Xonotic 0.7 released - New maps, animation blending and much much more | Hacker News Reader

Xonotic 0.7 released - New maps, animation blending and much much more

xonotic.org

32 pointsklrr8 comments

I've been playing Xonotic for two years or so now, I'm also an active member of their forums, so if anyone got any question regarding anything please just ask.

Xonotic is an old-school shooter game, mostly inspired by Quake (q3cpma, QW) and Unreal Tournament (UT2k3, UT2k4). It got an active casual community which plays a lot of Overkill/Minsta/Vehicle mods on pub servers. There is also some action on vanilla pub servers. The competitive side of Xonotic is actually quite strong. We got cups every month and there's always pickup matches (private matches organized via IRC, #xonotic.pickup @ QuakeNet) every evening. The best thing about Xonotic is its friendly community of awesome people.

Cool. For those unaware, Xonotic is a FOSS FPS, forked from Nexuiz after the Nexuiz IP was sold (bit of drama on that one—the creators of Nexuiz did so without asking the Nexuiz community[1]).

Although I've only played Nexuiz, it's a serious blast—very akin to Quake 3 Arena.

[1] http://www.xonotic.org/the-game/faq/#What_prompted_the_split...

To be fair, its more like Quakeworld than Quake 3.

With all the silly movement and weapon modes it is more like Unreal Tournament than any Quake really.

Unfortunately I think the fork didn't go very well. If they'd immediately just released a nearly-the-same version and iterated from there the entire Nexuiz community would have brought along to the new project. Instead, the developers treated Xonotic as their chance to change everything, so you ended up with drastically different gameplay and no map-file compatibility.

This inevitably led to a split where some people like the changes overall, and others still cling to the 4-year-old Nexuiz 2.5.2 release. Worse, neither group is large enough to really have a healthy ecosystem of active players. Nexuiz was already in decline before the fork, but splitting the community in two hastened it considerably.

It's a shame, I really liked Nexuiz a lot... fast pace and interesting movement system. I used to follow Xonotic development fairly closely, but never got the same enjoyment out of the gameplay.

I agree, Xonotic is a great game and a lot of fun. Also it is highly competitive. It is also a blast at most lan parties where it's been played.

Only thing Xonotic really lacks are active players - typical chicken and egg problem. Although it already got better. And servers are online en masse. Maybe Xonotic's lack of active players is a result of somewhat overcomplicated accessibility for less computer savy gamers, as the set-up (ingame) and the heaps of options are a little bit too much and confusing.

Actually, I think it would be nice if the game starts into a "beginner" mode, which promts for basic things intuitively. The game does it already for Playername and such but important settings such as Field of View are hard to find. Well, it's open source so maybe I should be looking into that :)

the problem with xonotic and other arena fps is that they lack the killerfeature that would not only lure in a new generation of players, but also shake on the throne of quake3/quakelive, which is arguably the perfect arena fps to date (and yet humps along at under 300k players itself)

what i see is that new players will get crushed for months before they reach their first milestones and become somewhat formidable players in these games.

compare that to the new and popular fps games where you can just jump in, spray some bullets and get some nice looking plates pop up on the screen.

i don't know if there's still room for the unforgiving nature of arena fps aside from hypercompetitive people

"Modern" FPSs (COD, Battlefield, etc) have one killer feature, at least on consoles, RE skill-balancing—intelligent matchmaking.

With a large enough volume of players, players get matched by skill—meaning fewere "noobs" getting owned and an overall more balanced match.

I noticed Xonotic has player stats on the homepage—I wonder if those could be used for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com