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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released 142

Posted by Soulskill 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."
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Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released More

Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released

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  • I am a casual gamer and tech-average slashdotter, but what the heck is GLSL ???

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

      (Open)GL Shader Language.

      • Re:GLSL is .... ? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sopssa ( 1498795 ) <sopssa@email.com> on Sunday June 21, 2009 @01:21PM (#28411803) Journal

        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?

        • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xappax ( 876447 )

          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.

          • How do you not "trust the client"? Even if virtually all the code was on the server, with the client only providing the user input, how is the server to know whether it's the user or a bot pointing and clicking to get the headshot?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Toonol ( 1057698 )
        Does it REQUIRE OGSL capability? I've been a bit disappointed with the number of open-source games that require relatively cutting edge and expensive video hardware, with no fallback options. My current system only has drivers for OpenGL 1.4, which as far as I can tell doesn't support that capability.
        • No, it does not. Simply disable GLSL in the "video options" menu and you're good.
          • You know, this is all it takes, yet so few companies will willingly let you disable advanced options like this, instead forcing you to not be able to play a game which would otherwise probably operate just fine on older hardware. If I didn't know better, I'd almost say there was some sort of collusion between hardware companies and the gaming companies.. but then again, I'm sure people say that about Microsoft as well.

    • Re:GLSL is .... ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by donscarletti ( 569232 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @10:59AM (#28410775)
      GLSL stands for openGL Shader Language [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org] which does something very similar for DirectX (though using slightly different terminology such as "vertex shaders", "pixel shaders" and "geometry shaders").

      • 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.

  • Nexuiz clone? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It looks, plays and feels just like Nexuiz! [alientrap.org]

  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)

    by KermodeBear ( 738243 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @10:57AM (#28410767) Homepage

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

  • Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @10:59AM (#28410777)
    But is it fun?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      Since it's open source, the answer is: probably not.

    • 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: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But is it fun?

      I'll bite.

      Yes, it is fun. It is not "I'll log in every day and join a clan and become a regular" fun, but more like "I'll log in when I'm bored and chase people around and waste the day" fun. I've installed and uninstalled this game dozens of times. There is no backstory single player mode. Mostly just running around shooting people

      It's free. Why would you even ask if it is fun? It's like having a chef try to hand you a free sample to taste and saying "but is it yummy?".

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Spaham ( 634471 )

        I won't try free samples if they don't look yummy...

      • The value of time (Score:3, Informative)

        by nacturation ( 646836 ) *

        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.

    • Re:Wow, it has technical specs. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KermodeBear ( 738243 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @12:31PM (#28411399) Homepage

      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.

      • I remember Half-Life. It was nice, but it was a little boring. I was always falling asleep at the keyboard, waiting for the guy I was shooting at to finally die. I remember having the same problem with Halo. I don't play either game anymore.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

        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

        • Just popping in to say that your description of the Simpsons mod sounds a lot like Tribes from back in the day. It's amazing the amount of depth that a rocketpack (crazy jumping) and slow-moving projectiles (the Tribes disc launcher) can add to a game.

      • All of the weapons take only [one or two] shots to kill someone.

        You might like Nexuiz (more), then. If you play just a little defensively and you don't overcrowd the map, you can typically survive quite a few shots from most weapons. Even with just the default 100 HP, you can survive a few shots from almost half the weapons.

        What's great: if you're close enough, you can hear what other players pick up, so you can gain an advantage by figuring out where on the map they are and where they're going (so you can ambush them).

    • 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

      • It isn't surround sound, but who the hell has a 5.1 surroundset for gaming anyway?

        Ehmm, you ever see those sets with a woofer and 5 or 7 small speakers? Don't cost a whole lot either...there's a reason pretty much all soundcards these days are 7.1

        • I have yet to see somebody with a surroundset that's not utilised for watching DVD/BluRay movies, let alone plugged into a desktop computer.

    • I played the previous version a couple years back, mainly because it could run on my Pentium 3 w/ TNT2. IIRC it was basically a Quake 3 clone using a heavily upgraded Quake 2 engine. Yes, it was fun.

  • Sorry, had to ask. The Linux world always bitches when something ignores them. Just seemed right.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      i believe it is on the mac as well... the linux client is listed as linux/unix, still downloading and waiting to test it for sure though

      for everyone else, here's another download link:
      http://games.on.net/file/27574/Alien_Arena_2009_7.30_for_LinuxUnix

    • Re:OMG WHY NOT ON MAC? (Score:4, Informative)

      by wicks0r ( 982807 ) <jmwicksNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday June 21, 2009 @11:23AM (#28410951)
      There is a "unofficial" mac patch here [110mb.com], 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.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This site [gigenet.com] has a patch that will fix your issue.

      • None of the developers have Macs, none are willing to buy one just to port the game. There was someone who was working on a Mac port, had it almost finished, then he disappeared without releasing so much as a header file. He was calling himself "Heisenburguncertain." If you ever run into him online you should ask him about it.
    • Most PCs come with Windows. Linux is free. Therefore, pretty much anyone can work on a Linux or Windows port. OS X is not available for third-party hardware, so if someone wants to work on the Mac port, they have to buy a new machine, which typically means that you only get a Mac port if someone actively wants to work on it. Combine this with the pain of building things like SDL on OS X, and irritating limitations of the Darwin linker / loader (e.g. no support for __thread variables) and you end up with

  • 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)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @12:20PM (#28411321)

      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. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21, 2009 @12:24PM (#28411347)

        Clearly, Windows is not ready for gaming.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by GimpAlien ( 1581901 )
        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

        • [It] tries to install toolbar, wow, I found a way around it! I unchecked the friggin box!

          Yet more of this defense-of-authority attitude. Come on. Nobody wants this thing, and the default should be off.

          • Ok, let's then just talk about the toolbar, there are numerous PAID for software that DO THE SAME THING. Not to mention it's hard to find a freeware that doesn't, they do exist but not many. Norton was one of them that had this even though you pay an arm and a leg for their crap. Comodo has free security software and they are far more sneaky about their ask.com toolbar. So yeah, maybe no one wants it, so don't leave it CHECKED, lol. Did a hand come out of the screen and slap you when you tried to uncheck i

            • So it's all right because others do it? That's a bullshit argument. It's still a tricky way of getting unwanted software onto unsuspecting people's computers. If people actually wanted this software, vendors wouldn't have to pay to have it piggybacked onto completely unrelated programs. It's deliberately deceptive, and just because you know enough to uncheck the box doesn't mean that everyone does, or should have to, know to do that.

              Why the hell do people like you continually advocate for the interests of f

      • So, basically, what you're saying is... It's just as well that it's not succesfully ported to OS X? :P Sounds like usability epic failsauce, to me.

        Maybe if they hadn't ignored the Mac platform and checked out some of Apple's industry-leading guidelines on usability, UI and "UX", it wouldn't have turned out that horrible. Seriously, I believe strong adherence to good guidelines will make every aspect of your software of a higher quality.

        Then again, I wager this game was developed by coders, with graphics

        • Boils right down to this-- In order to get a Macintosh with enough power to run this game, you'd have to shell out at least a thousand dollars. None of the developers have that kind of money to throw around right now, as far as I know. And did you actually play the game? How can you judge the usability, graphics, audio, and whatever else without playing it, just because it doesn't support OS X? Obviously I'm not saying you should install another OS just to play the game, but don't judge.

          • What do you mean? Did they develop the game for Win/Linux on 500mhz Pentium IIIs? If they can't afford a $1000 Mac, they can't afford a $1000 Windows PC. Since you can run OS X on Intel x86 [osx86project.org], these guys could be theoretically running OS X on the very same machine they're developing in Windows on. There's just no longer the argument that "We can't afford Macs, so we can't make Mac software"...

    • Re:Windows installer totally broken (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KermodeBear ( 738243 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @12:26PM (#28411367) Homepage

      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:

      • 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.

        • 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)

            by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @12:39PM (#28411441)

            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.

            • "Galaxy" is an IRC client/server browser. I do agree that it sucks, but you don't have to use it. As for the "CLI" you got, that's the ingame console, which basically all games (Quake 1-4, Doom 3, ET:QW, UT 1-3, etc) have. You should have been able to get out by hitting "escape." If you didn't think to use "esc" you obviously haven't been using computers long enough to know that button's universally understood and respected function. If you want to skip galaxy, try the "quickplay" icon which should also h

              • "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

                • 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!"

                  How am I supposed to know? I didn't make the game, I have in the past suggested that galaxy be removed from the game, and to be honest your experiences with it are a very good argument that I could use in favor of its removal-- but the way you phrased it really doesn't come off as convincing or helpful.

                  I understand that, but how come it shows up when I'm trying to enter a game? And not, for example, when I'm already in a game and hit ~? And apparently there was some secret formula I had to type in there to join, and hell if I know what it is, so.

                  And if I hit escape, what happens? Jack shit. It just sits there, doing nothing. I gave it at least a full minute before giving up.

                  Okay, that really ought not to have happened and could have been a bug. I never ran into something like this. Then again, I haven't used galaxy in about a year. My experience with it is outdated. But once ag

                  • Some of your complaints are actually valid, but since you are so rude about them, it really nullifies any chance of anyone really being willing to resolve them. You seem to ignore, out of hand, any possibility that the developers might actually be open to suggestions (which in my experience they are.)

                    It pisses me off when they waste my time releasing something that sucks, that they *know* must suck (I don't believe for an instant that nobody on the entire Alien Arena team hasn't ever seen a decent game UI b

                    • Don't know what to say, I have never personally encountered any of your problems, nor have I ever heard of anyone encountering those problems. Could have something to do with the Slashdot effect (I know whenever Icculus goes down, Galaxy starts up slower because it can't get the newsfeed from that server.) To be honest though, pretty much everyone else has gotten the game to work. Maybe it has usability issues, but its a fun game, and myself and thousands of others just manage to get by... somehow.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by Endo13 ( 1000782 )

                    Normally I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but I think the main problem here for Blakey is that he didn't sign up to help test a beta and report bugs. He downloaded something that was supposed to be a complete working package, ready for anyone to use. Whether it is free or open source or not is really irrelevant. If it's still a beta (and it sounds like it is) then it should be posted as such.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Vohar ( 1344259 )

                You should have been able to get out by hitting "escape." If you didn't think to use "esc" you obviously haven't been using computers long enough to know that button's universally understood and respected function.

                Escape generally is used to cancel or exit something. I wouldn't have thought to use it as a method of progression either. Same boat as this other guy--I'd be thinking that I had to enter the right command to run or search for servers or something in order to play the game, not exit out of what it was giving me.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kiffer ( 206134 )

      It also wants to Enhance My Browsing Experience by installing a browser tool bar... yippy

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

      But hey, at least it's free!

      Yes, people who can take all the design risks they want would rather give up that freedom of trying something new to make yet another fucking Quake-clone. I'll blame it on people doing it for the "I did it, and it's free!" factor rather for trying a cool new idea they imagined.

      Strangely enough, not so many people have any good new ideas that they want to follow.

  • 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.

    • They should dump it. Building an application to manage the sound API is completely backwards and makes linux look poorly designed.

    • Unfortunately pulseaudio has significant problems

      You could have just stopped there.

  • 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.

    • If I run ... Dell ..., everything should be fucking flawless.

      You really need to lower your expectations buddy, no operating system is going to fulfill that one.

  • 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

    • did you extract with permissions? try chmod +x crx

    • 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:
      $ locate libopenal.so /usr/lib/libopenal.so.0 /usr/lib/

  • OpenAL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arQon ( 447508 ) on Sunday June 21, 2009 @02:27PM (#28412367)

    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

  • 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 [proboards.com]

    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 [proboards.com]

    Everyone having issues look at forums.

    Plays great on my Dell Inspiron e1505 and looks great for FOSS/x-platform

  • 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

  • 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
  • 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 inclu

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