As others have helpfully pointed out, Sauerbraten is an open source Quake-like arena FPS. It's been around for years, and this is this first major release since 2013.
The community is still quite active, and there's been a particular hubbub of activity preparing for this new release. It's a super fun game if you're into arena FPS with lots of opportunities for tinkering, modding, and freeform content creation through its fairly unique online map editor.
I'm happy to answer any questions, and there's also the community discord server: https://discord.gg/j3kyxtj
Next holiday at the hackerspace we're looking for something to spin up and hook in anyone walking by we'll be playing Sauerbraten!
The developers have many notable side projects in the gaming space, too. Aardappel has a programming language, Lobster[0]. And eihrul created the ENet library for UDP networking[1]. I think Sauerbraten itself uses ENet.
I could be totally off on this, but isn't this a classic way of encoding levels?
The original Cube engine is almost as old as Quake III: Team Arena, which can do more free-form geometry and has pretty light-maps, but ‘compiling’ these maps was a lengthy, compute-intensive task at the time, which made online multiplayer in-game level editing impossible.
While people tend to focus on the mapping and the stripped-down Quake gameplay, I think there are some subtle innovations that Sauerbraten did that are unrecognized. For example, the announcer loudly notifying you when a major powerup is about to drop. It was always silly that, in old twitch-FPS arena games, the gameplay was heavily based around memorizing the spawn locations and times of the major pickups... Sauerbraten/Cube2 made that informal thing formal by including it in in-game announcements.
And the on-screen text... back then, games were resistent to just sticking the user's name over the player model and uglying up their game. Now, of course, nobody would dream of putting the art over the multiplayer experience like that. Cute related features are how chat text similarly appears over the speaker's head. Also, on-screen numerical damage. Little things that many FPS games of the time insisted on not doing because of "immersion", but MMOs had proven that informative, clear gameplay was more important than immersion.
Willing to bet a fair number of folks found this, figured out it was some kind of game, and immediately wanted to know more (I certainly did)... but had to dig around to do so. "Sauerbraten" is a very common German dish, for which every search engine (correctly) returns a big list of recipes.
The times when we kept our Burgers warm by placing them on the 17'' monitor heat outlets. Not that they really stayed warm, but that didn't matter to us when gaming away the school holidays.
It was the time I got introduced to some very cool people on these nights who taught me html, taught me that there is more than Windows (something called Linux) and a lot of other stuff. Damn - these were interesting times. And it put me onto a track that led me to were I am right now.
Thanks a lot to these people.
Wow, it's still around! https://assault.cubers.net/
that brings back some memories
Simpler times..
The feeling of power at such a young age was intoxicating
When I was in college I did one of my projects using it, to great results (also I went overboard with the easy to use engine and made even the furniture inside rooms inside buildings... so the FPS tanked whenever you were outdoors and looked at the city buildings, thankfully the demo for presentation was entirely indoors, so my extreme detail was visible only through windows, where it worked fine, excellent culling system the engine has).
Also I wanted to join the Wouter's course in SMU at Guildhall, but too expensive for me :( (also in another country entirely, making things more complicated), this was after tinkering with Sauer source, and wanting to be that good at coding :)
oh man, maybe you have no idea how many lives you changed with this project <3
> svn: E120106: ra_serf: The server sent a truncated HTTP response body.
That's all I get, either using the website's snapshot download or svn export.
