We are now very close to releasing Unvanquished 0.55! It’s now only a matter of days! We have published a first release candidate (see the thread in the forums). Let’s give some news about the project before the release day comes!
Updated updater updating the updater
We already rolled out our new updater! The Unvanquished launcher 0.2.1 was published in July and it automatically updated itself. People using the Unvanquished launcher to run the game (the recommended way to do it!) are therefore already running the new launcher.
Rendering goodness
Last year we made a call for a renderer developer, and Reaper joined us. He is a true wizard and does amazing things you can’t even imagine! Not only did he fix and finished the portal blending and recursive mirror features we were looking for help with, but he did much more than that. Reaper is moving our renderer forward to leverage the latest shiny things we can use from OpenGL 4.6 and even beyond: bindless textures, compute shaders…
Slipher who has been involved in the development for a very long time now (he is truly one of our oldest and more faithful and productive developers!) also recently joined the small elite of the ones who grasp how the renderer works! Many things that were broken for years are now fixed thanks to him! He is the one who re-implemented video playback and who fixed the autosprite feature!
The list of regressions in our renderer compared to what the legacy Quake 3 OpenGL 1 renderer was doing is now very close to being empty! We have reached a point where all legacy maps are expected to be rendered properly.
Mods and maps
The years 2023 and 2024 were opulent in modding and mapping, you can find a lot of fun on the servers (like the AMCS amcs one by Sweet seen in the screenshot above)!
Compatibility and performance
The hardware and driver compatibility of the engine will be improved a lot with the upcoming 0.55 release. Any device that supports at least OpenGL 2.1 will be expected to run.
Performance has been impressively improved in many ways, we will distribute free loads of hundreds of fps to every player!
Prepare your benchmarks, it will be fast!
Translation
Since 0.54 we also called for translators, and some of the translations were already shipped with Unvanquished 0.54.1.
As we are running the last meters to the next release, you may want to help translating the remaining strings.
Unvanquished tray browser
Viech published on GitHub a minimalist Unvanquished server browser that runs as a tray icon and lists servers.
This is very simple but also very handy!
Infrastructure
We are in the process of upgrading some of our public software on our server, like the wiki, the authentication system, etc.
In our chat platforms, we created a new play channel that is dedicated for the bot making game announcements, this keeps the general channel less noisy. On Libera.Chat it is named #unvanquished-play, on Matrix and Discord they are named named “play”.
Submodule dances
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/ \
| ✝ |
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| beloved |
| submodule |
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| 2017-12-30 |
| 2023-04-11 |
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| R.I.P. |
| | 🄵
(,,)é | | ɘ̀(⹁⹁) ɘ̀(⹁⹁)
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Press F to Pay Respects!
Some work done on our build tools allowed us to reimport the unvanquished_src.dpkdir submodule into the game code repository. We also imported CBSE (the code generator that produces the plumbing for a component-based gamelogic) in the game code. That makes things easier to deal with.
Showcase videos on Youtube
In the past year we published some videos on our Youtube channel showcasing some of our development progression: video playback on surfaces, recursive mirrors, portal blending…
This is a reminder we have a Youtube channel here, don’t forget to subscribe:
It’s also the right time to remind we have a Mastodon account alongside our usual X and Facebook accounts:
So, don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel and follow our Mastodon account!
There are news to come!
🤯️ Awesomeness is coming!