Alien Arena: Mercury Edition Does A Lot Of Changes

The latest update to the Alien Arena open-source first person shooter is now available for gamers. Alien Arena: Mercury Edition has a whole lot in the way of changes.

There's graphical enhancements, improved engine OpenGL rendering, and new game features. Key highlights include:

- Major improvements in map rendering speed
- HD lightmaps
- IQM mesh animation now handled in GPU for major peformance gains
- Particle rendering optimizations
- Fixed issues with ATI and shaders
- Soft shadowmapping for vegetation and players
- Cubemapping on mesh and map surfaces
- New glass and water effects
- Weapon switching has been made significantly faster
- TCA now best two out of three
- Various player models received poly increases for smoothness
- New armor models

More details on the Mercury Edition release of Alien Arena can be found at PlanetArena.org.