10 Best Open Source FPS Games
| 9:36 AM

By On 9:36 AM


Time for another overweening list - the SEO godesses demand it!

Tremulous has 1.1 stable, 1.2 dev and 1.3 third party dev versions. It's a mess. Getting bots to run is a mess. Yet I love this game. I am only capable of playing 50% (can't handle moving aliens at all) yet I had the most fun building bases in Tremulous.

So you want to download and play Tremulous? HA! HA I SAY! Pick your poison:

  • 1.1 stable from 2006
  • 1.2 beta from 2009
  • 1.3 inofficial alpha from 2018

I still don't know which is the most useful for either finding servers with bots or humans. (1.3 has zombie game mode servers with bots is all I know).

Unvanquished is Tremulous 2.0 and a little more complex and hardware requirements. If you can find a better-looking FOSS game I'm all ears and eyes. Uvq has bots built-in.

OpenArena is Quake 3 Arena with strictly freely licensed assets, some of which likely satisfy niche fetishes. Who doesn't know OpenArena?

Rexuiz is really interesting because it takes care to not split the community. Assuming Nexuiz classic has a community? It also publishes on itch.io and any open source FPS is at least 10 times better than any Unity3D-made FPS on itch, so that's a really smart move - if your team has the time to make nice thumbnails/screenshots.

I really gotta compliment on the music in Xonotic. And the visuals.

Red Eclipse is still in development and has movement that is quite different from all the Quake descendents thanks to its doublejump and innovative weapons. I can't get over the blurry look though (I guess it's mostly the particle effects, maybe I could tweak them to be... sharper?). Additional microrant: some of RE music I like, some not much.

I like Trepedation's original game mode (Trepedation) but I have yet to try it against human players but at least the characters and levels seem to be hand-made for the project.

Sauerbraten is today minus 2013 years old and still popular, by comparison. And I gotta say: instaCTF is fun! To heck with the "flag dropped" sound though. Sauerbraten is partially non-free-as-in-freedom asset-wise.

FreeDoom is an entire single-player campaign. So is Blasphemer. Amazing amount of content! Once configured with mouselook and advanced sprite upscaling, it's nearly as good as an actual 3D FPS.

Smokin' Guns actually has a bunch of license uncertainties. But it looks like there's an effort to modernize it and liberate it.

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Warsow is now Warfork and on Steam
| 4:19 AM

By On 4:19 AM

Warfork Gameplay (livestream - skip ahead 1m20s)

Last updated 2019-08-22 (see bottom of this article).

The title says it all. Warfork is the revival of Warsow. Warsow is cool (and super hard to master) but does not have servers running and no development ongoing.

Warfork is an ironically-named fork of Warsow, has CC0 art assets and is for now only released on Steam. The source supposedly is mostly based on qfusion, the source code is supposed to be available as a DLC.

I recognized one of my own CC0 sounds in the game (dong.wav) without attribution (which is totally fine both legally and morally) but it's too bad that assets (especially the nice announcer voice) can't be re-used/re-shared with voluntary attribution without digging around for it first.

Some art is limited by containing trademarked logos. Would be cool to have clean versions if anybody plans on packaging Warfork for official distro packages eventually.

Shortly after launch time there were around 50 people on all servers, later it was even more. Let's hope it ends up being a success and that many other open source games will dare following!

Warfork on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/671610/Warfork/
Warfork on Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/VY95TKZ

Fun for me: I found out about Warfork two hours before release time as I was checking out a discussion about bringing Unvanquished to Steam.

Y'all better start with itch.io for distribution first. ;)

Discuss about this article on our forums here.

Update 2019-08-20: 

  1. To my knowledge, the Warfork team is not required to publish the source, the offer to provide the source in the license included in the Steam release might suffice. Somebody who cares enough might try to contact them and ask for the source. [Oh wait somebody already did]. This worked when I asked for the source of an OpenArena Android port on the Play Store years ago.
  2. I was wrong about Warsow not being under development - Its Beta was updated just days ago. However I'm there are no regular servers available for players.
Update 2019-08-22:

Warsow 2.0 is now almost fully FOSS!
| 3:21 AM

By On 3:21 AM

Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND).

Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0
You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here.

Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included.

So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now...

Happy fragging :p