Warsow 1.0 Released
warsow.net
warsow.net
Either install this package: http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/playdeb_0.3-1~getdeb1_...
Or otherwise add the repository to your apt sources:
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playdeb.list
deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb games
I'm a little surprised they didn't mention that on the page.
Maybe it's impossible to do coherent art direction in nebulous volunteer efforts. I don't believe the technology limits the style so much. Certainly that is not the case with something as basic as sounds.
What differs the most from the other Q3-likes (direct clones like OpenArena and more distant ones like Nexuiz) is the core of the game: while the others merely handle framerate-bound physics, bunny hopping, rocket- and strafe-jumping as gameplay side effects, this one is designed from the ground up to integrate such rule-abusive gameplay into its core. Jump features have been added (bounce-jump on walls), physics has been tweaked to provide less hackish strafe jump, configurations options abound to make the game tunable for enthusiasts (like coloring walls and floors instead of simply disabling textures and lightning). It seems this version goes even farther in configurability, with configurable coloring and extensively configurable/scriptable UI.
Anyone who hasn't played Warsow CTF 3v3 - 5v5 in a lan setting is missing out!
Just in case your preference for Warsow is solely based on the lack of promode in QL, I'm really glad to tell you that there is promode now in QL, and there's been for a couple of months now. Granted, it's a premium feature and so on but there are some public promode servers (user-spawned), specially CA and CTF, and I've been having a lot of fun there.
Worth mentioning that id Software deserves a ton of credit for open sourcing their engines. Most open source 3D gaming stuff, like Warsow here, is based on their code.
Downloading and I'll give it a go this afternoon.
Damn, I miss W:ET. Best multiplayer FPS I've ever played, hands down.
There's no relation to Warsow, except couple versions back he did give us permission to include it in Warsow, but we never got around retexturing and fitting it for Warsow due lack of resources, so it ended up in QL.
Personally I'm a bit more a fan of OpenArena[1], the community is a bit more fun-play focused than most other games (and you'll often get an answer when asking something ingame), but this game is great fun too. Good to hear there is progress, and also cool to see this on the HN homepage :)
For Warsow, really pleased for them that they've reached 1.0, but from everything I've heard, specially over the past few months, they've made it a lot harder on themselves than it should have been, by the way they are organised (or not so organised) internally.
OpenArena's goal is to make a completely open-source and free Quake 3 clone with some additions like delag, and it's actually the opensource competitor for Quake Live. It could use some more developers I think :)
I think the biggest hurdle in developing this version was actually the choice of using libRocket to script the UI with. Turns out the lib is very slow, and it needed lots of work to get working properly.
There's vic, me and toukka doing any coding and kimza mapping some, jihnsius doing the music, and have pretty good agreement over everything we do, so I wouldn't call us disorganized :)
There's a pretty fun FOSS FPS called AssaultCube which I used to play a lot - it's simple but it's fun. That has quite a high number of players. Unsure about how active the other FPSs are but whenever I've tried them out I've always been able to get a game.
Disclosure: I'm on the Xonotic core team :)
It's very fast paced and requires quite a lot of skill and muscle memory to become good at it. There are a couple of "noob" servers that are quite enjoyable however. Overall a very good game.
But somehow UT feels very much like a community. More so, than the other ones. (i like world-of-padman though)