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."

Comments

Re:GLSL is .... ?

[KDR_11k]

(Open)GL Shader Language.

Slashdotted

[KermodeBear]

The main site seems to be slashdotted out of existence, but I was able to find a download link as GamersHell.

Re:Slashdotted

[KermodeBear]

ModDB also has download links.

Re:Slashdotted

[mattyrobinson69]

here is another ( games.on.net )

Re:Slashdotted

[AlHunt]

Parent link is to Window version.

Here: http://www.gamershell.com/download_47540.shtml is the Linux version.

Re:GLSL is .... ?

[donscarletti]

GLSL stands for openGL Shader Language. It's a high level way of specifying vertex programs (functions run on each vertex) and fragment programs (functions run on each pixel as it is drawn). Basically, it provides a language environment similar to c that can be used to program the GPU to do calculations that the CPU would otherwise have to do. Another similar technology is Microsoft HLSL which does something very similar for DirectX (though using slightly different terminology such as "vertex shaders", "pixel shaders" and "geometry shaders").

Wow, it has technical specs.

[Chelloveck]

But is it fun?

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[nomadic]

Since it's open source, the answer is: probably not.

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[ZosX]

Perceived value. The value of something increases in peoples' minds with the cost. It all has to do with how informed the consumer is. A lesser informed consumer would see something that is free as worthless, otherwise, why would it be free?

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[Lisandro]

Seriously. I hear that argument with OSS games every time - "yeah, it might be fun", but it looks like crap". Now we have a relatively good looking game, and we get this. It's a fairly classic multiplayer FPS - if you liked Quake 3 or the UT series, you'll be enjoying it.

I find it funny no one seems to apply this argument to most commercial games lately. Most of them look glorious but are shit to play.

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[KermodeBear]

I played for 15-20 minutes and, for me, it isn't all that fun for one simple reason: All of the weapons take only a few shots to kill someone, at most. Usually just one or two. So, it ends up being a twitch-fest. There's enough twitch games out there already.

Half-life, now there is a game that had deathmatch down. It took a while to kill someone. There weren't a lot of insta-kill weapons. A little slower paced. The "thinking man's deathmatch" if you will.

Graphically, it is pretty nice. For an open source game, it is fantastic.

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it funny no one seems to apply this argument to most commercial games lately. Most of them look glorious but are shit to play.

Wow, you're right! I've never heard anyone express this opinion of popular commercial games before, especially not in EVERY SINGLE GAMING DISCUSSION EVER!

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[LoverOfJoy]

I'd much rather a slashdot game summary link to a game review than a changelog. Sure, not everyone will agree with the review. There are individual preferences. But personal preferences aside, some games have design flaws that make it less fun for most people. Some games have unique quirks that make it more fun for more people. It'd be interesting to learn of some of those kinds of differences and I don't think there's anything wrong with asking about it.

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[nacturation]

Wow, the bashing didn't take long.

Everyone bashes anything that is free. From free t-shirts, to a free day camp for kids, to free FPS game. If it's free it is bashed. If it cost $10, it would not be nearly as criticized. There is some sort principle I've read explaining this concept somewhere.

Okay, I think we've answered the question "Are you fun?" But the original question was whether or not the game was fun.

Re:Wow, it has technical specs.

[4D6963]

All of the weapons take only a few shots to kill someone, at most. Usually just one or two. So, it ends up being a twitch-fest. There's enough twitch games out there already.

That's true that a lot of multiplayer FPSes these days give you less than a second from the time you see your enemy to kill or get killed, but making it so you have to empty a whole clip and a half into your opponent doesn't fix it. The solution isn't necessarily in a trade-off.

Which reminds me of a very fun mod for CoD4 I've played lately. It's a paintball mod, a Simpsons mod (you play in 3D Springfield) and you can jump very high, there are few buildings you can't leap over in one bound. So basically, it's a huge bunny hopping map, but here's the fun thing : if you pick a grenade launcher, you can kill an enemy on the ground easily (takes lots of luck to hit a flying enemy with that), and you have a poor firing rate (one shot every 2-3 seconds).

So what happens is you spot an enemy, let's say you're on the ground, not jumping. At first you don't shoot, because grenade launchers don't fire straight, and because you need to make the projectile hit the ground not the enemy to have a chance to kill the enemy on the ground. Your enemy is bunny hopping, all over the place. So what you do is start hopping too, but carefully you only start hopping when your target is about to reach the apex of his jump. Because what you want to do is be at a high point and be relatively stable while your enemy is near the ground to shoot him. So you jump, keep track of your enemy, and hopefully if it worked out well you get him in one shot while you're quite steady in the air by shooting at the point on the ground where you predict he's about to land. Optionally another quite fun option is to stand on land while your target is in the air, run to the point where you think he's going to land, and punch him dead when he lands right next to you.

For short, it's fun because you first have to track down your enemy, you don't have to start aim and shooting mindlessly but rather carefully calculate your time of jumping, your time of shooting and where to shoot (which is not where your enemy appears to be but where you think he'll be, which makes it more fun), and if you're against a skilled bunny-hopper it can lead to an exciting jump-dogfight which outcome can be quite interesting, like for example the two jumping towards each other and punching or shooting each other at close range in mid-air. Alternatively it's also quite fun to pick out guys that are high perched and staying there by jumping high and shooting a paint grenade from a distance straight into them or their immediate surroundings.

A shame these days we're sticking to a guy who runs all over the place and shoots supersonic bullets straight into his enemy when there's much room for trying alternatives that have wildly different gameplay results.

Re:OMG WHY NOT ON MAC?

[wicks0r]

There is a "unofficial" mac patch here, but I can't get it working on 10.5.7. Anyone else get it working?

From the Alien Arena site:

The official MacOS port has been indefinitely postponed. However, apparently someone has indeed ported Alien Arena to the Mac, and released a patch. Download the linux version above, then apply this patch. We cannot guarantee this will work.

Oh wow, it gets worse.

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Oh wow, it gets worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, Windows is not ready for gaming.

Re:Oh wow, it gets worse.

[GimpAlien]

Tries to install toolbar, wow, I found a way around it! I unchecked the friggin box!! Woohoo! And let me say, if you are having Galaxy issues, look to your router\firewall or your settings. OR even read why some issues may occur. All this crap over a free game, FREE, that you are whining about just shows immature reactions and impatience. And if you'd simply hit esc, you would have gotten into the game very easily. That's why SOME have enough sense to read before jumping into something. Well, most can take some time and have the intelligence to figure things out. Had you played with shape blocks as a toddler, you may have better luck and patience now. For others who read this, trust me, the game is great, especially for FREE. To complain about something that gives you what Alien Arena does, have no patience and make it sound SOOO bad is beyond ridiculous and while everyone has preferences, may not like the game which is fine but going off like you paid for it, lol, childish.

Re:Windows installer totally broken

[KermodeBear]

I noticed that too. I also noticed that you can change the installation directory, as long as you have one of those input devices... What are they called now? Keyboards? Kids these days.

That I didn't mind nearly as much as the search toolbar they try to get you to install after the game is installed. Can't blame the guys for trying to get some compensation for their work, but I, like everyone else I'm sure, avoid those toolbars like the plague. (o:

Re:Windows installer totally broken

[Blakey Rat]

Would it kill me? No.

Do I feel any compulsion to help them fix bugs in a game that I'll never play, or even look at, again? No.

Do I have any confidence that they give even the slightest shit about fixing bugs, since I saw approximately 50 of them in the first 5 minutes of running (or failing to run) the game? No.

Look, the "Galaxy" dialog beeps every time you click on anything. Copy and paste doesn't work. The text is an unreadable color-combination. The actual game presents you with a mysterious prompt (using a different unreadable color-combination) with absolutely no instructions how to play. For God's sake, it tries to install spyware. Obviously the people making this game don't give a shit. So neither do I.

Re:Windows installer totally broken

[robot_love]

Don't believe it, Kiffer. I have over 15 toolbars installed and if anything, I'd say my browsing experience is significantly degraded. However, I suspect that with just 5-10 more toolbars I'll be past the 'tipping-point' and my browsing experience is going to go stratospheric!!

Re:GLSL is .... ?

[sopssa]

What is interesting is that how have they implemented a system to prevent cheaters and hackers? As Open Source game makes it possible to get the full game code and just make your cheats into it and build your own client, rather than going the harder route of debugging asm language. Have they implemented something to prevent cheating, or have they just totally ignored it?

OpenAL

[arQon]

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

Re:Windows installer totally broken

[Spaham]

welcome to the hasrh reality of end users !

The value of time

[nacturation]

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.