A Look At Free Quake3 Engine Based Games 77
Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, nearly two years ago. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."
id Software Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting timing! (Score:1, Interesting)
Come on, dude. Give credit to the source of your post.
Two others... (Score:5, Interesting)
nexuiz.com
warsow.net
Nexuiz is incredible. (Score:5, Interesting)
Seconded for fucking truth. Nexuiz is the most fun I have had with an open source game in the history of ever. I had a LAN last October wherein we played Nexuiz for most of the night (amidst filesharing, Xbox games, and food and conversation) and it was an absolute blast. The couple of LANs before that, while great in their own right, weren't as cohesive when it came to everyone getting into one game.
I experimented with Cube, but found that it wasn't as seamless for LAN play as Nexuiz, and some of the levels (at least in SP and where bots are concerned) were sadistically difficult. As I described it in a forum post, "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye."
The great thing about Nexuiz is that it combines:
One of the problems we had in some of my LANs was that some people's computers, primarily the girls' laptops*, were underpowered for games like CoD, MOHAA, and the like. UT '99 ran fine, but you can only play an 8-year-old game for so long (stop throwing things at me, Starcraft fans, I know it's still awesome and I'm talking FPSes here. ...Stop throwing things at me, Deus Ex fans. ...Fine, you win) before you hunger for something new. Yet, when we played Nex, we had (among others):
With the exception of my test box, which lagged pretty severely, Nex ran without a hitch on everyone's system. One person had mouse troubles, but she had the same problem with UT at a previous LAN, and was using a wireless mouse, so I'm chalking that one up to hardware.
On top of that, it's cross-platform Win/Mac/Lin, so nobody's excluded. First person to say "I run BeOS you insensitive clod!" gets slapped with a large trout.
Aaaaanyway, give Nexuiz a shot. It's great. And the blood effects are, put simply, a little frightening for an OSS project where people presumably work on what they like.
* - Yes, I have girls at my LAN parties. Stop looking at me like that. You're creeping me out.
Re:Two others... (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem is most of these projects don't "get it" when it comes to game feel. I just tried both Nexuiz and Warsow and they both feel exactly like Quake1 and Quake2. Some of the graphics are updated and they have added a few effects but it looks exactly like the original. That is, dated. Also the movement feels exactly like the originals which is probably on purpose but compared to a more modern engine like Quake3 the movement feels very rigid and forced. I guess my point is while they do some updating, they don't really go far enough to create something that feels right and good. I mean they have the whole frigg'in engine source available yet they don't tweak the feel of the game. Back when I was doing mod development I would have killed for access to the engine source so I could make the game feel just right.
Nexuiz is kinda meh but I like the cartoon shading in Warsow.
More OSS graphics engines (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ogre3d.org/ [ogre3d.org]
And Crystal Space, which is very pretty, and also includes a game engine;
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ [crystalspace3d.org]
If someone however knows of an OSS physics engine for games which does a bit of aerodynamics, please let me know.
Re:Day of Defeat-ish alternative? (Score:3, Interesting)