Sauerbraten CTF Edition

Formerly known as Cube, Sauerbraten is an open-source first person shooter game built upon the Cube engine that has been entertaining gamers for years. Sauerbraten has come a long way when it comes to advanced rendering features, maps / game-play modes, and other features, with a sign of these improvements being the Sauerbraten 2008-06-17 CTF Edition release. As implied by its name, this most recent release of Sauerbraten introduces a capture the flag game-mode. In addition to the CTF gaming support, there are many other improvements and new features, with this being the first update since the end of 2007.

In addition to the capture the flag mode, an "insta CFG" mode has also been added for instant CTF gameplay. Some of the improvements with this release include a new song soundtrack, an in-game text editor, cloud box support, texture browser displaying glow/rotation/offsets, console message filtering, Mumble positional audio support, improved texture rotation, and a "Private Stan Sauer" single-player campaign mode. The in-game text editor isn't designed for multi-tasking in doing programming or writing documents while gaming, but this editor is intended for editing the game's configuration files.

This game has also picked up several enhancements to its underlying "Cube 2" engine. Sauerbraten 2008-06-17 introduces support for soft particles / explosions, pulse-glow shaders, refractive waterfalls / environment-mapped waterfalls, a rewritten particle renderer that offers greater extensibility, a more efficient (and re-written) world renderer, support for underwater fog / caustics fading, built-in zoom, fallback support for environment-mapped water reflections, MD5 model support, OBJ model support, and a new decal system. The new decal system is responsible for handling bullet holes, scorch marks, and other minor and a number of new commands. We've found many of these improvements to be very nice and the graphics are starting to look much better compared to early Sauerbraten/Cube releases.

Adding to the change-log for Sauerbraten 2008-06-17 are thirteen new maps. These maps are named hallo, shipwreck, akroseum, berlin_wall, hog2, paradiselost, duomo, tejen, mach2, capture_night, reissen, c_egypt, and kalking1. In total this game update has more than 56 changes.

To some dismay, we still view the Sauerbraten menu system as being a bit awkward and not as clean as other open and closed source games.

To view the complete change-log for the Sauerbraten CTF Edition release, head on over to the Cube Engine Forums. Sauerbraten for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X can be downloaded from SourceForge. If you are new to the free software gaming scene, you may also be interested in (among many other titles) Nexuiz and The Battle For Wesnoth.

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