ETLegacy Continues Advancing Enemy Territory With OpenGL 3, OpenAL Surround Sound

One of my favorite Linux-native games of all time would definitely be Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wonderful memories of that excellent id Tech 3 game and back when I had time to game on Linux, when not being challenged by early Linux GPU driver issues. This game continues to live on via the community ETLegacy open-source project and recently did issue a major update.

A Phoronix reader pointed out this week that back in September was the ETLegacy 2.75 release. We have covered ETLegacy previously as an open-source project working on a fully-compatible client and server for Enemy Territory based off the open-sourced id Tech 3 engine code. The past few years ETLegacy has been making the game more modern and supported via SDL work, Ogg Vorbis support, optimizations, engine improvements, Lua scripting, and other features not dreamed of back when this game was released in 2003.

The ETLegacy 2.75 update is a big update but sadly only heard of it now. ETLegacy 2.75 has some big updates including an OpenAL sound back-end with support for up to 7.1 surround sound, a new OpenGL 3 renderer that's available in experimental form, gamepad improvements, The developers wrote in the release announcement from September, "We are confident to say that ET: Legacy is the most advanced, stable and optimized ET version ever created and we will continue to work to live up to that statement. Future features and updates are already in the pipeline and are being worked on."

Other ET:Legacy 2.75 changes include SQLite3 support in the engine, all of the work around the experimental "renderer2" making use of OpenGL 3, re-adding joystick/input device code, fixed demo recording, modding improvements, and more.

ETLegacy 2.76 is already in-development with work like an IRC client on the servewr, improvements to the new renderer, and much more. Can't wait to see where the open-source community takes this Enemy Territory spin-off into the future. If you have time this weekend, try out the game at ETLegacy.com. For reference, the game does still rely upon the original EULA-protected game data from Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.