14 DAY TRIAL // Unvanquished, a free, open source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has just received a new update that packs quite a punch.
Unvanquished still has the Alpha tag next to the version, and for good reason. The title is still under heavy development, so you might not experience the best gameplay with this particular build.
If you look back a few years, to 2010 for example, you might remember that there was a battle between various free multiple first-person shooters, and titles like Tremulous and Nexuix were very popular. They were helped by the fact that Linux didn't really have any amazing games, but those titles disappeared, leaving almost nothing in their place.
Unvanquished is actually a fork of Tremulous, and if you have a keen eye you might notice it, but that's about it. Unvanquished is actually a much more complex game and even in its development stage it's still head and shoulders above any free multiplayer title out there.
Even if you can't really tell from the changelog, this is actually a bigger update than it seems. For example, a new jetpack model with new animations has been implemented. It comes with limited fuel and, after some debate, the developers decided to leave it like that.
Unvanquished is now using NaCl binaries and, even if the client is still not ready for the adoption, this is part of the game code for the server.
The Plat23 and Perseus maps have been updated, the Parpax and Yocto maps have been recompiled, and some problems with Gamma and textures have been corrected. Some users might notice that these maps are now looking a little bit better.
Unfortunately, this latest update also brought some problems that might prove to be somewhat more difficult to handle.
“If you use Ubuntu 14.04 (‘trusty’), you may notice a small backward step. This is due to a bug in the SDL 2.0 dev package which, basically, means that we can't build using it without some less-than-nice hacks. So the decision was made to use SDL 1.2 for the moment.”
“NaCl binaries aren't buildable on Debian 7 (‘wheezy’) at present because Google, in their wisdom, decided to use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for building their SDK binaries. And that has a newer version of glibc than in wheezy, and a few of the binaries require code which isn't present in the older version,” reads the announcement.
More details about this amazingly-looking game can be found on the official website. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and bugs are bound to be encountered. You can download Unvanquished Alpha 27 right now from Softpedia.