4930239
story
Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday June 21, @09:44AM
from the new-bells-new-whistles dept.
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."
Related Stories
Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)
The main site seems to be slashdotted out of existence, but I was able to find a download link [gamershell.com] as GamersHell.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)
ModDB [moddb.com] also has download links.
Parent
Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
here [on.net] is another ( games.on.net )
Parent
Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
Parent link is to Window version.
Here: http://www.gamershell.com/download_47540.shtml [gamershell.com] is the Linux version.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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It's the last version, but it is in sid (I am on amd64)
$ apt-cache policy alien-arena
alien-arena:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 7.0-1
Version table:
7.0-1 0
500 http://ftp.de.debian.org/ [debian.org] sid/contrib Packages
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is the keygen included?
Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not stupid but I couldn't join any game... just can't figure out, each time I join a game it shows the console and stays there.
The interface is horrible and inconsistent, in a hundred colors, with basic things anyone would expect missing. But it does have matrix style text in the console... meh.
For example, there's no 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 setting in the video options but you have two boxes where apparently you have to enter manually the resolution.... but the first time you click on it you just type a
Re:Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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Well, it's the 12329429th online shooter incarnation. So uhm... nothing new there.
The game is really polished. The quality of the graphics and the sound is really good. It isn't surround sound, but who the hell has a 5.1 surroundset for gaming anyway?
The artwork is err... a bit outdated but good acceptable as in it doesn't feel like you are playing a 5 year old game.
The entire feel and setting to this game is, well, a bit kiddy. No hardcore übergamer-style here. It is more targetted for 15 year o
Re:Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
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So simply asking whether a game is any fun is considered "bashing"?!? Sounds like you have a slight persecution complex.
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Re:Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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!
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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.
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The value of time (Score:3, Informative)
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.
OMG WHY NOT ON MAC? (Score:2)
Re:OMG WHY NOT ON MAC? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Windows installer totally broken (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Oh wow, it gets worse. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Oh wow, it gets worse. (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly, Windows is not ready for gaming.
Parent
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Yet more of this defense-of-authority attitude. Come on. Nobody wants this thing, and the default should be off.
Re:Windows installer totally broken (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
Parent
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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.
The point is that I don't know what to change it to, because I have no idea if it's a 32-bit or 64-bit application. You know, the thing that non-retarded installers, knowing which type of application it is, normally does automatically.
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Would it kill you to try one, and if that doesn't work, then try the other, and then file a bug report?
Re:Windows installer totally broken (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
welcome to the hasrh reality of end users !
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"Galaxy" is an IRC client/server browser. I do agree that it sucks, but you don't have to use it.
If it sucks, why is it the default option? The thing most users are likely to see first? "Hey, I know! Let's make sure users see the crummiest thing we have first, before entering the graphically intense, super-fun, awesome video game!"
Is it some kind of test you're supposed to pass? "You are not geeky enough to play this game! You have not passed the Galaxy test!" Fuck that.
As for the "CLI" you got, that's the
Re:Windows installer totally broken (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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I rarely do any development work on Vista as a result of the prior hassle, and don't know if they "fixed" this on SP1.
They didn't fix it because it's not a bug. You're supposed to do development in your user profile folder; that's why it's the default project location for Visual Studio, for example.
This is one of the cases where the developer ignorance/lazyness "tax" is passed straight to the customers in the form of broken apps when you get a forced upgrade.
That I agree with. The number of developers who w
A Quake clone? (Score:2)
Doesn't work on Fedora 11 (Score:2)
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
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I used unzip and it kept the +x permission just fine. I have a different error: ./crx ./crx: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$
I have openal installed (and installed the openal-devel package just to test):
$ rpm -qa | grep openal
openal-devel-0.0.9-0.17.20060204cvs.fc11.i586
openal-0.0.9-0.17.20060204cvs.fc11.i586
Looks like F11 doesn't have the latest/right version of libopenal: /usr/lib/libopenal.so.0 /usr/lib/
$ locate libopenal.so
OpenAL (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Cheating? (Score:2)
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 th
Help missing (Score:2)
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(Open)GL Shader Language.
Re:GLSL is .... ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
You mean like Assault Cube? (Score:2)
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Trusting the client allows cheating, whether it's open source or not. I don't need to hack assembly to cheat at a client-trusted game, I can just tamper with my outgoing network stream. I don't necessarily even need to look at the binary.
I dunno if Alien Arena implements trusts the client or not, but the point is that security in games has nothing to do with whether the software is open source.
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Re:GLSL is .... ? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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How many single player maps does it have?
the old version had quite a few - I just played through about 6 levels (i.e. lots more than nexuiz)
if they wanted more levels, would it be possible to use the ones from tremulous?