After six months of active development, Xonotic 0.6 brings many new features for both casual and die-hard players. It boasts new weapon models, new maps, massive new features, and a ton of bugs fixes.

While you’re busy downloading the game, let’s have a look at all the fantastic enhancements Xonotic 0.6 has to offer.

Download via torrent
Download via HTTP

MD5: 2dac2c1ad4388255d3ad4d038dea3f77
Package size: 964MiB

Lower quality download via HTTP (602MiB, md5: 219aaa91eb8362e39e0851eb83bd3a1f)
Map editor download via HTTP (150MiB, md5: 0ccee66956043898a696f97df1a3f723)

You can also download and play Xonotic on Desura:

Xonotic 0.6 introduces the long-awaited feature of ClientSide QuakeC (CSQC) networked players. With this change player entities are now controlled on the client instead of the server, which allows the client to control animation of the models and their level of detail. This conserves FPS and improves performance without any visual loss. Spawn damage particle effects on characters (bleeding, burning, gibbing etc.) are also possible with this approach. It also allows the player to enable forced enemy models: regardless of what playermodels others choose, you can set a different one locally, e.g. brightskins that are very popular among more competitive players.

CSQC networked players opens many more possibilities for the future, including ragdolls, animation blending/smoothing/segmentation, client side weapons (no latency when firing/attacking) and much more. The most important parts for this are included in the engine of 0.6, allowing servers running newer versions to push these future features to the client dynamically. This allows for much more flexible development and better testing.

XonStats, the integrated statistics system for Xonotic, allows you to send game data (frags, deaths, captures, weapon accuracy, etc.) and store them online for later viewing (at http://stats.xonotic.org/). You can search for yourself or your friends’ statistics, watch overall rankings, server statistics and much more! Because we respect your privacy the system has been designed to be specifically opt-in, and on first launch of the game you will be asked whether you want your stats to be published. More features for the statistics are still being developed, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to see more data or would like to see data represented in another way.

Xonotic 0.6 comes with sRGB lightmap rendering by default so maps have more natural, realistic lights and shadows. We also released a new version of our official map creator software netradiant with updated support for the (now default) sRGB compile method. In general this means that maps will have less extremely dark corners, and lights don’t have to be as bright as before to light up the room.

Xonotic 0.6 ships with four new maps. Lightspeed is a fun, small CTF map best played with four people. Fans of Deathmatch, Freezetag or Minstagib will enjoy fragging in the blueish halls and corridors of Solarium. The competitive crowd will enjoy the 1v1 maps Drain and the remake of a classic Quake deathmatch map, Darkzone.

The Laser and the Minstanex have new high quality models. This was needed especially for the Minstanex, as its model was more than 3 years old… Either way, they follow along nicely with the goal of improving the models/appearance of the game.

We have redesigned and simplified the menu interface so it’s clear and convenient to use. We also paid great attention to the various translations of the menu text. And now support several languages (like Spanish, French, German and Hungarian) in the in-game messages. The menu is now available in Greek and Ukrainian as well!

Xonotic 0.6 introduces the new, fun game mode called “Sandbox“. Use your imagination to create funny scenes with the playermodels, add your own ones, and share them with your friends, even online! This can also be very useful for development, or easily trying new things without hacking the code or opening up a map to edit it. Though Sandbox is currently still a bit limited, expect new features coming to it later!



You can also view an extensive changelist of new features and bugfixes here. (note: may be incomplete)

Xonotic 0.6 demonstrates again the development power of a collaborative community of players and developers, where open discussions and knowledge commonly shared is the key for success. We’d like to grab the opportunity to shout out a very big THANK YOU for our beloved community, players and fellow developers who made this release come true! Without all your constant input, (positive) criticism, dedication and friendship, Xonotic wouldn’t be what it is today.

We have great news for those who prefer the competitive side of Xonotic. First, let’s take a look at the recent happenings since we last gave word about the ongoing Xonotic 1v1 tournament!

Semifinals, WB and LB final results

The semifinals were played between fisume vs PCLizard and L0 vs Mirio, with PCLizard and L0 winning respectively. You can watch the matches along with their commentaries on morfar’s twitch.tv account.

In the winner brackets finals PCLizard won against Lo after great fights on 3 separate maps (Warfare, Xoylent and Final Rage). You can watch the matches with commentaries from kojn and Mirio below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The loser brackets finals were played on the maps Warfare and Darkzone between fisume and L0, with the winner turning out to be fisume. With that win fisume earned a ticket to the grand finals! GG for both players and congrats to L0, who wins 3rd place in the tournament!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grand finals

The first Xonotic 1v1 online tournament ends on Sunday 19.02.2012 20:00 CET,  when fisume and PCLizard will have their ultimate showdown to decide who’ll be the winner of the GRAND FINAL! The matches will be played at the regular place (the eXile 1on1 Tournament Server X), and as usual, there will probably be a screencast too. For more information check out the tourney thread on the official Xonotic forums, or join #xonotic or #xonotic.pickup on IRC (irc.quakenet.org)!

GL & HF for fisume and PCLizard!

We’ve been contemplating for a long time a way for map screenshots to be done easier for the mappers and developers in a way that streamlines the process in the future and keeps the screenshots consistent and clean, so divVerent recently implement this. Basically, the way it works is by placing an entity on the map which contains an origin and view angle, and then the autobuild system (or maybe other parts of the game, like intermission perhaps in the future) will save the screenshot at that exact position.

There are basically 3 ways you can do this easily:

1. Use a “target_position” entity together with an “info_autoscreenshot” entity which only needs origins. This method is best for netradiant, simply because you can create the mapshot without much effort at all, all you need to do is position the entities how you want and link them together with Ctrl + K.
2. Place the “info_autoscreenshot” entity, and then rotate it manually in netradiant to how you want it by using the rotate tool.
3. Use r_speeds to get your desired origin and angles, and then manually create the entity with a text editor.

You can see examples and the results of these on maps already in the game as of today, “glowplant” uses the first method and “g-23″ uses the second.

If the map is on the autobuild server, it will automatically make you screenshots using these map entities (up to 3 entities can be used at once). The screenshots are at 1024×1024 resolution, but you need to resize them manually to 512×512 to use them as the mapshot. Unfortunately, the autobuild system cannot automatically pack the map shots into the pk3s as the screenshots are done after compilation/building, so you will still need to handle that yourself as well.

A new lighting method has been in the works for a bit now by divVerent, which basically uses more realistic color and shading calculations for the lightmaps created by q3map2 (you could already read about this in WoX-Blox #1). It can in many cases be a major improvement to lighting on maps, and especially it helps with maps being too dark in some cases. Of course the mapper still has full control over lighting and can still make the map dark, BUT it needs to be pointed out that sRGB lighting is by default about 2.2 times brighter than normal lighting methods! Because of this, it cannot be simply “slapped” on to a map, unless you adjust the light radius and intensities appropriately.

You can use various light flags to scale/adjust to compensate for this extra brightness, generally a factor of 0.4 or 0.5 would make the lighting look similar to the old style lightmaps.

Additionally, we have also produced a new build of NetRadiant for Windows users which has a few more features/tweaks/fixes since the last one, plus this new sRGB support enabled by default. (NOTE: Linux and OS X users have to compile it themselves using the git system, those platforms are impossible to build for different architectures normally) If you use this build version OR your map is on the autobuild server and you want your maps lighting to remain the same, you MUST use the “-nosRGB” flag! Otherwise, the lighting will default to sRGB, and that may be too bright for your map.

sRGB lighting for maps is certainly better when used properly, and it’s the direction we want to go in the future, and we expect all default maps (and all new ones) to eventually switch to sRGB lighting. Currently the most notable ones that use it are: Drain, Courtfun, g-23, and Darkzone.

Finally just a quick one about a feature we added to the waypoint editor. In addition to its old functionality, the waypoint editor can now automatically map the waypoints based on YOUR movement. Using the waypoint editor normally, enable g_waypointeditor_auto and just walk around all the various paths of the map. Once all paths are plotted, you will see a very natural plot which generally is far easier and much better than manually creating all of the plots. Depending on map size, it usually takes 5 minutes or so of just walking everywhere you can. Note that you should WALK slowly as bunnyhopping can distort the paths for bots.

Thank you for your attention, and again, please spread the news! If you have any question or just would like to comment this news, state them at the original announcement at the Xonotic forum!

]]> http://www.xonotic.org/2012/01/public-xervice-announcement/feed/ http://www.xonotic.org/2012/01/public-xervice-announcement/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Xonotic/~3/K1aCd-v1QII/ http://www.xonotic.org/2012/01/wox-blox-issue-3-%e2%80%93-community-news/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:11:08 +0000 C.Brutail http://www.xonotic.org/?p=1918 Welcome! You’re reading the third installment of WoX-BloX, the “World of Xonotic Blogs”! Development carries on at a crazy pace, and we barely have enough time outside of cleaning and polishing new maps, media, and code for the upcoming 0.6 release…

That’s right folks, you’ve read it correctly – Xonotic version 0.6 is on its way! We originally wanted to give it all to you for Christmas, but unfortunately Samual got very ill in the middle of November and was unable to contribute to the project at full scale. He’s now back at 100% and is currently crushing nasty bugs. With development back on pace we expect Xonotic 0.6 to arrive in late January or mid-February.

Okay, now that I have made you excited enough, let’s have a look at what our lovely community is up to! We have news, new and ongoing tournaments, exciting challanges and many more!

Results of the Nexball mapping contest

The Nexball mapping contest initiated by Cortez was fruitful, and once again proved that the community has a lot talented mappers. There were a total of 10 ball-bouncing maps submitted for judgement, and here are the results along with their download links:

1.: Mayanball by Morphed
2.: SWAT-SD by nowego4
3.: Bloodball by Maddin
4.: Dearbumperball by Soelen
4.: Gears’n'Balls by freefang
5.: Aerial-match by forseti
6.: Ariel by kuniu the frogg
7.: Basket_Case by PinkRobot
8.: Dustball by monad
9.: Deardrugball by Soelen

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL CONTESTANTS!

For more detailed rankings and the reviews of the judges, take a look at the forum thread of the Nexball mapping contest! If you’d like to check out the maps online, feel free to hop in to Pink Robot’s Lovely Nexball Server” (IP: 159.253.4.32:26000) and kick some balls! I’m pretty sure you’ll need a little exercise of virtual soccer and basketball in preparation for the announced…

Nexball 2v2 tournament by [BOT]

The [BOT] clan is at it again, organising a very promising and fun team challenge, the first ever 2 vs 2 Nexball tourney of Xonotic!

General rules:

• Gamemode: Nexball
• Timelimit: 5 minutes
• Fraglimit: No fraglimit
• KO Stage (Single Elimination) – NO Groups!
• Beggining of the tournament: After the Duel tourney (approx. 1st/2nd week in February)
• Best of 5 (Bo5) (maxium 5 maps will be played and your team have to win 3 maps to be in the next round).
• You can contact admins in IRC at #bot.xonotic or #xonotic.pickup
• Server: Pink Robot’s Lovely Nexball Server” (IP: 159.253.4.32:26000)
• Mumble server: shirkhan.dyndns.org:64740

The map list will consist of the submitted maps from the Nexball mapping contest, with Mayanball being the first map of the finals. You can sign in to http://xoneu.tourney.cc/ to find more information about the tournament and its rules. In case you don’t have a team but you’re willing to participate, or would like to discuss the tourney settings, hop in to the [Tourney] 2v2 Nexball thread on the Xonotic forums and put your name in the hat!

Race challange by Cortez

Cortez continues his monthly race challanges, for January it’s Capture the Flag race. Your goal is to do a capture on the map Tripzone (a CTF conversion of the classical DM map Darkzone) by divVerent as fast as possible. Beware – there is more to this map than meets the eye. This challenge is not an easy one, so good luck and have fun!

Rules:

• 0.5 physics only!
• The fastest player has to make a demo or video to show off how he did it (so everyone gets a clue how to play that map).
• Map download link: Tripzone
• Deadline: 1st February!

Post your times, videos or demos at the Xonotic forum: The Race Challange – January!
The winners for the multi-mapped December challange were Justin, Sless and Mirio. Congratulations! You can check out their time and the total rankings here.

Community server news

We’re more than happy to inform you about a new Xonotic Deathmatch server hosted by ++ The Beer Garden ++ (server IP address: 174.37.44.42:26000)! Located in Dallas, the server adds another North American place to frag on, so players from the EU might have a bit higher ping around~150 (it’s in the red zone, but still playable when I tested it). The server runs Xonotic version 0.5, and unfortunately doesn’t gather statistics yet.

Server Rules:

1. No racial or blatent slurs of the like.
2. Don’t be annoying…
3. No cheating
4. Be respecful.. this actually covers about all of ‘em.

You can find additional information on the official site of the server at The Beer Garden, or at the Real-time Xonotic server list. Original announcement can be found here.

After a small downtime, the Amazon EC2 0.5.0 CTS Server (us-west-2) is back again to provide online defrag action for CTS fans in the US (the server is located in Oregon)! Very big thank you for liberty who paid another year for the EC2 cloud computation server. Have fun playing there!

Not a week goes by without somebody showing up with an awesome map, soundtrack, or model. December was no exception. Cortez finished his Bleach retexturing project you could read about in the previous blog, Nestel released a surreal DM map with vehicles named Modern West Town, and forseti brought us some new Assault action with Safe-District. CTF fans can rejoice too, as kuniu the frogg released his Xoylent CTF remake based on the infamous Soylent CTF from Nexuiz. You can grab all the maps on the following links, though I suggest to keep an eye on those forum threads, as all maps might have future versions.

Dowload links:

• Bleach b1
• Modern west Town
• Safe-District
• Xoylent CTF

Better late than never, D_W fulfilled an old promise of his and provided us with alternate sound effects. His first mini pack has various sounds, but mostly ones involving item pickups. Included are armour and general item pickup sounds, item respawn, jump pad, gib, and gib splat sounds. You can download his work here. For sources and feedback please visit his thread of “D_W’s Sound Effect Extravaganza (and Brainstorming) Thread” on the forum. Thanks D_W!

“Erebus got fed up with having to fight in the arenas all the time. He wanted a little peace and a fun place to relax, to take a break from Xonotic and all the shooting. After some searching, he decided that a good place would be the Second Life virtual world, especially the open-source grids. So he took himself a vacation from all the fighting, and went to try out the experience of being a SL avatar.”

A while ago, Second Life implemented mesh support for avatars, allowing meshes to get rigged to the avatar skeleton and worn. Since the models in Xonotic are GPL, MirceaKitsune ported Erebus and his Xonotic Pony and Vixen models from Vore tournament (Warning: slightly NSFW) as a test.

If you’d like to find out more about getting the models as your avatar in Second Life (or you’d just like to add some comments about it), you’re more than welcome to do so here in the Xonotic forum.

That’s all for the 3rd issue of Wox-BloX, folks! I hope you enjoyed all the community related news and got excited about the new upcoming release of Xonotic 0.6. Good luck/have fun fragging and racing, and don’t forget to sign up for the tournaments and challenges. See you next time!

Just wait until you see what we’ve got planned this year

C.Brutail has recorded an intense battle of public deathmatch, recorded at Kababunka server. The server runs game version 0.5, however for the video recording the development version was used allowing you to see some of the new graphical features under development now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1v1 commentaries by Antibody, kojn, and Mirio for the 1337

If you’re into competitive gameplay, I have three new face to face commentaries from Antibody, kojn and Mirio to show you. The first one is a very thrilling pickup match featuring Mirio vs PCLizard on the reworked map “Downer” by Cortez. It’s really exciting – a must see!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The second video is a practice match between PCLizard and fisume commentated by kojn and Mirio. In this video, the battle takes place on the Xonotic version of the classic Quake map Darkzone, and it was a practice match for their then upcoming tourney match. Watch how each player’s strategy develops in this down-to-the-second thriller!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lastly, here comes the big boom! The archived screencast of the semi finals of the [BOT] 1v1 Online Tournament in online, boasting a whopping 2 full hours of Xonotic action! In the beginning of the screencast you can listen to some pulsating Xonotic music Northern Lights composed by Sc0rp followed by Traveler and Quiet by blkrbt. From 10:53 you can watch kojn’s fragmovie entitled Deathmatchers, and from roughly 22:08 the live commentary of the semi-finals with PCLizard vs fisume, and L0 vs. Mirio. You can find the video at morfar‘s twitch.tv account.

Have fun watching!

]]> http://www.xonotic.org/2011/12/xonotic-videos-roundup/feed/ 2 http://www.xonotic.org/2011/12/xonotic-videos-roundup/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Xonotic/~3/VCxWE9bSL9g/ http://www.xonotic.org/2011/12/xonotic-1v1-tourney-semi-finals/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:35:58 +0000 C.Brutail http://www.xonotic.org/?p=1854 As you probably already know, [BOT] clan organised an online 1v1 tournament in the beginning of the fall, and the matches are coming along very nicely! The tournament has already progressed to the brackets of the semi finals with:

fisume vs PCLizard

L0 vs Mirio

The semi finals will start on:
Friday, December 9th at 10pm CET / 9pm GMT / 4pm EST

The server for the semi final will be held at eXile 1on1 Tournament Server X. The server has 14 spectator slots, so if you want to follow the battles for yourself, you’re free to do so! If you don’t have Xonotic installed, fear not, as kojn and Mirio (when he’s not playing of course ) will give you LIVE streamed commentary at http://en.twitch.tv/morfah/ (big thx goes to morfar).

So buckle up folks, grab some popcorn and a cold beer, and get ready for some epic duels! Don’t forget to join #xonotic or #xonotic.pickup on IRC (irc.quakenet.org) before the matches, as some of the aforementioned details might be a subject of change (most likely not, but those will most likely be anounced on IRC).

GL & HF for the contestants!

Artifex armifer digitis dextris, oculis occultis!

Welcome back reading WoX-BloX! For those who are still not familiar what this is all about, let me introduce the World of Xonotic Blogs, where you can get the latest news about Xonotic, let it be either about development, tournaments, or other cool Xonotic related happenings. In this issue the we’ll cover up some of the most important buzz happening in our beloved community.

As you could read in a previous blog post, 11/11/11, Global Gamers officially turned 5 years old! Global Gamers is an IRC network formed on a simple concept: gaming should be fun! To promote that fun they host multiple game servers for classics like Quake2 as well as cutting-edge hits like BF3, and of course, Xonotic! On 12th November as a part of their celebrational events they held a four-match Xonotic free-for-all contest. The matches for the contest were a blast, with participants from AU, US and EU too!
The first three winners were:

#1 fisume^ (459 points)
#2 ChaLK (420 points)
#3 CrancK (347 points)

Congratulations to the winners, and GG for all the other 25 players who celebrated with Global Gamers! You can find demos from fisume^’s point of view here, and a complete list with endgame screenshots of all participants with their scores here. Also, Jehar from TastySpleenTV has made a very nice screencast commentary lasting more than two hours!

Jehar’s screencast Part1 @ own3D.tv
Jehar’s screencast Part2 @ own3D.tv

As we’ve reported a few weeks ago, [BOT] is organising a 1on1 tournament. The groups stage is already over, the tournament participants are now battling in brackets in double elimination system. Unfortunately, a few contestants have dropped out in the groups stage: Debugger, itsme, Halogene, ai, mepper, C.Brutail, aNictS, Lord Canistra, Calinou, Samual, qbit, naryl and Vargos. s0rk and FruitieX were eliminated in the first rounds of the brackets stage. GG for them, and thanks for participating!
If you’d like to follow and spectate the matches, don’t forget to join the xonotic pickup channel on IRC (#xonotic.pickup @ irc.quakenet.org), the usual meeting and gathering point of the contestants, so you might be able to catch the starting of the matches!

The Race Challenge

The Race Challenge is a very unique monthly community contest organised by Cortez. As the name suggests, the participants have to try to beat eachother and the clock in “race” game mode: they have to run through checkpoints on maps as fast as possible. The first challenge was held in February and ever since then Cortez has announced it every month, providing a great deal of entertainment for the players. November’s announced challenge was Speedy-Lane by FruitieX and Cortez.

The challenge attracted many players in November too: Mirio, Leeloo, Justin, kunio the frogg, sev, Halogene, It’sMe, Sless, Grunt, nowego4, Dissolves, nifrek, and Soelen. Soelen has also recorded a Youtube video that shows his mad trickjumping skillz, and how he beat the map with in just 13:37 seconds with the help of some imaginary friends (WARNING! Video is slightly NSFW, and features harsh language).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Besides that hilarious video, the winner in November was nifrek with a time of 0:17:42!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

As usual, Cortez has already announced the challenge for December, this time with multiple maps to complete (map names are also download links if you’d like to check out them and take part in the race):

1. stormkeeprace – one of the official race maps included in Xonotic 0.5.
2. warfarerace – Pinkrobot made this adaptation back in 2008 and now it’s updated it for Xonotic!
3. Slalom – by FruitieX.
4. Streetrace – by Pinkrobot, which is also retextured for the race challenge.
5. darkzonerace – Cortez applied the old sheme from divVerent and FruitieX to his darkzone remake.

Rules:

• 0.5 physics only!
• The fastest player has to make a demo or video to show off how he done it (so everyone gets a clue how to play that map)!
• Deadline: 1st January.

Don’t forget to post your times at the official Xonotic forum!

Nexball mapping contest

Xonotic has a very fun, though unfortunately underplayed game mode, called Nexball, originally developed for Nexuiz by Revenant, later recoded by MrBougo. The goal of the game mode is simple: you have to score points for your team in a soccer or basketball/handball style ballgame.
However, with currently two maps in the official mappool (and one of them is pretty much broken actually) and one in the works, there’s a real need for some more ball fields to play on. To invite mappers to produce new nexball maps for a possible tournament in the future, Cortez announced a Nexball mapping contest! The prize for the winner will be that his map will be played exclusively in the final, while other submissions will most likely end up as normal maps in the tourney.
The team of judges will consist of Antibody, MirceaKitsune and merlijn.
The rules are quiet simple:

• It has to be a nexball map
• Has to be optimized for a 2on2
• Maps with more then 1 ball are ok, but the limit is 50 balls per map. Otherwise the map won’t be accepted.
• The theme of the map is up to you.
• Be creative!

Deadline: 2nd January 2012 23:59 GMT +1

There are already some submission, but keep up those maps coming folks, this tourney will be a great fun! To get you inspired, here are some screenshots, that were submitted by Morphed, nowego4 and forseti:

If you have any questions regarding Nexball mapping, feel free to ask on the contest’s thread on the forum, or join #xonotic.editing @ irc.quakenet.org on IRC.

Creativity in the community: Models, maps and audio OH MY

I don’t even know where to start with this section on WoX-BloX, there are just so much awesome creative minds in our beloved community, kudos where it’s due, realy, you guys are just amazing! The first thing to mention is… well… it’s weird. In a good way. Or not, you decide, I’m not into this meme at all.

“My Little Pony”
Ponies. With guns. Ponies…. Xonotic PONIES! MirceaKitsune has created a set of adorable MLP models that you can use in the game.  Let’s join the fun, jump around, sing happy songs, dance, fling shotguns or just simply blow eachother to smithereens in My Little Xonotic Pony models!

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can get the latest version (v3 by the time of posting the blog) of the models here, but always check the My little pony… Xonotic pony? thread on the forum for updates.

WIP weapon models
Though they’re still early and a work in progress, I shall advise you all to keep a close eye on anark10n‘s weapon models. Early screenshots, but to be honest, I’d realy like to see some of these badass tools of destruction sometime ingame too! Keep up the good work!

You can see even more of anark10n’s work in his post of the Screenshots of what you’re doing thread on the forum.

Remake of “Bleach” map
On mapping grounds Cortez is at it again (from where the hell does this guy get all his energy and free time anyway ), with a retexturing project of a well known good old Nexuiz map Bleach with the exomorph texture set.

Remake of “Aggressor” map
Another classic map we all know and love named Aggressor is being remade by nifrek here with the new exomorph texture pack by Morphed, giving this map a fresh new style while keeping the same great gameplay. Currently of course it’s still a work in progress, but it looks very promising… to check it out yourself, visit the map autobuild server and download the latest “aggressorx” build today!

New CTF map work in progress
It seems when Justin is not zooming back and forth with bunny hops on race maps, he likes to try out his skills in brush building also, and I have to say, he has some talent there too!

New DM map “Quad Generator”
If you’ve ever wondered, where do Strenght items come from, Leeloo gives you the answer: they are of course produced in the Quad Generator facility! I realy dig the visuals and the overall feel of this map, very great job, you should download it and give it a try! The map is still WIP, but it’s in a very playable condition. If you’ve found a bug, or you have some suggestions for Leeloo how he can even further improve the map, don’t be shy to post about it in the map’s thread on the forum!

Strange new DM map “Hyperspace”
Do you like warpzones? ThePWTULN sure does, and his new map named Hyperspace does have a few of them. This stylish deathmatch map aims to have simple, yet stunning TRON-esque visuals, and features interesting non-euclidean map geometry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hyperspace is still in BETA stage, but feel free to download it, and tell ThePWTULN your opinions about the map on the forum.

Another strange new map “Geodasic”
Last, but not least, Nodenum has created a very interesting experimental map called Geodasic. The speciality of the map is that as it’s creator tells it was fully generated with experimental C++ code entirely! The map is a single big geodesic sphere filled with jump pads and some weapons. Seems like Sierpinski finally got it’s successor… You can download the map here, and if you liked it, or you have to comment to add, shout it out at Geodasic’s forum thread.

Voice acting by bitbomb
Prepare your eardrums folks, ’cause bitbomb is here with some announcer and character voices! Stepping out of nowhere, bitbomb’s first forum post ever was offering his help and showing his great work of proposed character taunts and some realy booming annoucer voices – now that’s what I call giving a good first impression of yourself You can listen to his work of announcer sounds and character taunts on the forum, and while at it, please give him some feedback too.

I have to thank everybody who contributed to the project by any means from the community, let it be a simple texture, a line of code, maps, models, sounds, artwork, some funny comments or feedback on the forum etc. You’re great folks, it’s a pleasure to play with you and develop Xonotic for good guys like ya all! Finally, feel free to listen to core team developers Samual and divVerent‘s new songs on piano linked below

Intrepid Dream.mp3 by Samual – 5mb – 2 minutes 56 seconds
divVerent’s Sonata No.3 played by Halogene on Soundcloud

As you could read previously, there’s an online 1on1 tournament on the fly, organised by the [BOT] clan. The groups are already played out, and the combatants have moved on to the brackets stage (you can read about this a lot more in detail soon in WoX-BloX issue # 2! ).
Though the matches don’t have set dates, there are always a lot spectators watching over the duels with great attention. As Antibody once promised, he has done an audio commentary of a duel between two experienced Xonotic players: kojn and fisume.

Have fun watching!

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to spectate a match, be sure to join the Xonotic pickup channel on IRC (#xonotic.pickup @ irc.quakenet.org) so you don’t miss the start.
Additionally, you can discuss this video on the official Xonotic forums.

So, as we’ve promised, here’s the first real issue of WoX-BloX! For those who’ve missed the good news, WoX-BloX translates to “World of Xonotic – Blogs”: an insider developer blog for the masses, so you don’t have to mess with reading cryptic git commit logs, go treasure hunting in the depths of our forums, or lurk for hours on the developers’ IRC channel for information morsels to feed your hunger for Xonotic WIP news (however, you’re welcomed to do so, if you want ).

Development news

XonStat

The first and most important news to share is the availability of the long awaited statistics system by Antibody, XonStat. It’s main purpose is to take game data (frags, deaths, captures, weapon accuracy, etc. etc.) and store them in a way that can be viewed at a later time. The aim of the project is to provide a place where players can see how they improve over time or remember the fun times they had. The main backend of the stats setup is based on a PostGreSQL database of Antibody’s design (who is a DBA in real life), and the frontend and submission parts of the application are written in Python using the Pyramid web application framework which is given data transferred by POST requests from authorized Xonotic servers using divVerent’s blind_id library. Additionally, because of the private identification of servers/players and security of the system, it makes it that much more difficult to cheat the system which helps keep the statistics clean and free of hacks and otherwise mistakes.

The stats testing system can be found at http://stats.xonotic.org/. It’s still heavily work in progress and has several flaws – this means that it will be taken down periodically for maintenance and bugfixes. The data being stored there should also be considered temporary, as it will be purged when we go from testing to stable. Still, it is a major step forward with the project and it is important to test and get criticism on during its early developmental stage.

Antibody had a lot help along the way. He received wonderful game icons from JayWalker and a theme from -z-. divVerent, Samual, and FruitieX have all helped getting the Xonotic server code up to par with his enhancement requests. Mirio, asyyy, and Mepper have been great at finding bugs and submitting enhancements. Because of their collective efforts we now have a system that captures accuracy and scoreboard data. Kudos to all these great people, thank you very much guys! Below you can see some of the icons currently used in the application contribute by JayWalker:

We encourage server owners to work with us and help us test the system, and you can help out too by just setting one cvar (console variable) in your server configuration file:

g_playerstats_uri "http://stats.xonotic.org/stats/submit" 

Additionally, there are a few cvars which clients may need to adjust manually if you’re playing from the Xonotic 0.5 release… Reason being that these cvars are not default in Xonotic 0.5 release, and you have to set them manually (by dropping down the console with SHIFT+ESC, and typing in these commands). In future releases, we will have these options both in the menu and asked of you the first time you play the game.

cl_allow_uid2name: "1" means your name will be shown, "0" means it will NOT be shown.
cl_allow_uidtracking: "1" means you will be tracked across games using an ID (called a hashkey), "0" means you will NOT. 

Of course, configure these how you see fit… For testing purposes though, we would appreciate you enabling both of them so we can better work with the data directly.

sRGB lightmaps

There’s a major fixing of the rendering of map lighting that divVerent is working on: sRGB lightmap encoding. Oh, come on, don’t give me that face, I’ll explain it right away what it does! In real life, lights have 1/r^2 falloff (and q3map2 emulates that too). This means, if you move away from the light source, the intensity of the light decreases linearly in an exponential way: the double the distance, the quarter the light intensity.

Ok, are you still with me? Good. But, here comes the problem: light values on your screen are not linear. In fact, the quarter the light value is actually 21th (!) the light intensity. This produces overshadowed, and unrealistically sharp lighting in maps. sRGB lighmap encoding fixes this issue, so we’ll have more natural, more realistic lights, that modern engines like CryEngine render. Here are some screenshots to demonstrate the effect (before and after).

Note: The greyish tint is actually due to a bug where the lights don’t use the proper color tinting values, this bug was fixed by the time of this post, so pay no attention to it for now and simply look at the lighting/shadowing.

This might not get fully in our next release, simply because this is not only an engine change, but maps have to be re-lit too to take full effect (adding more targetted spotlight style ligths instead of floating ones).

If you’d like to see this cool new feature for yourself ingame, here are the git branches you need to check out:
xonotic/darkplaces.git/divVerent/srgbfixes
xonotic/xonotic-data.pk3dir.git/divVerent/enable-srgb
xonotic/xonotic-maps.pk3dir.git/divVerent/sRGB

Gamecommand codebase overhauled

Samual is making the gamecommand system simplier (like “gametype”, “cointoss”, “gotomap” just to name a few), and improving the help system, plus adding new commands and new features which almost everyone can benefit from. From a developer standpoint, it’ll be much easier and cleaner to add new commands once he’s fnished this tremendous work. Here you can see an example of the already reworked code for server side commands. If you desire to tinker around with the codebase, here’s the development branch:

xonotic/xonotic-data.pk3dir.git/samual/updatecommands

The next release will also have a new map to frag your opponents to fleshy gibs: Lightspeed by C.Brutail! The map is a small, 1v1 or 2v2 CTF map, that features brutal fast gameplay and the not yet used facility114 texture set made by Oblivion. It also has randomly triggered sound effects for lightning, a mapping feature divVerent developed on mapper request especially for this map (in fact, randomisation can be used on all triggers, see entity info or the map sources for explanation and details).

8-bit Arena is a multy gamemod map, still in WIP status. The map will support deathmatch, capture the flag, and nexball gamemods. It was built a very unique 8-bit style with retro gaming references, and homages made to a classic and beautiful era of computer history. The map also features a very cool, conceptual eye-candy element: touch sensitive floor tiles! There’s still some quite work left to do on the map, but you can always check out the latest version from the automatic map compile server. For technical details, see and check out the branch:
xonotic/xonotic-maps.pk3dir.git/cbrutail/map-8bit_arena.

Click here to view the embedded video.

New Minstanex-gun model

A new MinstaNex-gun model is in WIP for a very long time now, but it seems it’ll finally see the pretty lights of a heated minsta battle, replacing the ancient “vacuum-cleaner” mocknamed model (that deadly piece of household machinery has been with us since Nexuiz 1.5 or so!). It was modelled by theShadow, and the texturing is currently under work in LJFHutch’s master painter hands. You can see the original concept art and the currently done third and first person view of this mighty weaponry on the pictures below:

That’s right folks, you’ve read it right! There’s a new gamemod and a mutator in development, and each one is more fun than the other!

Sandbox is a one-man project coded by MirceaKitsune.  This gamemod offers you the ability to spawn all kind of models found in the game – place them around the map, recolor or resize them, link them together etc. There’s also an internal data storage and a clipboard system, so you can save your modelsets, load them to clipboard, and paste them anytime you want. The mod offers both offline and online play – this gives you the opportunity to share your saved modelsets with the aid of the clipboard with other players on the server! It’s still early in development, but MirceaKitsune already made huge progress in just a few days. While it’s not yet so flexible as the famous Garry’s Mod for Half-Life2,  the project is geared towards further goals like adding physics, predefined clipboard sets for easier model creations, make model bones possible to pose from in-game etc. Below you can see a small video featuring the already implemented and working functions. You can find the sandbox git branch at:
xonotic/xonotic-data.pk3dir.git/mirceakitsune/sandbox

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can try out the mod online at MirceaKitsune’s Xonotic server (you need to check out his branch first, and recompile your engine in order to be able to play). For more info on the mod, check out it’s developer thread on the Xonotic forum

Last, but not least, here comes the big bang mutator from the coding master tZork and the artisan modeller Morphed:

OVERKILL

Overkill is like Xonotic on steroids (can you imagine that?!):  you only have 3 brutally overpowered weapons – the nex, the shotgun, and the machinegun. All the weapons have infinite ammo, but they have to be reload once in a while. The secondary firemodes of the weapons have been replaced by an offhand laser, pumping up the vertical movement ability to the max. From time to time, you can also pull the pin off of an offhand grenade that can be shot with every weapon, triggering a large combo explosion that rips everything to smithereens in the nearby. To countereffect the insane firepower of the guns, health regeneration is incresed to a very high speed. In teambased gamemods, player respawning happens next to nearest living teammates; this often leads to never ending massacres near a tactically important item or place on a map >:D .
The mod also has some new player and weapon models, although yet untextured.

Click here to view the embedded video.

tZork and Morphed’s mod became very popular, no doubt, and it has a public testing server, that you can visit anytime:
[MoN] Overkill. Now with votable game modes. (87.250.159.246:27000)

If you’d like to check out the technical details behind the mod, the git branch you need to pull is:
xonotic/xonotic-data.pk3dir.git/tzork/extragib

Wow, that’s massive! I’d like to thank everyone participating in developmet, both from the official dev team and the community members too – you all provide great ideas, advices, and helpful bugreports, that keeps Xonotic rolling to it’s next release!

ATTENTION TO FELLOW DEVELOPERS!

As writing this blog is not a simple task that can be done in a few minutes, I’d like to ask for all your help! May I introduce you all the git commit tag:

#woxblox#

From now on please add this humble word to the the message field, when you push a commit to remote that you’d especially like to be featured in WoX-BloX! This will add the opportunity to us to filter important commit messages and help writing the nexz blog issue with the following command:

./all each git log --all --grep='#woxblox#' --since="1 week ago"

That’s all for now folks! See you all in the next issue of WoX-BloX, that’ll feature the recent buzz in the community!

GL & HF!