Unvanquished (video game)

Last updated
Unvanquished
Developer(s) Game community
Initial releaseFebruary 29, 2012;12 years ago (2012-02-29)
Preview release
0.55.1 beta [1] / November 3, 2024;40 days ago (2024-11-03)
Repository github.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished
Engine daemon (game engine)
Operating system Linux, MacOS, Microsoft Windows
Type Multiplayer video game, first-person shooter, real-time strategy game
License GNU GPLv3, CC BY-SA 2.5 [2]
Website unvanquished.net

Unvanquished is a free and open-source video game. It is a multiplayer first-person shooter and real-time strategy game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.

Contents

Gameplay

A large alien Tyrant is being attacked by a human (background) and a machine-gun turret (offscreen, left) as it tries to demolish the human base. Unvanquished tyrant.png
A large alien Tyrant is being attacked by a human (background) and a machine-gun turret (offscreen, left) as it tries to demolish the human base.
A human player building a defensive structure Unvanquished-0.52-human-builder.jpg
A human player building a defensive structure

Players fight in an alien or human team with respective melee and conventional ballistic weaponry. The aim of the game is to destroy the enemy team and the structures that keep them alive, as well as ensure one's own team's bases and expansions are maintained. Players earn resources for themselves and their team via aggression. [3]

Commenting on gameplay, Lifewire noted: "One particularly fun aspect of Unvanquished is that as insects, players can crawl on the walls and ceilings, adding a new, though perhaps somewhat disorienting, take on game physics". [4]

Development

Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to Tremulous . The gameplay and game resources are under the CC BY-SA 2.5 Creative Commons license whilst the Daemon engine is under the GPLv3. [2]

Development began the summer of 2011 on SourceForge, with the first alpha version being released on February 29, 2012. [3] While the code development was already happening on GitHub since 2012, [5] the game release distribution moved from SourceForge to GitHub in 2015. [6]

Unvanquished is developed by a team of volunteers who used to release a new Alpha on the first Sunday of every month. [3] However, since the project reached a new stage of development, betas are released with less frequency.[ citation needed ]

Engine

The lineage of the Daemon engine Daemon Engine history.svg
The lineage of the Daemon engine

Unvanquished uses the Dæmon Engine, [7] [8] born from a merge of the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine (id Tech 3) and the XreaL engine. [9] That merge was initially named OpenWolf [10] before being renamed to Dæmon [11] [12] before the first alpha release of Unvanquished was released. [13] Its development is now proceeding in its own path from its predecessors.

In 2015, with version 0.42, the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with developers of Xonotic . [14]

Reception

Michael Larabel from Phoronix.com praised Unvanquished's graphics in July 2012, while it was still in alpha state. [15] [16] Lifewire praised the insect mechanic as an interesting twist and the ease of modding (referring to the level editor). [4]

Softpedia reviewed the game in version 0.49 in March 2016 and gave 3.5 stars. [17]

Between 2011 and June 2017 the game was downloaded alone from SourceForge over 1.3 million times. [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. "Unvanquished 0.55.1, let's polish it!". unvanquished.net. 2024-11-03. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  2. 1 2 "Copying". GitHub . Retrieved 19 August 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 "About - Unvanquished". unvanquished.net. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  4. 1 2 Dave Rankin. "5 Open Source First-Person Shooter Video Games" . Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  5. Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix . Retrieved 2024-11-27. The development of this multi-platform game is also being done in the open and can be found on GitHub
  6. Marius Nestor (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge". softpedia . Retrieved 2024-11-25. they would soon migrate away from the SourceForge website and that planned on releasing future versions of the game on GitHub
  7. Larabel, Michael (2013-09-15). "Unvanquished Is Rewriting, Modernizing The Quake 3 Engine". Phoronix . Retrieved 2024-08-09.
  8. Larabel, Michael (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished Makes Its Open-Source Engine Easy For Other Games". Phoronix . Retrieved 2024-08-09.
  9. Larabel, Michael (2012-12-01). "The State Of XReaL, OpenWolf Game Engines". Phoronix . Retrieved 2024-11-27. Among the features to OpenWolf were 64-bit support, a modern OpenGL 3.2 renderer shared from XreaL
  10. Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix . Retrieved 2015-07-07. The open-source Unvanquished game is being powered by the Daemon engine, which is a fork of the OpenWolf engine.
  11. "Renamed engine". GitHub.
  12. "Rebrand to Daemon". GitHub.
  13. "10 years and Unvanquished". unvanquished.net. The game was released on tremz.com as first alpha under the Unvanquished name on February 29 of 2012. The engine was already named Dæmon as it had been renamed from OpenWolf to Dæmon in January of 2012, one month prior that first alpha release.
  14. Marius Nestor (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge". softpedia . Retrieved 2024-11-25. the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with members of the Xonotic free and fast arena shooter game
  15. Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix . Retrieved 2015-07-07. OpenGL 3.x renderer from XreaL, Stereoscopic 3D renderer support, MD3 and MD5 model support, an improved shader system, procedural animation blending
  16. Larabel, Michael (2012-08-25). "Unvanquished Still Looks Amazing For Open-Source". Phoronix . Retrieved 2024-11-27. Unvanquished is still on track to become one of the most compelling and visually impressive multi-platform open-source games
  17. Alexandru Dulcianu (2016-03-14). "Unvanquished Review". softpedia .
  18. "Statistics". SourceForge . 2017-06-06. Retrieved 2017-06-06.