The Big idTech 2 round-up post

Hello fans ;) Today we get back to the main business of this blog: gaming news!

And of course my favorite genre: FPS (forevar!)... specifically everything related to the Quake2 engine (idTech2).

The reason is that we got a nice mail from the developers of Quake2World, which I had not really on my radar as still under development. But now they released a public beta, which I have not tried yet as there isn't a Linux download (yet).

Edit: Updated to newer video

But judging from the pictures and videos, I am was quite sure that DFSG standards are not fulfilled... and they know and don't care (very short sighted... but well).

So that is why I decided that they don't deserve a news post all by themselves :p

Low and behold... an update on all Q2 based games that *are* on my radar:

AlienArena is preparing for a new release with a reloaded trailer and some update one engine improvements:

What's new in AlienArena

Ya3dag, also released a new version recently and I still think its cool in-game editing features should be picked up by some other idTech2 engines. Can't be that hard to port...
Especially for UFO:AI it might be a nice way to modify missions. Speaking of which... they are also preparing a new version 2.4 and released an RC (changelog) recently. Again no Linux download, so I am skipping it for now. They have however almost reached full FOSS status of their sound-effects... at least that is what they say, the graphic they posted says CC-sampling plus though, which is AFAIK not FOSS compatible :(

Now to the games that don't show any real visible progress: War§ow is just posting stupid stuff interesting trivia on their blog. However I don't consider the long awaited 0.7 release vapourware yet.
Another matter in the vapourware category is OverDose though... in development since what feels like at least a decade, and still no release anywhere near (which is also their excuse why they don't share their nice engine improvements or for that matter any source-code all together >:( ). However they recently posted a lengthy news on Moddb in what seems to be an attempt to jump on the current "Kickstarter" bandwagon. Think what you want of that... but they are for sure not getting any of my cash before there isn't a engine-source release...

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New FPS updates

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates:

Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;)

Another new release (7.53) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings.

Alien Arena 7.53

Quick rundown of other news:
War§ow got a new website, and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine (OpenWolf) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here (and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more).

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A Garden of colorful projects

Found this nice abstract shooter over at LGDB a few days ago:

Garden of coloured lights gameplay

As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*).

In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called "Free Game Alliance" to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this!
Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages...

Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena, which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here.

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FPS news

Short one for today... I guess Charlie will make a longer post about the new 0 A.D. release later on (sorry to steal your thunder :p ).

So FPS news only from me today ;)

Irritant, the lead developer of AlienArena was so kind to inform us that a new release can be expected within a week.

Check the rest of the new screens-hots in the thread linked above.

Other that this? Well there is a rather interesting thread about a Tremulous art update mod called Tremz in the official Tremulous forums.
More cool WIP screens can be seen here. Quite amazing progress given that is has been started only recently.

Oh, and the lead developer of the OpenWolf project joined our forums and posted a bunch of rather nice screen-shots and some background info from this ET:Wolf engine update project.
So if you have some questions regarding this project, fire away!

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