''Red Eclipse'' is an open-source

first-person shooter A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre, video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a First person (video games), first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through t ...

that is forked from '' Cube 2: Sauerbraten''. Like the original ''Cube 2'', it features

multiplayer A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...

gameplay as well as in-game level editing, but with improved graphics and a focus on

parkour Parkour () is an athletic Training#Physical training, training discipline or sport in which practitioners (called ''traceurs'') attempt to get from one point to another in the fastest and most efficient way possible, without assisting equipment ...

movement. The game is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

, released under the

zlib license The zlib license is a permissive software license which defines the terms under which the zlib software library can be distributed. It is also used by many other open-source packages. The libpng library uses a similar license, libpng license, s ...

, and developed by an open community of contributors. Its content is free, and released under a

CC BY-SA A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...

license.

Gameplay

''Red Eclipse'' is a multiplayer first-person arena shooter, similar to ''Cube 2: Sauerbraten'', with a style of play comparable to ''

Quake III Arena ''Quake III Arena'' is a 1999 first-person shooter game developed by id Software. The third installment of the ''Quake'' series, ''Arena'' differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing primarily on mult ...

'' or ''

Unreal Tournament ''Unreal Tournament'' is a 1999 first-person shooter game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. The second installment in the '' Unreal'' series, it was first published by GT Interactive in 1999 for Windows, and later released on the P ...

''. Players fight in two randomly assigned teams — Alpha (Blue) and Omega (Red) — which can be changed with mutators. Game modes include: Deathmatch (kill to score), Capture the Flag, Defend and Control (players must secure control points to win), Bomber Ball (a bomb must be brought into the enemy goal before it explodes), Race (players compete for the number of laps), as well as online cooperative map editing. As in ''Cube 2'', each mode can be further modified with several mutators, such as FFA (Free-For-All, i.e. players fight for themselves) and Instagib (all hits are lethal, and players spawn only with a rifle). Unlike ''Cube 2'', ''Red Eclipse'' features parkour movement, such as vaulting or running along walls.

Development

''Red Eclipse'' was branched from the defunct ''Blood Frontier'' project, itself a fork of '' Cube 2: Sauerbraten'' that began development in 2007. The first stable release of ''Red Eclipse'', version 1.0 ("Ides Edition"), debuted on March 15, 2011. The game engine is written in C++ and uses SDL with

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

as its cross-platform graphics API. It builds and expands upon established concepts of ''Cube 2'', and uses the same

octree An octree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly eight child node, children. Octrees are most often used to partition a three-dimensional space by recursive subdivision, recursively subdividing it into eight Octant (geo ...

geometry model to enable real-time,

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

editing. ''Red Eclipse'' 1.3 in 2012 introduced two new modes: "King of the Hill" and "Coop". Version 1.6, released on December 21, 2017 and dubbed "Sunset Edition", was the last version to use the old rendering engine, before the game started using parts of the engine of ''Tesseract'' (another fork of ''Cube'' ''2'') for the next major release. ''Tesseract'''s graphical improvements allowed ''Red Eclipse'' to use more advanced rendering and lighting techniques — most notably deferred shading, better shadow-mapping, and support for reflection and refraction. ''Red Eclipse'' 2.0 ("Jupiter Edition"), the first version to use the new engine, was released on Steam in December 2019.

Reception

In 2013, ''Red Eclipse'' was used by researchers of the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

and

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

for the creation of IllumiRoom, a project to create an augmented television screen with projectors. The researchers noted in their IllumiRoom paper for the CHI 2013 that access to ''Red Eclipses source code enabled a "rich, interactive experience".

References

External links

* {{authority control 2011 video games First-person shooter multiplayer online games Parkour video games Linux games MacOS games Open-source video games Windows games First-person shooters Arena shooters

Gameplay

Development

Reception

See also

References

External links