Unvanquished Still Looks Amazing For Open-Source

Unvanquished is still on track to become one of the most compelling and visually impressive multi-platform open-source games.

Nearly two months ago I wrote about how Unvanquished looked like a very promising open-source game. Unvanquished was spawned from the ioquake3-powered Tremulous open-source game but has much better artwork assets and is powered by their own Daemon Engine, which is a fork of the OpenWolf Engine. OpenWolf in turn is based upon id's open-sourced Enemy Territory code-base plus the XReaL rendering engine improvements.

XReaL itself also began with impressive goals and progress, even to the point I looked at it as a possible contender to becoming the most impressive open-source game engine, but sadly XReaL has mostly faded away and is no longer a thriving project. Unvanquished, fortunately, is a different story.

While there isn't yet an Unvanquished stable release of the game, in the past two months the developers and artists have continued making great progress.

First of all, Unvanquished Alpha 6 was released at the beginning of August as outlined here. This latest development release of the multi-platform game features a new turret, a new HUD plus a preview of a new alien HUD, new effects, massive code clean-ups (over 200k lines of code removed), URI support, and other game engine changes.

A seventh alpha release of Unvanquished is expected at the beginning of September.

There's also another forum post that outlines some of the progress that's been made within Unvanquished over the course of this month and will be featured in the next Unvanquished alpha release.

For those interested in more Unvanquished reading, there is the beginning of their retrospect that highlights some of the history already of this open-source first person shooter.

Those wanting to checkout the source-code to this game can find it at GitHub.