New Alien Arena release coming very soon...

[Irritant]

This is the official press release, so sorry for the generic, canned dialog...

Alien Arena version 7.52 is only a week away from release!

Some of the new general features for this release include:

• Many new models and textures
• Four exciting new levels
• Vegetation shadowmapping
• Account system for stats
• Improved stats algorithms
• Various improved effects
• Decoupled renderer from client frame code
• Variety of bug fixes and code cleansing
• Changes to the bot code and anti-camp

Alien Arena is a free deathmatch game that has been around for some time, and steadily evolved into what we feel is a leader among a crowded fps field. With it's smooth gameplay, balanced weapons, and rich, immersive arenas, Alien Arena is an artisticly cohesive tour de force in the genre. Outlandish claims you say? The visual proof, well that's in the screenshots...the rest...well, you'll just have to download version 7.52 when it comes out and find out for yourself!

Alien Arena 7.52 screenshots:






Alien Arena is also finding it's way into horror...yup, the game is featured in a soon to be released horror movie called "The Association" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1842494/ and is planned to be featured in another upcoming horror flick called "Zombex" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1916763/ , starring Malcom McDowell and Corey Feldman!

For more information about Alien Arena visit http://red.planetarena.org

[Irritant]

Might postpone this a week. Possibility of vastly improved performance, pending further testing.

One thing we are also doing with this release is moving some of the remaining oldschool maps into an "official" map pack that will include a variety of discontinued maps. Some of these are still popular to this day, but don't really meet the current standards of quality that we've set for ourselves. Still, 55 stock maps come with the game, and all discontinued maps are available via fast http download in-game. The map pack will be usefull for server ops, though a good number of them are still in SVN so that it is easier to set up servers to run them.

Following this release, some things might change radically, partially due to the release of idTech4, and how we might integrate useful items from that engine, and also how we may change net code, meaning for the first time in the 8 year history of this game, that we break compatibility with older clients. The backwards compatibility is something that we've sort of taken pride in, for better or worse, but we also realize it's held a few things back that we'd like to address. Bottom line is, we want to make this game a lean, mean, fraggin' machine, and that has really always been the goal. Attempting to achieve that has been a fun ride