icculus is back up. Because of this, the Galaxy client takes a bit longer to launch, as it's timing out trying to get a news feed off of Icculus. So if you're a windows user, just click on "Alien Arena Quickplay", and use the in-game browser(which is a better browser now anyway).
There's a list of mirrors offering the latest version here: http://alienarena.arcadebelgium.be/
Come on, can we get our terminology straight. Is it freeware or free software (open source)? There is a big fucking difference. In my view so many of these 'free' games have shot themselves in the foot by licensing the engine under a free software license (i.e. GPL) but not also licensing the game artwork under a similarly free license. Tremulous is an example of this, as is Warsow (perhaps they have fixed this by now). If you choose to be loose with your licensing, you will find it quite hard to get included in most GNU/Linux distributions' official, (free software) repositories. You are costing yourself potential users, many of which are short on choice when it comes to easily accessible games, thus are likely to increase the user community, and possibly introduce others to the game who would otherwise not know about it.
it provides a language environment similar to c
There's no goto. There's no implicit goto. Your only "control flow" is conditional assignment (x = a ? b : c).
Among the primitive operations are matrix multiplication, matrix inversion and 1/length(vector), but no integer arithmetic.
It's about as similar to C as SQL is: not at all, really.
in Ubuntu Hardy Heron - at least it doesn't for me.
Also it is not at all obvious how the Mac patch is supposed to be implemented in OS X.
and just for good measure:
Windows sucks.
The download links for the binaries and source to the current version (V1.43) of Challenge Quake3 are broken. Please re-upload the files to FileFront and some mirrors.
Running on Ubuntu 9.10, game plays wonderfully smooth compared to previous versions. Much nicer looking than the other free fps games out there, and play is really fun. I wish they'd do more with the menus, but that's a minor complaint, otherwise this looks alot more professional and polished than Warsow or Nexuiz. Big step up, I was about to give up on this game ever playing well with settings turned on. This realese plays alot faster.
The bottom line is, it's free, it's an awesome game. If you don't like it, shut up and don't use it. Why waste time battering something no one is FORCING you to use? Did someone say you HAD to use it? You HAD to install it? No? Then shut up. Didn't like it? Uninstall it, and shut up. I do take time to defend it, it's better than running freeware into the ground. Will you donate all your free time and money to the charities the toolbar and such brings in? No? Then you have no room to complain at ALL, so shut up!
Really enjoy. But sometimes I feel like I'm on wheels - not walking/running. Anyways, great work, it's nice to play.