Slashdot Mirror
New 'Reloaded Edition' of Alien Arena Open Source FPS Released
An anonymous reader tips this news from IndieDB:
"Alien Arena: Reloaded Edition has been released. This is a major release of this game, with many new features, and a veritable truckload of new high quality content. Every aspect of the game has been improved upon and expanded, from the engine, to the game code, weaponry, and overall gameplay. Some of the new features for this release include: Many new rendering features; Twelve new/rebuilt levels; Two new player characters, the Overlord and Warrior; Brand new 'super' weapon, the Minderaser; Improved antilag code; "Simple" items rendering option; Improved and expanded movement; Improved Bot AI, particularly with CTF; New music, and music 'shifts' in game situations; and a variety of bug fixes and code cleansing. Alien Arena is free to download, free to play, and the code is open sourced, and that will never change."
the code is open sourced, and that will never change.
Are you sure? Are you absolute certain? Do you feel lucky, punk?
I'm downloading it now. Prepare to be teabagged, bitches!
By 'anonymous reader' do they mean their advertising department? How many "this game is-coming/just-came out" stories do we need on the front page?
adding "Reloaded" makes it sound even more dated than "2012"
This isn't 2003 anymore. The hype surrounding the second Matrix movie is no longer culturally relevant.
The Windows installer will also try to install the crawler toolbar. Supposedly it lets you uncheck the boxes but they are checked by default. This is BAD behavior in my opinion. If they want to recommend it and leave them unchecked to start with (i.e. you must opt IN not OUT) that is acceptable.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
It's just you.
Confirming that it's just you.
Where's the 'Reloaded' edition of Alien Autopsy?
Now, like a lot of other open-source multiplayer FPSes (Xonotic, Warsow, World of Padman), all we need are people actually PLAYING them online and we'll be set. Bonus points for active players here in Australia.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
...meaning opensource games are 13 years in the past.
This game blows. It appears to be populated largely by reject kids from halo.
Thanks for the spamvertisement. that was a waste of time.
Game cannot be commercially used and the data is proprietary. Don't get too excited...
http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/trunk/docs/license.txt?view=markup
Why the video in this post is Flash? I don't have one, because they make my computer and me sick. UGH!
Oddly, my immediate reaction on watching the video was the exact opposite to yours, more like "Why is this so graphically poor?".
Sauerbraten graphics are way better than this, with the sole exception of avatars. for some odd reason, Sauerbraten avatars never progressed beyond the basic ogre-like form of Cube, dunno why. See http://sauerbraten.org/ for more info and downloads and source.
But avatars aside, everything else in Sauerbraten seems more graphically polished, and it runs at 200 FPS on old hardware.
(Maybe it's just a poor Alien Arena video cap.)
there are few enough A-grade open source games
The problem here is that there's no money to be made from free video games, which in the present capitalist system of things means no way to put a roof over the developers' heads and food in their children's stomachs apart from a bounty system like Kickstarter. Though selling support works for some kinds of business software, games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher. Furthermore, the game consoles tend to have explicit anti-copyleft policies. See previous posts by jcnnghm, turbidostato, and alexo.
Then they'll argue that this is the only way they can fund things like the program's web site.
To defeat that argument, you'll eventually have to demonstrate a way of funding the development of freely licensed software intended for non-business use without installing this sort of adware. The "selling support" method works only for MMO games, not for single-player, living room multiplayer, or LAN multiplayer games.
...meaning opensource games are 13 years in the past.
Like that's stopped anyone. People are still making and selling new software for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a hardware platform twice that old.
The first thing I thought when I saw this footage was, 'hee, this is unreal tournament'...
The engine is far more advanced than Quake 3.
games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher
Even free to play games were rare because the idea of selling in-game items had not been tried. Who would think that someone would pay for a digital flower? [...] The sale of vanity items in multiplayer games can fund development.
I don't see how selling items could work in a Free game that isn't MMO. If the game is Free, someone could just hack the game to give himself the item in a non-massive mode such as living room multiplayer, LAN multiplayer, or private server online multiplayer.
But just to get you thinking, imagine a multi-player game which has updates every 2 weeks. If you don't have the latest copy you can't play with others.
Yes you can: just play a non-massive mode.
An automatic update subscription costs $48 a year billable in increments. Yes you can wait a few days and find someone willing to give it to you for free, but wouldn't you rather pay for a subscription?
If the game is Free, it wouldn't take a few days. Someone would script up an automatic mirror in one of the P languages and have a delay of no more than an hour.
Single player serialized content has similar potential if it is well made.
I don't see how so, especially if above-board mirrors of Free single-player mission packs pop up within the hour.
You can even write games whose only intent is to create a brand for selling merchandise (ala Hello Kitty in Japan)
Now you're getting somewhere. Non-copyright restrictions such as trademark law can be used on a product released under a copyright license for free software and free cultural works, much as Fedora and OpenBSD restrict their brands. But not all brands can become strong enough that they inspire parodies
Downloaded the tarball and installed without too much trouble. Runs pretty good on my 460, but could use some more optimizing I think. Levels are a little on the dark side, but the game does look really good, and was fun. It's come a long way since the last time I played in 2008 or so.