''Unvanquished'' is a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

and

open-source video game An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible. Definition and differentiation Not all open-source games ...

. It is a

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 ...

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the pl ...

and

real-time strategy Real-time strategy (RTS) is a Video game genre, subgenre of strategy video games that do not progress incrementally in turn-based game, turns, but allow all players to play simultaneously, in "real time". By contrast, in Turn-based strategy, turn ...

game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.

Gameplay

Players fight in an alien or human team with respective melee and conventional ballistic weaponry. The aim of the game is to destroy the enemy team and the structures that keep them alive, as well as ensure one's own team's bases and expansions are maintained. Players earn resources for themselves and their team via aggression. Commenting on gameplay,

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noted: "One particularly fun aspect of Unvanquished is that as insects, players can crawl on the walls and ceilings, adding a new, though perhaps somewhat disorienting, take on game physics".

Development

Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to

Tremulous ''Tremulous'' is a free and open source asymmetric team-based first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements. Being a cross-platform development project the game is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The game features two opposi ...

. The gameplay and game resources are under the

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2.5

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

whilst the Daemon engine is under the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. Development began the summer of 2011 on

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, with the first alpha version being released on February 29, 2012. The game moved to

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in 2015. Unvanquished is developed by a team of volunteers who used to release a new Alpha on the first Sunday of every month. However, since the project reached a new stage of development, betas are released with less frequency.

Engine

The ''daemon'' engine is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

of the earlier version of the OpenWolf Engine. While developing "their" engine, Unvanquished team uploaded clean copy of the source code, dropped original commit history and claimed project as theirs. Its development is now proceeding in its own path from its predecessors. In 2015, with version 0.42, the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with developers of

Xonotic ''Xonotic'' () is a free and open-source first-person shooter video game. It was developed as a fork of'' Nexuiz'', following controversy surrounding the game's development. The game runs on a heavily modified version of the Quake engine known as ...

Reception

Michael Larabel from Phoronix.com praised Unvanquished's graphics in July 2012, while it was still in

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

state.

praised the insect mechanic as an interesting twist and the ease of modding (referring to the level editor).

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reviewed the game in version 0.49 in March 2016 and gave 3.5 stars. Between 2011 and June 2017 the game was downloaded alone from

over 1.3 million times.

References

External links

*
Source code repository
on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Original project repository
on

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...