10 Best Open Source FPS Games

Top ten FPS that are FOSS

Time for another overweening list - the SEO godesses demand it!

Tremulous has 1.1 stable, 1.2 dev and 1.3 third party dev versions. It's a mess. Getting bots to run is a mess. Yet I love this game. I am only capable of playing 50% (can't handle moving aliens at all) yet I had the most fun building bases in Tremulous.

So you want to download and play Tremulous? HA! HA I SAY! Pick your poison:

• 1.1 stable from 2006
• 1.2 beta from 2009
• 1.3 inofficial alpha from 2018

I still don't know which is the most useful for either finding servers with bots or humans. (1.3 has zombie game mode servers with bots is all I know).

Unvanquished is Tremulous 2.0 and a little more complex and hardware requirements. If you can find a better-looking FOSS game I'm all ears and eyes. Uvq has bots built-in.

OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with strictly freely licensed assets, some of which likely satisfy niche fetishes. Who doesn't know OpenArena?

Rexuiz is really interesting because it takes care to not split the community. Assuming Nexuiz classic has a community? It also publishes on itch.io and any open source FPS is at least 10 times better than any Unity3D-made FPS on itch, so that's a really smart move - if your team has the time to make nice thumbnails/screenshots.

I really gotta compliment on the music in Xonotic. And the visuals.

Red Eclipse is still in development and has movement that is quite different from all the Quake descendents thanks to its doublejump and innovative weapons. I can't get over the blurry look though (I guess it's mostly the particle effects, maybe I could tweak them to be... sharper?). Additional microrant: some of RE music I like, some not much.

I like Trepedation's original game mode (Trepedation) but I have yet to try it against human players but at least the characters and levels seem to be hand-made for the project.

Sauerbraten is today minus 2013 years old and still popular, by comparison. And I gotta say: instaCTF is fun! To heck with the "flag dropped" sound though. Sauerbraten is partially non-free-as-in-freedom asset-wise.

FreeDoom is an entire single-player campaign. So is Blasphemer. Amazing amount of content! Once configured with mouselook and advanced sprite upscaling, it's nearly as good as an actual 3D FPS.

• Get the engine: https://zdoom.org/
• Get the game: https://freedoom.github.io
• Get the other game: https://code.google.com/archive/p/blasphemer/

Smokin' Guns actually has a bunch of license uncertainties. But it looks like there's an effort to modernize it and liberate it.

Comment on our forums here.

Read More

Xonotic 0.8.1 released & related news

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch (via the autobuilds), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps.

From the user "Antibody" (known for his duel commentary videos) comes this nice video overview of the new features:

(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)

On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.

Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.

Read More