This is our thirtieth monthly alpha release. Read on for what’s new!

Hello friends, and welcome to the latest installment of Unvanquished. We were nominated as project of the month for July by Linux Game Awards, and we’ve taken note of the feedback that everyone gave us over the last release. There are many fixes in this one, along with some new content. We are grateful for the nomination and the attention we have received. Thank you!

The release will be uploaded to SourceForge shortly, and to our torrent tomorrow. Here is what’s new.

New armory!

The new armory model is now in this release. As you can probably tell, it looks absolutely nothing like the old one, and presents a more circular design. It’s taller than the previous armory, and you’ll need to be a bit more creative if you intend to camp on top of it. We are open to suggestions as to what to display on the screens that you can see in the shot.

New hive!

Everyone’s favorite late-game alien defense structure now has a new model, too. The model lies closer to the ground and has a face to ensure that you will feel guilty when firing upon it. For the moment it still fires a swarm of buzzing things, but in the near future it will fire off individual flies.

Beacons!

We now have a cool new beacon system that will lay the foundations for many future changes, but they are already usable as-is. It is now possible to mark things with a variety of beacons visible to teammates, including attack, defend, pointer, repair, and time beacons. They are also visible on the minimap. We tried our best to make them unobtrusive, and in the future, we will use the system for team radar. Give us feedback!

Vertex data optimization!

For this release we’ve merged in our ‘vertexpack’ branch, which adds some efficiency to our renderer in the form of more efficient vertex attributes. This should result in less GPU memory usage per model, and depending on the graphics card in question, faster vertex shader invocation should result in some users noticing a degree of performance increase. We will have an article soon on the more technical aspects of it, as well as future plans regarding it.

Weapon inertia!

As part of what will be a series of changes in making the first-person weapons behave more realistically, human weapons now all have inertia behind them. This means that they will now lag slightly when following your motions.

Bug fixes!

We spent a lot of time going over the new libRocket interface and fixing things, so it should be a lot better than it was on its debut last month. For instance, we’ve reorganized many things in the interface, including many small things like adding a new team selection box. We also fixed long-standing issues like the weirdness with first-person models while spectating, assorted console strangeness, and the abundance of dynamic light created by marauders for no reason.