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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Open Source Shooter Nexuiz 2.5 Released 309

Michael writes "A new version of Nexuiz, a GPL-licensed, first-person shooter, has been released. There are over 3,000 changes in Nexuiz 2.5, including new maps, new game-modes, enhanced graphics, new audio, and other major changes. Phoronix has posted a preview of this Nexuiz 2.5 release, with screenshots showing the impressive graphics and how it has raised the bar for open-source gaming. Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge."
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Open Source Shooter Nexuiz 2.5 Released

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  • Bizzaro-UT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:45AM (#27463835)

    Are all of the maps UT maps or just all the the ones in the trailer?

  • First PS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bromskloss ( 750445 ) <auxiliary.addres ... nOspAm.gmail.com> on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:45AM (#27463837)

    Many games claim to be the first person shooter. I don't know whom to believe.

    • Re:First PS (Score:5, Funny)

      by dns_server ( 696283 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:59AM (#27463899)

      I guess it's just a matter of perspective.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by v1 ( 525388 )

      Depends on what criteria you want to use. Doom was probably the first contender but lacked almost all notion of the 3rd dimension. IMHO bungie hit it first with Marathon, with improvements over Doom too numerous to list. Some of the key additions were vertical aim, lifts, reloading, reasonable ammunition limits, bundled map AND physics editors, improved mob AI, and of course the big winner, networked multiplayer deathmatch. I personally think that last one is a requirement, though there have been some v

    • Re:First PS (Score:5, Funny)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @11:17AM (#27465973)

      That's ok, I can never tell the real time strategy games from all the fake ones out there, either.

  • by ZeroNullVoid ( 886675 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:49AM (#27463855)

    This should run on crappy systems and good ones based off the system specs and engine.

  • Cheating? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:51AM (#27463871)

    I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating. Server side checks and such can of course be implemented, but what prevents someone from just turning all the enemies bright red?

    With the source, one could even make a rather effective aimbot (Or just write a bot that plays completely by itself) and it would be nearly undetectable since any countermeasures are also open source.

    I understand that even a closed source game will have its fair share of cheats, but open source is almost begging for them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by K.os023 ( 1093385 )
        Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

        While interesting, that statement is very poor in actual information. At the very least, a link to some page [wikipedia.org] will let people easily see what you're talking about. Actually saying that it had "an anti-cheating mechanism using an RSA-based public key cryptography authentication system that also attempts (with limited success) to detect and prevent Man-in-the-middle attacks." is even better, especially if you give referen
    • When playing MP, what's to prevent the same server-side checks that are in all FPS games these days? And you can turn all the enemies bright red in proprietary games too- the models and texture maps are usually pretty easy to find, and don't form part of the binary (which is the bit people are talking about when they refer to open source).

      And SP doesn't exactly matter- people are free to cheat to their heart's content if its just for them. Not that I know if the FPS in TFA even has a SP mode.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Tei ( 520358 )

      Some QW engines use a closed source module. Since QW is GPL this is a small violation of the GPL no one care about.

      I don't know how to handle this Nexuiz. Has to be easy* to pick the Darkplaces engine and compile a version with wallhacks. Most probably this is managed by real humans on the other side banning ip's and the sort.. and with a nice enough community where cheating is rare or non existant.

      * to tell the truth.. DarkPlaces is (sort of...) a total rewrite of the Quake engine. It has interesting tec

    • by jopsen ( 885607 ) <jopsen@gmail.com> on Sunday April 05, 2009 @06:31AM (#27464359) Homepage
      Why don't we just consider it a new aspect of gaming... ?
      - May the best hacker win...
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      ...how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

      I saw a social solution to this problem. Back in the day of Descent and Descent ][, (Both of which were closed source apps at the time.) folks would host matches explicitly for folks who wanted to cheat. If you ran into a cheater in normal play, you either ignored him, or generated another game. (IIRC, there was no kick/ban feature.) D1 and D2 were P2P games, not server/client, so it was trivially easy to cheat. Very few people did.

    • Re:Cheating? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05, 2009 @09:59AM (#27465493)

      What one of the developers had to say about cheating: http://www.nexuizninjaz.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=428&pid=3267#pid3267 [nexuizninjaz.com]

      To add some technical stuff to this emotional matter:

      Basicly only a few cheats are possible: auto-aiming (which aims for you and SHOULD be able to hit perfectly), wallhacks (which allows you to see through walls) and speedhacks (which allow you to run faster). Stuff like health, armor, weapons you posses are TOTALY in control of the server and can't be changed by any client. So if you suspect people to be unkillable this usually just means they collect lots of health/armor and as you can collect them almost without limit it can be hard to kill someone really stacked. Being able to change health/armor/weapons would require a custom setup (recompiled) server, so if you play on the 'well-known' servers you should be fine. In theory it might be possible to hack a server but thats totally unheard off. So, nothing to cheat here..

      Speedhacks usually point to some bugs in Nexuiz and while there were such bugs in the past they should all be fixed now, which should make speedhacking impossible. If there are still bugs in Nexuiz the developers should be told about! For the fun of it, due to network changes a certain Nexuiz version acted as speedhack on certain older nexuiz servers, but again, thats all fixed now and also helped to get server admins to update :-) So, nothing to cheat here..

      Wallhacks are also impossible with the default settings because Nexuiz uses a clever anti-wallhack. Basicly most games tell the client the position of all other players and items and when using a hack to make walls transparent you can see those players and items in the whole map. Nexuiz in turn only sends info about players and item only if you could possibly see them. So even if someone WOULD use a wallhack and make walls transparent there would be nothing to see. This means wallhacks are USELESS in Nexuiz, nothing to cheat here... (Unless someone changes the default settings to save SERVER cpu power). One can also usually notice a wallhack when spectating as the user of such hacks tends to aim at players behind walls. However notice that good players tend to do 'prediction shots' aka shoot were they think someone might be or go to. Their experience is good enough to make this tactic work very well.

      Which leaves us with aimhacks or autoshoot hacks. First the bad news, in theory there is nothing to REALLY stop them. Some games, companies TRY to run programs to find KNOWN aimhacks but thats a arms race and can only be lost. Programs like punkbuster will only hog your system while searching for known hacks, they can not find UNKNOWN hacks and a few month ago there was a big uproar as someone found a way to get MANY (iirc tenthousends) people banned via punkbuster though they did not cheat at all :-).
      Now the good news, aimhacks can usually be spotted very easily if you spectate. Also, as i said they should be able to hit perfectly but they do not. Most of the hitscan (point-and-frag) guns in Nexuiz have spread. For example the shotgun and mg. Also while playing online there is ping which changes slightly and thus some shots are missed. Other weapons are projectile based which can be evated. Thats an area were good players with lots of experiance can even be better then aimhacks because they are better at anticipation and can 'feel' were that guy will move to :-). Also players that use aimbots usually do so because they are not as good as they would like to be so you will notice a big difference in movement and aiming. As for autoshoots, thats a hack which 'fires' if you move the crosshair over an player. That thing can be harder to find in an demo or spectating but it will ONLY work with hitscan weapons and is also not perfect. If its a bad autoshooter you will notice it fires rockets or similar guns when the crosshair meets the other play

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

      Games like bzflag allow the admin of a map to ban players for a particular amount of time if they start breaking the rules. Some of the worst activities are:

      Wall-walking - taking advantage of the latency between the server and client to walk through walls. Happens when someone tries to take a screensave while moving fast.

      Team-killing (TK'ing) - shooting the other members of your team just for fun. Can happen by accident

    • What does that have to do with open source? With closed source games you can run such a hack without much difficulty. Granted it could be harder but not a big deal. Client-side hacking can always be done.

      The problem is not that the game is free as in libre but free as in cash. You can make an infinite amount of hack detecting tools. But if you don't charge people for the game you can't punish them. Ban them? and they will be back in minutes. They only reason client-side isn't CONSTANTLY hacked in games is
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05, 2009 @03:54AM (#27463879)

    What type of DRM do they use?
    Because EA has taught me that playing games without DRM is stealing and wrong ... very wrong.

    Unless this installs some horrible boot-sector-writing DRM to my computer, it isn't up to EA's commercial quality standards and I don't want it.

  • I've tried to run Nexuiz on my ubuntu desktop and each time it's crashed the X server, hopefully I can share in the glories this time around! :D
    • by Artemis3 ( 85734 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @04:30AM (#27464023)

      Don't use full screen mode (use windowed) and it works. Hopefully this has been fixed...

      • It's pathetic that we're still talking about things like this but windowed games with resize support can be made to behave just as if they were fullscreen games (but still supporting virtual desktop changes) by using compiz's window rules plugin. Set the game fullscreen in there, and disable argbx visuals (iirc) for anything OpenGL.

      • It also works in full screen mode. I didn't know it could be run in a window :-)
    • I just tried it on Ubuntu 8.10 and it Just Works. It runs very smoothly at 1920 x 1200.

      And, also, it is very, very good to play!

      UT always felt like a pinball machine to me. Nexuiz is fast-paced but still lets you keep control.

      I like it a lot.
  • by emanem ( 1356033 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @04:30AM (#27464017) Homepage
    Come on, I'm plying on the PS3 at Killzone 2 and Resistance 2. The graphics is not comparable at all... Are we sure, Michael, that this is a new game? Cheers,
  • Not Very Impressing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aaaaaaargh! ( 1150173 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @04:30AM (#27464019)
    Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.
    • by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

      Exactly, that's what boggles the mind about such projects. Why on Earth do they try to do exactly what the big studios have done to death in a way they'd never be able to equal, rather than something different?

      That's exactly as if independent movies tried to be like Armageddon or Die Hard 4. They don't because they know it would be shitty and no one would pay to see that, that's why they do precisely what big studios can't afford to do, they innovate, they go in wild directions, they take risks, and more im

    • by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @05:36AM (#27464213)

      First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

      That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid. While Nexuiz might not be an innovation to the genre, and might not smitten you with the highest res graphics, it still proves the concept of open source by taking something that already existed (the original Quake 1 source code) and continually improving it with user contributions. Hardcore gamers will definitely appreciate the never ending flow of UI and gameplay improvements. And if someone ever has a better idea, they can take Nexuiz and expand on it, whereas without that open source foundation, not only would they be delayed by years of extra work, they might not even start.

      And I'm sure if you go to the trouble of reading the changelogs, you will have a much greater appreciation for all the work that has gone into it than you do just as some guy who plays the latest console releases.

      Meanwhile, checkout TA: Spring for a RTS, and Wesnoth or Freeciv for turnbased strategy. If you aren't impressed, I suppose you aren't in to strategy games.

      • by dave420 ( 699308 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @06:18AM (#27464325)
        That sounds lovely and all - I appreciate the immense amount of work the developers put in, but they ended up with a game that looks 10 years out of date. So what you're saying is that FOSS FPS games are made by people with the best intentions and skill, but end up being terrible when compared to closed-source commercial games.
        • I'd be hard pressed to say Nexuiz is a bad game by any means. It looks nicer than Unreal Tournament 2004 (definitely not the "ten years" bollocks you spouted) and plays like a dream for me, a mainstream PC gamer who wants a fun, simple shooter. I'm certainly not alone in the servers, I'll say that much.

          If you don't like it, don't play it. But honestly, if you don't like it and you really feel like trolling, give us reasoning besides "I don't like the genre."
          • by dave420 ( 699308 )
            Don't get me wrong - I *love* the genre. It's my favourite genre by far. What I don't understand is people defending it by saying it's on the same level as modern closed-source games. That simply isn't the case. And the 10 years "bollocks" is not bollocks - it's based on the freakin' Quake engine, which was created 13 years ago. Sure, bump-mapping and dynamic lighting is great, but hardly on-par with the shed-loads of further advances that are present in closed-source games. It looks nicer than UT2K4?
        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by Draek ( 916851 )

          Are you in any way, shape or form correlating a videogame's graphics with its actual quality as a game? or did whole paragraphs of your post suddenly and inexplicably banish into the aether of the interwebz?

        • Have you even played Nexuiz?, it doesn't look 10 years out of date at all, maybe a year out of date at most
      • by Fungii ( 153063 )

        That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid.

        What? How can a compliant be "invalid"?

        The amount of work that's gone into the development is completly irrelevant, so there's no need for your snide remarks about 'some guy who plays the latest console releases - the fact of the matter is that this shooter isn't a patch on commercial games from 10 years ago, as is the case for most open source games.

        Now, excuse me while I go for a game of tux racer.

      • First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

        I agree with your premise, but disagree with your conclusion. I think opensource video games, including first person shooters will eventually out-compete closed source, but I think this will happen once OSS projects are developed which sufficiently separate the content from the engine and controls. When there is an OSS project that has a strong engine that allows end users to drop in content (which includes most graphics, sound, maps, and scripting) and said OSS project includes decent, free developer tools

    • From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      Nexuiz development started as a Quake modification in the summer of 2001 by Lee Vermeulen. Soon afterward the project moved to the DarkPlaces Quake engine created by Forest Hale, who later also joined the project.

      From there, it looks like it basically only has had added effects and general graphical upgrades. I hope that helps explain it's roots and why it looks like a quake clone.

      If you're wonder why a project is the way it is, you're best off searching the about page of the actual site or looking for it on wikipedia. You're much more likely to get group think by just saying what you did on slashdot.

    • Fortunately, the article summary contains the phrase "Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge," which is code for "it sucks, don't even bother."

      So, unlike the last open source Quake-clone game [blakeyrat.com] I wasted tons of time on, this one I don't even have to bother.

      BTW, why is the open source community so obsessed with Quake (generally, and deathmatch specifically) when the wider gaming community has almost universally moved on to more complicated games? Deathmatch simply isn't fun for the major

  • by John Betonschaar ( 178617 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @04:47AM (#27464077)

    Kudos to the developers and for someone who likes this kind of games it's probably good fun to play, but seriously, you can't really call this 'impressive graphics' or 'raising the bar for OSS gaming', can you?

    It looks like they just took the Quake 2 engine with Quake 3 sound clips and recreated all the levels en textures.... badly...

    Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.

    I can understand it's hard to create something that compares to a commercial game in terms of graphics and content, but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay. There must be some guys with really crazy ideas they can try out.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Some people like this type of gameplay. Who are you to judge?
      • That wasn't a judgment on people who enjoy this type of gameplay. The GP was putting a spotlight on the ridiculous nature of the claims. By any measure that includes games outside of the OSS community this game is anything but raising the bar. It may be fun to play, it may be an excellent example of this style of gameplay done well, but the game design itself is a retread. The graphics are passable but on par with legacy commercial shooters. The level design is, frankly, brutal and very behind the curve. Th

    • Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.

      How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter? Give it some weird play mechanic which never ends up being fun at all? Give it realistic weapons and a reload button? Come up with some uber-complicated gametype that nobody will play anyway because it's too complicated and doesn't play well? Add vehicles and turn it i

      • How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter?

        Well, you could *play* some made in the last 10 years and figure it out based on example.

        Give it some weird play mechanic which never ends up being fun at all?

        You could be, say, Red Faction and give it a game play mechanic that's no fun at all. Or you could be, say, Battlefield 2142, Half-Life 2, Portal, Halo 2, etc and give it game play mechanics that are fun.

        Give it realistic weapons and a reload button?

        It doesn't have a reload button? Criminy

  • All the time I couldn't actually concentrate on anything in the video besides the weapons! The effects are ok and projectile "physics" looks playable but the weapons themselves are sooooo damn ugly!
  • Looks like FUN (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BLKMGK ( 34057 ) <morejunk4me.hotmail@com> on Sunday April 05, 2009 @05:19AM (#27464167) Homepage Journal

    I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games. I say "So What?!".

    I like FPS and own all of the UT series of games as well as some of the older id games. I still find myself going back to UT2K4 over and over even though I have a later "better" UT3. Why? It's not the graphics, it's not the engine, it's not the sound - it's the gameplay. UT2K4 is FUN for me. Fun doesn't require super duper grpahics it simply requires engaging gameplay. With all of the custom maps, weapons, and other things added to UT2K4 it's a ton of FUN to play. Looking at the movies for this game it looks FUN just like the old Quake games were. Okay maybe the graphics aren't quite as good as a modern shooter but I don't appear to be paying $50 for it either AND honestly many of those bells and whistles found in expensive games don't add to the FUN. Kripes I had FUN playing the original Wolfenstein. the original Quake, why couldn't I also enjoy this one? Folks don't like the maps? Build better ones - just like what has been done with UT, Quake, Doom, and others. Stop bitching about that stuff and fix it if you really have heartburn with it...

    • I find a lot of younger players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor. Its hard getting past that. My son has managed it, but only because he was trying to 'get' why I still play games that were written before he was born.

      The simplest answer it "don't like something in a project? Join the project and improve it". Alas this isn't usually what happens, because for every person with the skil

      • I find a lot of players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor.

        This. But, I removed the "younger" from your post. There are plenty of thirty year olds who can't get past how nice a game looks, and they'll let you know it.

    • I have played Nexuiz quite a bit. I found it in Ubuntu's applications catalog while browsing through looking for interesting games. It really is a fun game. The game is freakin FREE, and pretty decently done, so who gives a shit if it doesn't have some big fancy storyline or the latest in state of the art graphics? You can just jump right into it with no effort and start blasting. When you're tired of it you can just quit and start back from the same place later. It doesn't require any thought to play and h

      • It really is a fun game. The game is freakin FREE, and pretty decently done, so who gives a shit if it doesn't have some big fancy storyline or the latest in state of the art graphics?

        I didn't find the game to be much fun when I tried it on OS X. Maybe I'll install the Linux version and give it a try. Basically, I found it pretty unusable.

        You can just jump right into it with no effort and start blasting.

        Yeah, I tried that. The mouse sensitivity was so bad it took me a full minute to turn around. I went back and adjusted it, but spent a good minute and a half trying to get out of the settings because to close them you have to find a nearly invisible textured dark grey on textured dark grey button in the upper right of the window. Now I've been casually

  • by PNP_Transistor ( 1398577 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @05:56AM (#27464255)

    I don't see how a game like this can compete with something like Quake Live [quakelive.com]. Quake Live (still in beta) is free and has comparable graphics and gameplay. Yet it already has a much larger community, more polish, and runs more smoothly.

    I understand that it is difficult for an open source game to have the same playerbase and polish as a professionally developed, ad-supported game. But at the very least Nexuiz should run more smoothly and should differentiate itself from other games that have already been released.

    I'd say that a better open-source game might be Tremulous [tremulous.net]. Runs much more smoothly on my computer, and I often want to play it because its gameplay is different from other games I already have. Perhaps that's why there have always been more Tremulous players than Nexuiz players in my area.

    • Why should it try and compete? They don't have the money, true, but so what?

      Did the people who wrote Narbaculer Drop have much money? Nope, did they create an awesome game that got picked up and remade as a hugely succesful commercial product? Yep.

      Tried World of Goo yet? That was low budget, almost certainly less graphically pretty than would have been the case if they'd had more cash, but the game is a commercial success.

      Good graphics and funding won't create good ideas. For that you need a passion for the

      • World of Goo and Narbaculer Drop weren't badly done Quake clones.

        Emphasis on "badly done" because if it was actually a well done Quake Clone I'd be playing the shit out of it.

      • Yes, but those are *new* games. We've already seen Quake like 15 times. We don't need more Quake, but if you're going to make more Quake, you have to make it *damned* good to compete against all the other Quake out there. (Much if which is also free, in the sense that matters.)

    • It runs plenty smoothly, and it plays like a mix between UT2k4 and Quake 3. It's basically Quake Live plus, you know, things like secondary fire.

      And the other poster put it nicely: why do they need to "compete?" They're doing just fine; the game runs great and looks very nice. It's a hobby project. I'm not a next-gen kind of fellow, but it runs on Ubuntu just fine (more than you can say for Quake Live) and manages to be a simple, fun FPS.
  • I can't even stand the video on http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/ [alientrap.org] :-(
  • It seems there are few to none 3D games for Linux that are not just multiplayer arenas but have a story or at least can be played alone with artificial enemies.

  • by bucketoftruth ( 583696 ) on Sunday April 05, 2009 @04:42PM (#27468589)
    I get violently motion sick when I play FPS games, but I can't stop playing this one. It's screaming fast and really fun. I think what makes it desirable to play is that it lacks the polish of the commercial titles but plays incredibly fast on my dated hardware. What it really comes down to is well designed maps and textures (for me).

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