The free first-person shooter Xonotic recently received another new update, version 0.8.5, which improves the most varied aspects of the game, with adjustments in all areas, including levels, graphics and models from characters to “bots” you can play offline with.
The last game release took place in mid-2017. Over the past five years, there have been thousands of changes added to both the game and the engine used in development, called DarkPlaces, which is derived from the original Quake engine. All this work brings new and updated maps, gameplay improvements, new sound effects, better bots, a new HUD, more translations, and a host of other improvements.
"Xonotic 0.8.5 is here at last! There’s been thousands of commits since 0.8.2 making this quite a long read for all the right reasons: refined gameplay, new and updated maps and models, new sound effects, more dangerous bots, new HUD and menu features, more translations, better infrastructure, too many fixes to count, and much more", explain the developers at official announcement.
The DarkPlaces engine also had significant performance improvements, a Quake Live-style mouse acceleration mode was introduced, and several bugfixes. There doesn't seem to be any major rendering work with this release (like support for Vulkan), but still Xonotic remains one of the best open source games.
To download the game, as well as for more details about the title, be sure to visit the developer's official website.
