Much of this had to do with the fully open source nature of the project, as well as it using the most advanced Quake based engine of the time, Darkplaces. It was overshadowed by another, rival title – Nexuiz. It’s a little known factoid that Alien Arena was the first of the Quake based aFPS games to arrive. Not necessarily the peak of Q3 and UT, but more the years in the mid 2000’s when the open sourced shooters arrived. Sometimes I really long for the classic arena shooter days. It won’t be long before these maps are populated with items like ammo, heath, and armor. I will add a few things more to GZ this week, some car and flying saucer wreckage, a few more detail meshes here and there. Meanwhile, a bit of minor work continues on Ground Zero, so here is a screenshot(though this one doesn’t show anything new, just thought it was a cool shot!). I’m also still working on content, and will soon have some updates there. I love the base framework that’s in place, and this will be something that will be a lot more easy to deal with than ancient Quake based engines. So far, so good! I am really excited to start testing and developing the more complicated aspects of online multiplayer.

Largely this is all completed now, with a little more brute force testing to confirm it is 100% stable. This all lead to the multiplayer side of things, and special care had to be taken there, not to mention the map editing aspect. So, in my “infinite” wisdom, haha, ok, let’s be honest – sometimes you just gotta go the “hack” route, I have the game go into an intermission when switching the maps manually. This really only happened when manually switching a map in the midst of a game, when it sits in it’s 10 second intermission between maps, and everything clears out during that time, it’s fine. Has to be some kind of weird timing issue with Bullet. It’s odd, given it uses the identical methods. Everything is fine when they are deleted “naturally” during the game, as they time out, but if there are some active ones and it runs through the list and clears them when switching maps – boom – crash. The one that is still bizarre is the case of the ragdolls. While tracking all of that down, a couple of other intertwined bugs were solved, at least in some fashion. It’s also now only flushing anything if the map changes, and instead resetting various data that needs resetting in those cases. It took a bit of time, and tracking down some weird things with the IQM models, but it’s working. I simply got sick of waiting for the game to load up all of the meshes instead of what it just needed…so…it was time to start doing some flushing and re-loading. I new that was coming fast, especially while making the newest level “Ground Zero”. At the stage now of “I made too much stuff, it’s using up way too much memory, and it’s time to get a little dynamic”.

Xonotic soundtrack