Today is an exciting day for us, as we are proud to bring you the first preview of Xonotic! There is a lot to tell, but since this release has already grown to a whopping 1.3GB – we will provide you with a download link right away. Please continue reading while it downloads. :-)
DOWNLOAD XONOTIC 0.1 PREVIEW HERE
The last release of Nexuiz (2.5.2) was on the first of October 2009, and when we decided to fork early March 2010 we continued where we had left off with Nexuiz. Large parts of the code, graphics and music have been redone and have improved immensely. In over a year we have managed to make huge progress on pretty much every part of the game. However this release is still a preview, which means that bugs are likely to exist and that some of our decisions turn out to have unwanted side effects. This first preview also still has a limited number of maps, but we do have many maps being worked on for future releases! In the next sections we will explain what new features are available and the main things that have changed from Nexuiz.
Performance
Many things have progressed, both in features and graphics, and this usually takes its toll on the speed of the game. We are proud to say that even with the enormous amount of new stuff, Xonotic performs very well on most systems we have tested. One of the things that makes the game feel much more smooth is the change from 20 to 60 server frames per second. We have also been able to merge the D3D code into darkplaces, which has resulted in a fps improvement on all supported OSes!
With all the new graphics you do need more RAM to store these in memory, we consider 2GB RAM a minimum for the normal game, however we also provide versions with compressed textures which are more suitable for lower end hardware.
Panelhud
One of the most noticeable things is that the way the HUD is shown is now completely dynamic. Everything is divided into panels that can be individually customized and moved around. This way you can create the HUD config that provides you exactly the information you want, and where you want it. There also are various pre-made configurations you can choose from if you don’t want to spend the time to tweak everything.
Apart from the HUD, there now is a big set of new and good looking crosshairs. The crosshair now also provides you with more information about several things, like the Nex charge, picking up items and showing from which angle you’re being attacked. Updated Crosshairs based on the concepts below:
New menu
The menu theme has been updated and the options have been tuned to better reflect what values players are likely to change. This means that some options that were available before are now only accessible through the advanced menu or by editing the cvars directly.
The server menu now has a few extra logos that can help you to select the server you’d like to play on. The ‘AES’ symbol means that a server support encryption, the Xonotic logo means it is a ‘pure’ server and the third logo tells you that a server has IPv6 support.
Pure servers are a new concept in Xonotic, which basically tells you that on this server there are no gameplay changing settings enabled. On these servers you can expect to find a game the way we designed it, however server admins are still free to use their own settings as they like. For consistency, please do let your players know what has changed in the MOTD or server name.
Physics and balance
The physics and balance have both changed a lot, while still staying true to being a fast paced action game. Movement has been simplified in both the code and in the way it feels, it is now easier to gain speed and to do turns without losing a lot of speed. There is still some benefit to using strafing to gain speed, but this has been lowered to make the game more accessible to new players.
The entire weapon balance has been rewritten from scratch, and while we still have the old weapons, some of them have been given entirely new functions. Others have been tuned to be more balanced in relation to the other weapons. Some of the weapons have also gotten new models and/or textures, and we also have a brand new weapon: the minelayer. (Screenshots can be found of the minelayer below)
This balance part of the preview release is really a test to see how it works out. We have obviously been testing a lot, but this part is likely going to need fine tuning and we need your input to get it right for the final release.
New player models and animation
The old player models in Nexuiz were quite outdated, so we decided to remove them all and start from scratch. Currently we do not have as many models as we used to, but they are of much higher quality. The animations have also been done from scratch, and they are now well aligned with the player models.
In addition to the player models, some other models were updated like the flag model, armor models, and a few weapon models.
New Maps
Xonotic features several remade and brand new maps, many of which are entirely recreated with new visuals and gameplay tweaks. So far we have 4 DM maps and 2 CTF maps, however there are MANY other great maps made for Xonotic which are still waiting to be added that could even be added by a server owner if they want to.
Client authentication and encryption
We have created and integrated a new cryptography library which allows both servers and clients to authenticate. Currently this is only used to store records and make them persistent after nickname changes. In the future we can use this system for various other things like statistics tracking and achievements.
Additionally we have added optional AES encryption support, which allows clients to communicate privately to a server. This can be used to prevent various attacks against the udp protocol used to communicate.
Final thoughts
We hope you will enjoy playing this game as much as we enjoyed making it. Please spread the word about the release, and let us know how you like this preview. Bug reports can go to the development tracker, and discussion can be done on the forums or on irc. You can find us in #xonotic on QuakeNet for discussion, the same channel on freenode is meant for development related chat. Happy fragging.
You can find additional media, including advertisements on the media pages (check the menu for subpages) to help spread news and support Xonotic.
Behind the scenes a lot has been going on in the organization of the Xonotic project. If you're watching git.xonotic.org, forums.xonotic.org, dev.xonotic.org, img.xonotic.org, #xonotic on irc.quakenet.org / irc.freenode.org then you probably have an idea of who has been contributing but there has been no clear definition to the public on leadership roles.
Through forum discussions and IRC chats, the core team has designed an organizational structure and appointed key individuals to positions. In the system design, we've tried to keep the hierarchy as low as possible. Xonotic is free open-source software and we're interested in evolving together with freedoms in tact but too much freedom in system design can lead to nothing getting accomplished. This is why we've appointed the following list of people to guide the direction of the project and ensure the quality of the experience.
Team Xonotic
Core Team
The Core team consists of 6 members who discuss and vote on large project changes. This international group of leaders is a classic group of collaborators who above all else, will try and do what's best for the game and community.
Coordinators are here to guide contributors, provide information both in and outside their area of expertise and act as liasons to the core team to ensure the most important information doesn't go overlooked. Coordinators will be the people to ask questions to regarding their subjects. If you're feeling lost, contact these people, their names are linked to their forum accounts.
Note: Many of the core members are serving double roles as coordinators. This is not a considered a conflict of interests in decision making because these members are largely filling the role until someone else who fits the description can fill it.
These coordination positions are time-consuming roles that require dedication, knowledge of the area and sharpened communication skills. If you believe you can be of assistance in this area, you may contact the team at admin@xonotic.org. Don't forget, you can still contribute in other ways without the responsibilities of a coordinator.
Other Contributors and Supporters
See dev.xonotic.org/xonotic for the most up-to-date list of contributors.
Needed positions Community Coordinator
To help organize and guide the growth of the community / street team
Writers
To write articles about xonotic and related things
Ruby developers
To customize redmine for the project needs
PHP Developers
To write MyBB plugins for the project's needs
In the past few weeks I've been taking a stab at all the Mac specific stuff for Xonotic. Most of these changes will probably go unnoticed for the majority of our players, but for the sake of documentation I will post some details about what I've done.
Let's start out with the good news, all of the libraries have been updated to the latest versions and are now all capable of running as 64-bit (x86_64). For many Snow Leopard users this will mean easier compilation and we will be able to include 64-bit binaries in our future releases. Furthermore we are switching to the SDL interface as the default for OSX now, largely because it is easier to maintain and there is very little difference in performance these days. The `all' script automatically selects SDL already, however you can choose AGL by means of `./all compile agl' and `./all run agl' if desired.
The reason why we're moving away from AGL is that the interface has massively changed in Snow Leopard, and currently AGL doesn't even compile on Snow Leopard. In fact this is unlikely to ever get fixed, as it would require the rewrite of a large portion of the code. This really only makes AGL an option for those of us still on Leopard.
Due to the 64-bit capability, we've also had to drop support for OSX 10.4 Tiger. I suspect everyone who likes gaming on his Mac does not run Tiger any more, and even PPC users can still upgrade to Leopard (Yes, we still support PPC).
With all of these changes, it has also become pretty easy to run Xonotic from GIT on your Mac. You will still need to install XCode and the SDL framework, but that's pretty simple. More information can be found on the wiki page. If you run into any trouble, please let me know.
Intro
As you can see it's finally possible for us to post news updates about the project! The news site apparently had some problems, and with our web developer busy there was no way to write news here. That doesn't mean nothing happened though, if you have been reading GIT log there's been a lot going on "behind the scenes" if you want to call it that The project has been going forward at a fast pace thanks to the great community of contributors that we have.
I'll start out in a little bit of a rush, trying to sum up the most important development that has been going on in the project, from the view of a busy developer who is just getting back into contributing actively
Player models
Ignis, Female Version
The player models are finally getting the update they deserve. Dib and tZork (hope I didn't miss anyone) are working on getting Oblivion's awesome player models working and looking fine in the game. Dib is also working on fixing the weapon scale, which previously was too big.
More screenshots in the <a href="http://xonotic.org/media">image gallery</a>.
Most of the Nexuiz maps weren't really up to today's quality standards, so the old favorites are being remade by mappers like tZork, Cortez, sev, FruitieX (me), Cuinnton and others. Currently it looks like at least the following maps will have remakes: Glowarena (tZork), Dance (FruitieX), Space elevator/Gasolinepowered (Cuinnton/FruitieX), Aggressor (FruitieX) Stormkeep (FruitieX), Runningmanctf (FruitieX, I'm promising much here ), Downer (Cortez), Evilspace (Cortez), Soylent (sev), Castles (Cuinnton), Space CTF aka cb_ctf1 (C. Brutail) and probably more that I've missed . Aside from remakes, I'm also seeing brand new maps appearing in the forum, and even in the repo (condemned_castles by MooKow). Which of these that appear in the initial release is something I have no idea about yet
Code
There's quite a lot going on code-wise. This is probably the part that's the most invisible to people in the community that do not hang around irc channels all the time, or read git log. We have been seeing big and important changes taking place, made possible much thanks to the switch to git: The developers aren't all tied to work in one place, in the stable "branch" anymore as they pretty much were in svn, now they can simply create a branch even for their most experimental changes. This enabled huge changes such as CSQC players to be possible to develop in parallel to other smaller things: that (as of today) still experimental stuff does not interfere with the rest of the development. When finished that should give us better animations, better prediction code, better compatibility to future versions (new physics code can simply be sent by the server, as opposed to now when you need an engine update) among other things. Also, Taoki has been working on adding more natural animations for the 1st person weapon models when moving the view around, similar to what most other modern fps engines are doing.
HUD
Another immediately visible thing in the initial Xonotic release should be the completely new HUD system, developed and initially brainstormed by me and Dib: the "Panel HUD". It takes each HUD element and divides them into rectangular panels, each panel freely movable and resizeable with the mouse cursor, similar to how you manipulate your windows on your computer. Thus you'll be able to create your own HUD layout easily, and with some extra effort and image editing skills, your entirely own skin. The default layout/skin has not been decided on yet, it's up to the community to provide the best!
Menu
WickedX menu theme, also by sev
We've also had a menu uplift, with new animation code by esteel and the new default menu theme looking like this:
Physics/balance
Other interesting changes include an update to the physics config, which now allows for circlejumps and more controlled strafe turning. divVerent has also tweaked them to remove exploits such as strafebots from being used. Doublejumps are an option still discussed, but before they are enabled by default "the code has to be more mature".
A subject that's currently discussed a lot about is the weapon balance, with many contributors having their own set of weapon settings. There's not much to say about any kind of "official" balance yet, but it seems like it is going to differ from the Nexuiz balance a bit. Personally I hope that we'll get as unique weapons as possible, with each weapon having it's own uses that differ from the others as much as possible, which was a little bit of a problem in the Nexuiz balance.
Many of you have noticed that the main site has been stagnant recently. This has probably left many of you thinking the project is dead if you haven't been lurking around IRC (#xonotic on irc.quakenet.org / irc.freenode.net), dev.xonotic.org, git.xonotic.org or forums.xonotic.org. It's far from it and we're aiming to get that sort of news out to the public in a more streamlined fashion.
In addition, we're looking to improve how we collect contributions, sort through information and make sure we're conveying status back to the public. We wish for this system to be as self-sustaining as possible and this attribute has long kept me from making this announcement. We've been doing a lot of planning and organization structure behind the scenes (more on that soon) and it is my hope that we can bridge these web applications with a global user system for simplicity. A lot goes into that however and it's not possible for us to do this yet. I have set aside some original plans for the way the applications are stitched together and refreshed/refined the vision of how this main-site should behave. This plan still allows for the future possibility of a global login but first and foremost, allows us to USE the darn thing .
I know you may have been hoping for more information about the status of the project but that will be coming in another update. For now, click around, get acquainted with all the goodies.
The latter was posted on 1st of April. Think about it.
Before, when we planned out the fork of Nexuiz to form the game project known as Xonotic, we were really wired on 2-days worth of coffee with lots of sugar. Now that has finally worn off, we've managed to clear our heads and more seriously consider the effects of our decision to start the Xonotic project.
We basically all realized that it's not a better managed game project that we wanted. We don't really want a better artistic direction, more community development, more focus on PR/Marketing. We really just wanted to throw a party. So far, the #xonotic IRC channel on quakenet, and the discussions on our forums, have been very much like a party. We're all drunk on excitement and our adrenaline is flowing from all of these ideas flying around. Everyone is having a good time.
But we have a couple community members who have actually been to real parties. They started pointing out that this wasn't really a party at all.
Some community members had comments to say about it.
CubeOwl - "I was told that there would be girls. I don't see any. You guys suck. I'm going back to Nexuiz"
merlijn - "Ya know, we were all excited and having a good time until someone noticed that, man, forking a video game is work! Hahaha! Nobody told us that!"
Dokujisan - "While I really enjoy helping the community improve and focus on this new video game project, I also kinda wanna get laid. So, yeah, I'm out"
mand1nga - "Man, I totally misunderstood. I thought someone said E-R-O-T-I-C. I was like HELL YEAH, let's party! But then I realized it was X-O-N-O-T-I-C, and I was like whaaaaa?!"
-z- "Whooo!! I'm on a boat! What the hell is Xonotic?"
Even the lead developer, divVerent, had second thoughts about the project.
divVerent - "I dunno if it's these hash brownies I ate or what, but I say let's sell Xonotic just like they did with Nexuiz! gplwut? lol"
We all obviously made a mistake here. We need to rewind and go back a few weeks to when we found out about the Nexuiz/Illfonic deal. If we could do that, we would then make the more wise decision of purchasing some Playstations and pre-ordering copies of Nexuiz for PS3. I mean, who plays videogames with a mouse anyway? All of that accuracy and control. That's just dumb.
So Team Xonotic would like to formally extend an apology to the alienTRAP team.
We would like to formally announce the arrival of Xonotic - A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.
Xonotic came about in the wake of recent troublesome changes to the Nexuiz project, changes that have left many of the core contributors and community members feeling that the project has been mishandled. As a result, we felt the need to organize a departure to start with a clean slate.
Xonotic will place focus on the things we love about Nexuiz, and extend our goals to become the game that many thought Nexuiz should have been.
While technically being a direct successor of Nexuiz, the Xonotic project is a rethink of the Nexuiz project that recognizes the community around it as its principal driving force and will restructure itself to respect that. This means that there will never be a single person with total control over the project. In addition to the stronger focus on the community, Xonotic will also pursue a clearer agenda including the following:
Game Changes:
A new set of player models and animations
A new set of sounds
New music
Default maps will get a makeover
New stronger bot AI
New names for weapons and gamemodes (especially ones using the "nex" prefix)
Low quality content will be dropped and replaced with higher quality ones
Project Changes:
Use of GIT versioning system instead of SVN
Better attention to marketing and public relations
A more defined artistic direction
More emphasis on recruiting
Better organization of contributors
More focus on community activities (tournaments, contests, etc)
More frequent releases
Global player stats tracking system, supporting anonymous player as well
While we don't have a specific timeline for the first release under the new title, you can track the progress and updates on our website, on twitter , facebook and in IRC: #xonotic on irc.quakenet.org
Please visit our FAQ page for more detailed information about this project.
We look forward to creating a game that everyone can feel a part of. You are very much welcome to help in any way you can. We appreciate all of your support.
The project has been going forward at a fast pace thanks to the great community of contributors that we have.![[Image: f6i2wct8fna1tvux1q.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/f6i2wct8fna1tvux1q.jpg)
![[Image: zkiws2z0x8qekb1hqvj2.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/zkiws2z0x8qekb1hqvj2.jpg)
![[Image: 5n4zm98lx8ympaip0la.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/5n4zm98lx8ympaip0la.jpg)
![[Image: 29xg8ajq1cdzrnqk1s4.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/29xg8ajq1cdzrnqk1s4.jpg)
), Downer (Cortez), Evilspace (Cortez), Soylent (sev), Castles (Cuinnton), Space CTF aka cb_ctf1 (C. Brutail) and probably more that I've missed ![[Image: hph3jau64w6eewq9dnl.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/hph3jau64w6eewq9dnl.jpg)
![[Image: pj13gstvgqpbamgxrxzm.jpg]](http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/images/pj13gstvgqpbamgxrxzm.jpg)
