Nexuiz Gets Forked, Turned Into Xonotic

Nexuiz, an open-source first person shooter that we have been covering since its first release in 2005 and has turned into a game that offers impressive graphics and raises the bar for open-source gaming, has been forked by many of its core community developers. This is coming after the Nexuiz founder and others ended up agreeing to an Xbox 360 re-make deal whereby a company known as Illfonic will take the code and re-make it within a closed-source game using their own artwork, etc. With Illfonic not looking to contribute back to the GPL-licensed Nexuiz and some community members not liking this capitalist move, they have parted ways and started work on a new project.

Xonotic is this new project that is a fork of Nexuiz and takes away some of the main developers within the Nexuiz community. Apparently they already have in excess of 30 core community members for this new project. This project aspires not only to take the GPL Nexuiz code and release it as a new game, but they are planning to provide new models and animations, new sounds and music, a makeover of many maps, higher quality content, and other organizational changes for the project.

At this time the project does not have any release schedule or any idea when Xonotic 1.0 will be released. The project web-site is Xonotic.org and additional questions are answered via the FAQ page. Hopefully this project will be able to take off as this begins to put the future of the GPL-licensed Nexuiz in question, which up to this point we would view as the best open-source first person shooter in terms of graphics and game-play.