Unvanquished Pushes Its OpenGL 3 GLSL Renderer

The eighth alpha release of Unvanquished was released this weekend with some major changes to its graphics renderer.

This open-source first person shooter that is a very promising non-commercial title with impressive graphics (similar to Xonotic) continues to see new alpha releases on a monthly basis.

It's already been known that the October update, Unvanquished Alpha 8, was going to advance its OpenGL 3.x renderer for the game engine that's derived from the id Tech 4 engine with the ETXReaL renderer improvements. Unvanquished game developers have been advancing their GL3 renderer to the point that they eventually want to ditch the old renderer and move to this GL3 with GLSL renderer as the default. This is one of the first open-source games beginning to take OpenGL 3.x support very seriously.

The Unvanquished Alpha 8 release on Sunday not only has GL3 renderer improvements that lead to much less memory being used, significant performance improvements, and speed improvements for the GLSL (GL Shading Language) shader cache, but there's much more. A new human model was introduced, there's a new weapon, a third-person construction kit was added, support for left-handed weapons, and an updated server browser.

More details or to download Unvanquished for your favorite operating system, see the new Unvanquished web-site.