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Posted by Arjun Shankar at 14:08 hr 01/04/2006.
Tremulous
I know my last article was on a game too, but then everyone is a child at heart. This time, it's a kickass game that puts the likes of Quake 3 and Counter Strike to shame. The next two paragraphs are quoted from the various sections in tremulous website, with a little editing done here and there.
Tremulous Promotional Video
Tremulous is a free, open source game based upon the GPL'd Quake 3 game engine. As a result, Tremulous code is also licensed under the GPL. This means that not only is Tremulous free in terms of monetary value, it is also free in the sense that you are free to use and examine it.
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Tremulous blends a team based First Person Shooter with elements of an Real-Time Strategy. Players can choose from 2 unique races, aliens and humans. Players on both teams are able to build working structures (there are 16 available structures) in-game like an RTS. These structures provide many functions, the most important being spawning. The designated builders must ensure there are spawn structures or other players will not be able to rejoin the game after death. Other structures provide automated base defense (to some degree), healing functions and much more.
The game is in the version 1.1.0 at this point. It has realistic physics and motion, several weapon options, scaling walls and ceilings (aliens only), and many other interesting features.
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I tried the game out from the linux installer, whose link is given in the tremulous website, and it works perfectly on my 1.4GHz lappie (about 60FPS). I have built binaries for i386 machines running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), from debian sources that I obtained from here, and here. You can get these from our glug-nith repository, by adding the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://glug-nith.org/repos/ubuntu dapper/
and then performing the following steps:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install tremulous tremulous-data
or, through synaptic:
Click "Reload".
Select tremulous, and tremulous-data, and mark them for installation.
Click "Apply".
If you run some other distribution of linux, you can use the installer available from here (Right Click, and 'Save Link As'). Make sure you add execute permission for the installer using chmod, or through File Properties menu in X.
If you run windows, or if you don't want to use our repository, or ftp service (It is pretty slow from outside college), you can download tremulous from here
All the video, and screenshots on this page, are obtained from the tremulous website, http://tremulous.net