It’s sadly been years since having anything major to report on for Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter game that started out many years ago as Nexuiz. Thankfully a new version of Xonotic was published this week and while it’s just a point release, it does come with many improvements.
Xonotic 0.8.5 is the new version released and it continues to further enhance this open-source game. Xonotic as a reminder is built atop the DarkPlaces engine, which is derived from the original Quake engine but has seen significant modifications over the past 20+ years.
Xonotic 0.8.5 is the successor to Xonotic 0.8.2, released all the way back in 2017. Over the past five years there have been thousands of commits between the Xonotic game itself and the DarkPlaces engine work. All this work brings new/updated maps, gameplay enhancements, new sound effects, better bots, a new HUD, more translations, and a range of other enhancements.
Among the in-game enhancements has been better balancing, a new “duel” game type, much better bots, new weapon models, and more. The DarkPlaces engine has seen significant performance improvements, a Quake Live style mouse acceleration mode is introduced, and various fixes. There doesn’t appear to be any major renderer work (nor Vulkan mentions…) with this release but still Xonotic continues looking among the best open-source games.
Downloads and to learn more about Xonotic 0.8.5 as one of the best open-source, cross-platform FPS games via Xonotic.org. I have already been running lots of benchmarks of Xonotic 0.8.5 and you can begin seeing Xonotic 0.8.5 GPU benchmarks via the test profile page. Here’s to hoping for many more and more frequent releases of Xonotic.
