Xonotic Aims To Be The Best Open-Source FPS

While Xonotic 1.0 is still a ways bit out, this open-source game derived from Nexuiz is certainly shaping up to be one of the best open-source first person shooters available.

Xonotic is built off the success of the open-source Nexuiz game, which was visually rich to begin with and raised the bar for open-source gaming. In the two years since the Nexuiz fork, Xonotic has raised the bar even higher.

Xonotic 0.6 is the latest release from this March and it's visually stunning -- and taxing on graphics cards / drivers, as shown from the many test results. The developers behind this open-source multi-platform game do have big aspirations for version 1.0 and are still working towards that goal as I wrote a few days ago.

As luck would have it, beyond the information I shared a few days ago, an official update has come out of the Xonotic camp. There's a developer news update. Below are some of the key items from their public development update.

- "There's no ETA for a new release, but I can already tell you it’ll have a lot of long awaited and interesting features, raising the high bar set by 0.6."

- Xonotic weapons are still in the process of being redesigned.

- Support for "simple items" -- see video demo embedded below.

- XonStat (Xonotic Statistics) updates.

- Item timers for spectators.

- To further push the visual richness, there's now Cubemap reflections on player models. (See video below.)

- Bezier curves for trajectory and rotation.

- New maps.

For those that missed it, the creator of the open-source game engine that's used by Xonotic (DarkPlaces) is now working at Valve Software on the clients of Steam and Source Engine.