Alien Arena 2009 Brings New Gaming Improvements

Back in October we reported on the release of Alien Arena 2008, which brought several graphical improvements, such as GLSL enhancements, parallax mapping, and new shaders. The developers behind Alien Arena and its Quake 2 derived engine had not stopped there, but they immediately began work on Alien Arena 2009. Now just a mere six months later, we have Alien Arena 2009 and it brings more graphics improvements along with many other technical improvements and new game content.

Among the graphical improvements in Alien Arena 2009 are GLSL per-pixel lighting on all surfaces, GLSL post-process frame-buffer effects, light volumes, shader optimizations, new textures and meshes, rewritten mesh rendering routines, improved accuracy of real-time lighting of meshes in the GL Shading Language, and faster shadow rendering. Alien Arena is based upon the open-source id Tech 2 code-base, but since then there have been many features added to this game's engine to further improve its graphics and game-play.

Beyond just the graphics, the audio has also been retooled and contains a number of new sound effects and underlying improvements. In Alien Arena 2009 there is now OpenAL 1.1 support along with support for Ogg Vorbis audio files as well as doppler sound effects and stereo music files.