Warsow 1.0 Released

http://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/14994

by mwilcox • 14 years ago

164 43 14 years ago

bashzor4• 14 years ago

Great news!

Personally I'm a bit more a fan of OpenArena[1], the community is a bit more fun-play focused than most other games (and you'll often get an answer when asking something ingame), but this game is great fun too. Good to hear there is progress, and also cool to see this on the HN homepage :)

[1] http://openarena.ws

corin_• 14 years ago

Interestingly (as someone who works in games industry doing marketing shit) I've never heard of OpenArena at all... but will definitely read up on it now you've mentioned it.

For Warsow, really pleased for them that they've reached 1.0, but from everything I've heard, specially over the past few months, they've made it a lot harder on themselves than it should have been, by the way they are organised (or not so organised) internally.

bashzor4• 14 years ago

Same in OpenArena, the organisation is quite messy. There are some modelers, coders, people who make maps in the hope of making it to releases... But nothing is really organized. Releases are not planned, and when they are planned they easily go 3 months overdue. But there is progress, and I think the game is already fairly complete as it is. Thousands of players seem to think so too.

OpenArena's goal is to make a completely open-source and free Quake 3 clone with some additions like delag, and it's actually the opensource competitor for Quake Live. It could use some more developers I think :)

zxy5• 14 years ago

They are quite organized, it's pretty hard to be disorganized, when you only have 2 main developers, and 2-3 occasional helpers.

I think the biggest hurdle in developing this version was actually the choice of using libRocket to script the UI with. Turns out the lib is very slow, and it needed lots of work to get working properly.

piffey• 14 years ago

What's the user base like in these games? I feel like every FOSS FPS I've ever played, besides UrbanTerror, has few to no players.

xmpir• 14 years ago

i agree - a user base count would be interesting

kaolinite• 14 years ago

Just so you know, UrbanTerror isn't open-source, sadly - still very good fun though.

There's a pretty fun FOSS FPS called AssaultCube which I used to play a lot - it's simple but it's fun. That has quite a high number of players. Unsure about how active the other FPSs are but whenever I've tried them out I've always been able to get a game.

kaddar• 14 years ago

Ehhh the public user base perhaps isn't really so important in foss fps games because these games are most often used as LAN games when not everyone owns the same collection of games. Before tf2, Warsow was pretty much the only good fps LAN parties could use legally.

simias• 14 years ago

You can find people to play with on public server all the time, however I think most of those are hosted it europe so YMMV. The main problem I have with Warsow is that the greater part of the regular userbase is very experienced and when you try to get into it at first it can be a very... punishing experience.

It's very fast paced and requires quite a lot of skill and muscle memory to become good at it. There are a couple of "noob" servers that are quite enjoyable however. Overall a very good game.

mwilcox• 14 years ago

Relatively small but there's been around 4000-6000 unique players per day since the launch of 1.0.

ralfn• 14 years ago

UrbanTerror doesnt have that big of a userbase either.

But somehow UT feels very much like a community. More so, than the other ones. (i like world-of-padman though)

colinhowe• 14 years ago

We play a lot of openarena at lunch (private server in the office). We're just trying this out now. First impressions are that the install and configuration steps are really smooth - something often omitted in these kind of projects. It's also fun. Might be that we switch our gaming from openarena to warsow...

bashzor4• 14 years ago

Or play both whenever you feel like it :)

planckscnst• 14 years ago

We have been playing Warsow and Red Eclipse at lunchtime. We're looking forward to giving the 1.0 a shot.

gallypette• 14 years ago

Urban Terror 4.2 is going to be released today ;) http://www.urbanterror.info

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

The 9 comments have opened my eyes, I honestly didn't think there was this many open, multi platform FPS games available.

Downloading and I'll give it a go this afternoon.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Very fun game. If anyone is familiar with Quake 3 or UT2004 style, you'll pick it up instantly.

mkohlmyr2• 14 years ago

Fantastic game, very happy for the team. I'm a CPMA fan personally and I always preferred Warsow over Quake Live as a replacement for CTF although QL duel is arguably better.

Anyone who hasn't played Warsow CTF 3v3 - 5v5 in a lan setting is missing out!

hypeibole• 14 years ago

Hi, fellow CPM fan here.

Just in case your preference for Warsow is solely based on the lack of promode in QL, I'm really glad to tell you that there is promode now in QL, and there's been for a couple of months now. Granted, it's a premium feature and so on but there are some public promode servers (user-spawned), specially CA and CTF, and I've been having a lot of fun there.

mkohlmyr2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the info I was not aware of that. I mostly stopped playing QL (all games really) when I went off to university though as I am laptop-bound! I might check it out next time I'm PC-adjacent though! Warsow CTF is actually tonnes of fun if you haven't tried it, I haven't played it in 2 years but I can only imagine it's even better now!

dredge• 14 years ago

To anyone else lured in by the "Ubuntu 12.04 (.deb)" install option - you need to add the playdeb repository to your sources list for the big "install this now" button to actually work.

Either install this package: http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/playdeb_0.3-1~getdeb1_...

Or otherwise add the repository to your apt sources:

  $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playdeb.list
  deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb games

Then do apt-get update (or equivalent) and the install link will work. As would just installing the warsow package, by that point.

I'm a little surprised they didn't mention that on the page.

krakensden• 14 years ago

on a related note, there is at least one Warsow map that has made it into Quake Live (Focal Point).

zxy5• 14 years ago

That's not a Warsow map.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Focal Point was created for Quake Live by this guy[1], who apparently has made the W:ET maps too, which are excellent.

Damn, I miss W:ET. Best multiplayer FPS I've ever played, hands down.

[1] http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design.htm

crizis3• 14 years ago

It was actually made for Quake 3.

There's no relation to Warsow, except couple versions back he did give us permission to include it in Warsow, but we never got around retexturing and fitting it for Warsow due lack of resources, so it ended up in QL.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

If you like that, you should also check out Nexuiz if you have not yet. It is my favorite of all the Open Source 3D shooters I have tried so far. It comes close to the very fast gameplay I liked so much in Quake3.

http://www.alientrap.org/games/nexuiz

frewsxcv• 14 years ago

Most of the developers have forked Nexuiz and created Xonotic. You can read about the split here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xonotic#Development

zxy5• 14 years ago

Yeah, the game right now I don't think is that good. I was talking with the developer and he's planing on doing some big gameplay changes. I really hope it turns out good, that game has a lot of potential.

oorion• 14 years ago

I've been playing warsow on and off for some time now and am extremely happy for the update.

Gravityloss• 14 years ago

It's a bit strange that most these projects seem to look and feel and sound almost exactly like quake 3, maybe with just some odd bits sticking out.

Maybe it's impossible to do coherent art direction in nebulous volunteer efforts. I don't believe the technology limits the style so much. Certainly that is not the case with something as basic as sounds.

bberrry• 14 years ago

I would think that's because Quake3 is held up as one of the best multiplayer FPS games of all time. It really had a buttery smooth feeling to it that's never present in modern games like BF3 or CoD.

lloeki• 14 years ago

The previous versions were more TRON-inspired graphically. I have not seen the project since a few years and was astonished by the changes in presentation.

What differs the most from the other Q3-likes (direct clones like OpenArena and more distant ones like Nexuiz) is the core of the game: while the others merely handle framerate-bound physics, bunny hopping, rocket- and strafe-jumping as gameplay side effects, this one is designed from the ground up to integrate such rule-abusive gameplay into its core. Jump features have been added (bounce-jump on walls), physics has been tweaked to provide less hackish strafe jump, configurations options abound to make the game tunable for enthusiasts (like coloring walls and floors instead of simply disabling textures and lightning). It seems this version goes even farther in configurability, with configurable coloring and extensively configurable/scriptable UI.

zxy5• 14 years ago

When this game was founded, about 7 years ago, Quake 3 was at a pretty big peak. The original goal was to make the next big competitive FPS. Though that didn't last too long, even though the scene is still largely very competitive players, there's no big tournaments for the game. Another thing to note, is that Warsow's engine is actually based on idtech 2.

Scene_Cast2• 14 years ago

You may be grouping "arena shooters" all together (one of my favourite genres, btw). Examples include Quake 3 / 4, Unreal Tournament series, Serious Sam, Open Arena, Nexuiz, Xonotic to name some popular ones. It's somewhat like calling the Battlefield series a clone of Call of Duty.

azakai• 14 years ago

Very cool!

Worth mentioning that id Software deserves a ton of credit for open sourcing their engines. Most open source 3D gaming stuff, like Warsow here, is based on their code.

crizis3• 14 years ago

That's true, but we've parted quite long from the original Q2 sources already - like our renderer is completely rewritten from scratch.

caleywoods• 14 years ago

I played in the online league in .3 and .4. Glad to see they've made it to a 1.0 release. It was an awesome game.

dimitar• 14 years ago

Another open source game that released a 1.0 is Smokin' Guns (former Western Quake). Has plenty of spaghetti western references :-)

10098• 14 years ago

I was actually trying to help the project with their new UI code about nine months ago, but then I moved to the US, had a lot of other stuff to take care of, and ended up abandoning the project. So happy for the development team though, keep it up guys!

Warsow 1.0 Released

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