Behind the scenes a lot has been going on in the organization of the Xonotic project. If you’re watching git.xonotic.org, forums.xonotic.org, dev.xonotic.org, img.xonotic.org, #xonotic on irc.quakenet.org / irc.freenode.org then you probably have an idea of who has been contributing but there has been no clear definition to the public on leadership roles.

Through forum discussions and IRC chats, the core team has designed an organizational structure and appointed key individuals to positions. In the system design, we’ve tried to keep the hierarchy as low as possible. Xonotic is free open-source software and we’re interested in evolving together with freedoms in tact but too much freedom in system design can lead to nothing getting accomplished. This is why we’ve appointed the following list of people to guide the direction of the project and ensure the quality of the experience.

The Core team consists of 6 members who discuss and vote on large project changes. This international group of leaders is a classic group of collaborators who above all else, will try and do what’s best for the game and community.

• divVerent
• -z-
• merlijn
• morphed
• mand1nga
• tZork

Coordinators are here to guide contributors, provide information both in and outside their area of expertise and act as liasons to the core team to ensure the most important information doesn’t go overlooked. Coordinators will be the people to ask questions to regarding their subjects. If you’re feeling lost, contact these people, their names are linked to their forum accounts.

• Diabolik a.k.a Dib

• -z- (web / game)
• FruitieX (game / web)

• morphed

• FruitieX

• mand1nga
• merlijn

• divVerent

• divVerent
• FruitieX
• tZork

• -z-
• mand1nga

• divVerent
• merlijn

Note: Many of the core members are serving double roles as coordinators. This is not a considered a conflict of interests in decision making because these members are largely filling the role until someone else who fits the description can fill it.

These coordination positions are time-consuming roles that require dedication, knowledge of the area and sharpened communication skills. If you believe you can be of assistance in this area, you may contact the team at admin@xonotic.org. Don’t forget, you can still contribute in other ways without the responsibilities of a coordinator.

See dev.xonotic.org/xonotic for the most up-to-date list of contributors.

Community Coordinator
To help organize and guide the growth of the community / street team

Writers
To write articles about xonotic and related things

Ruby developers
To customize redmine for the project needs

PHP Developers
To write MyBB plugins for the project’s needs

Contact Team Xonotic at admin@xonotic.org

In the past few weeks I’ve been taking a stab at all the Mac specific stuff for Xonotic. Most of these changes will probably go unnoticed for the majority of our players, but for the sake of documentation I will post some details about what I’ve done.

Let’s start out with the good news, all of the libraries have been updated to the latest versions and are now all capable of running as 64-bit (x86_64). For many Snow Leopard users this will mean easier compilation and we will be able to include 64-bit binaries in our future releases. Furthermore we are switching to the SDL interface as the default for OSX now, largely because it is easier to maintain and there is very little difference in performance these days. The `all’ script automatically selects SDL already, however you can choose AGL by means of `./all compile agl’ and `./all run agl’ if desired.

The reason why we’re moving away from AGL is that the interface has massively changed in Snow Leopard, and currently AGL doesn’t even compile on Snow Leopard. In fact this is unlikely to ever get fixed, as it would require the rewrite of a large portion of the code. This really only makes AGL an option for those of us still on Leopard.

Due to the 64-bit capability, we’ve also had to drop support for OSX 10.4 Tiger. I suspect everyone who likes gaming on his Mac does not run Tiger any more, and even PPC users can still upgrade to Leopard (Yes, we still support PPC).

With all of these changes, it has also become pretty easy to run Xonotic from GIT on your Mac. You will still need to install XCode and the SDL framework, but that’s pretty simple. More information can be found on the wiki page . If you run into any trouble, please let me know.

Merlijn Hofstra

As you can see it’s finally possible for us to post news updates about the project! The news site apparently had some problems, and with our web developer busy there was no way to write news here. That doesn’t mean nothing happened though, if you have been reading GIT log there’s been a lot going on “behind the scenes” if you want to call it that The project has been going forward at a fast pace thanks to the great community of contributors that we have.

I’ll start out in a little bit of a rush, trying to sum up the most important development that has been going on in the project, from the view of a busy developer who is just getting back into contributing actively

Ignis, Female Version

More screenshots in the image gallery.

WIP screenshot of Glowarena remake by tZork

WIP screenshot of Space Elevator by FruitieX

WIP screenshot of Dance by FruitieX

Most of the Nexuiz maps weren’t really up to today’s quality standards, so the old favorites are being remade by mappers like tZork, Cortez, sev, FruitieX (me), Cuinnton and others. Currently it looks like at least the following maps will have remakes: Glowarena (tZork), Dance (FruitieX), Space elevator/Gasolinepowered (Cuinnton/FruitieX), Aggressor (FruitieX) Stormkeep (FruitieX), Runningmanctf (FruitieX, I’m promising much here ), Downer (Cortez), Evilspace (Cortez), Soylent (sev), Castles (Cuinnton), Space CTF aka cb_ctf1 (C. Brutail) and probably more that I’ve missed . Aside from remakes, I’m also seeing brand new maps appearing in the forum, and even in the repo (condemned_castles by MooKow). Which of these that appear in the initial release is something I have no idea about yet

There’s quite a lot going on code-wise. This is probably the part that’s the most invisible to people in the community that do not hang around irc channels all the time, or read git log. We have been seeing big and important changes taking place, made possible much thanks to the switch to git: The developers aren’t all tied to work in one place, in the stable “branch” anymore as they pretty much were in svn, now they can simply create a branch even for their most experimental changes. This enabled huge changes such as CSQC players to be possible to develop in parallel to other smaller things: that (as of today) still experimental stuff does not interfere with the rest of the development. When finished that should give us better animations, better prediction code, better compatibility to future versions (new physics code can simply be sent by the server, as opposed to now when you need an engine update) among other things. Also, Taoki has been working on adding more natural animations for the 1st person weapon models when moving the view around, similar to what most other modern fps engines are doing.

Another immediately visible thing in the initial Xonotic release should be the completely new HUD system, developed and initially brainstormed by me and Dib: the “Panel HUD”. It takes each HUD element and divides them into rectangular panels, each panel freely movable and resizeable with the mouse cursor, similar to how you manipulate your windows on your computer. Thus you’ll be able to create your own HUD layout easily, and with some extra effort and image editing skills, your entirely own skin. The default layout/skin has not been decided on yet, it’s up to the community to provide the best!

Click here to view the embedded video.

WIP Panel HUD skin by sev

WickedX menu theme, also by sev

Other interesting changes include an update to the physics config, which now allows for circlejumps and more controlled strafe turning. divVerent has also tweaked them to remove exploits such as strafebots from being used. Doublejumps are an option still discussed, but before they are enabled by default “the code has to be more mature”.

A subject that’s currently discussed a lot about is the weapon balance, with many contributors having their own set of weapon settings. There’s not much to say about any kind of “official” balance yet, but it seems like it is going to differ from the Nexuiz balance a bit. Personally I hope that we’ll get as unique weapons as possible, with each weapon having it’s own uses that differ from the others as much as possible, which was a little bit of a problem in the Nexuiz balance.

Many of you have noticed that the main site has been stagnant recently. This has probably left many of you thinking the project is dead if you haven’t been lurking around IRC (#xonotic on irc.quakenet.org / irc.freenode.net), dev.xonotic.org, git.xonotic.org or forums.xonotic.org. It’s far from it and we’re aiming to get that sort of news out to the public in a more streamlined fashion.

In addition, we’re looking to improve how we collect contributions, sort through information and make sure we’re conveying status back to the public. We wish for this system to be as self-sustaining as possible and this attribute has long kept me from making this announcement. We’ve been doing a lot of planning and organization structure behind the scenes (more on that soon) and it is my hope that we can bridge these web applications with a global user system for simplicity. A lot goes into that however and it’s not possible for us to do this yet. I have set aside some original plans for the way the applications are stitched together and refreshed/refined the vision of how this main-site should behave. This plan still allows for the future possibility of a global login but first and foremost, allows us to USE the darn thing .

I know you may have been hoping for more information about the status of the project but that will be coming in another update. For now, click around, get acquainted with all the goodies.

We would like to formally announce the arrival of Xonotic – A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.

Xonotic came about in the wake of recent troublesome changes to the Nexuiz project, changes that have left many of the core contributors and community members feeling that the project has been mishandled. As a result, we felt the need to organize a departure to start with a clean slate.

Xonotic will place focus on the things we love about Nexuiz, and extend our goals to become the game that many thought Nexuiz should have been.

While technically being a direct successor of Nexuiz, the Xonotic project is a rethink of the Nexuiz project that recognizes the community around it as its principal driving force and will restructure itself to respect that. This means that there will never be a single person with total control over the project. In addition to the stronger focus on the community, Xonotic will also pursue a clearer agenda including the following:

Game Changes:

• A new set of player models and animations
• A new set of sounds
• New music
• Default maps will get a makeover
• New stronger bot AI
• New names for weapons and gamemodes (especially ones using the “nex” prefix)
• Low quality content will be dropped and replaced with higher quality ones

Project Changes:

• Use of GIT versioning system instead of SVN
• Better attention to marketing and public relations
• A more defined artistic direction
• More emphasis on recruiting
• Better organization of contributors
• More focus on community activities (tournaments, contests, etc)
• More frequent releases
• Global player stats tracking system, supporting anonymous player as well

While we don’t have a specific timeline for the first release under the new title, you can track the progress and updates on our website, on twitter , facebook and in IRC: #xonotic on irc.quakenet.org

Please visit our FAQ page for more detailed information about this project.

We look forward to creating a game that everyone can feel a part of. You are very much welcome to help in any way you can. We appreciate all of your support.

The Xonotic team.