Now for our 29th monthly alpha release! 

Hello everyone. There was an issue with our unvanquished.net domain name over the weekend, and we’ve been trying to get in touch with the registrar. We had hoped it would be resolved on Monday, but since we haven’t heard back about anything substantive, we figured we’d release anyway under an alternate domain. The site and forums should work fine, just replaced unvanquished.net in all of the links with the current domain. You can also reach us via our #unvanquished and #unvanquished-dev channels on Freenode.

And now for what’s in the release:

libRocket!

We’ve finally added our new UI system based off libRocket. The effort has spanned many months of design and work, and we are pleased to have finally merged it into the master branch. Gone is the old clunky interface with its awkward design, now to be replaced with a modern interface of our own creation. Considering we are still in alpha, you may expect some weirdness here and there, but as players you are the eyes of our project, and you will be valuable in spotting glaring inconsistencies and bugs for us to fix. Please report any and all strangeness you find on our forums, IRC channel, or GitHub bug tracker.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You no longer select items, freeing the mouse wheel for other binds.
• There is now a default grenade bind, assigned to the ‘g’ key.
• Making new HUDs is a different process, which will be explained soon.

Our menus have been greatly improved, both in and out of the game. Take a look at the options menu for instance, or the server listing. You can now easily start a local server without needing to bother with console, and you can even add bots to it, as long as the map has navmeshes included. For both teams, there is now a circle menu that will allow you to purchase upgrades and other things much more efficiently than before, and all items have clear explanations regarding what they do, hopefully leaving the game more comprehensible for new players.

The addition of the new libRocket interface brings us closer to our long-awaited beta, and once we’ve ironed out most of the bugs by next release, you can expect to hear about the next big thing we’ll be up to.

A new map!

Or rather, a classic one in the process of being upgraded for our engine. We now have a testing version of a retextured Station15, and the map will be available for you to play around with and provide much-desired feedback on. Considering that it is now our eighth map, and we have fulfilled our beta goal of at least six maps, we have made the decision to drop all of the old Tremulous maps from our default set. This leaves us shipping only our own maps, but you can still play the old Tremulous maps on your own servers as long as they are modified to work with our new filesystem.

Other changes!

A lot of other things went on this month for the game, although they’ve been dwarfed by libRocket. The human soldier now has cleaner armor textures, and the armor set has been modified so that the “unarmored” human is wearing a vest instead of charging into aliens in nothing more than chainmail pajamas. You can also expect the usual lot of bug fixes, of which there are too many to summarize here but can be viewed on our GitHub page.

Oh, and you should now be able to view our development section as long as you have ten posts or more on our forums.