Howdy, I posted this and also run Sauerworld, the community news and resources site for Cube 2: Sauerbraten.
As others have helpfully pointed out, Sauerbraten is an open source Quake-like arena FPS. It's been around for years, and this is this first major release since 2013.
The community is still quite active, and there's been a particular hubbub of activity preparing for this new release. It's a super fun game if you're into arena FPS with lots of opportunities for tinkering, modding, and freeform content creation through its fairly unique online map editor.
I'm happy to answer any questions, and there's also the community discord server: https://discord.gg/j3kyxtj
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out :) As someone who has never before heard of Cube, Cube2, or Sauerbraten, I just stumbled on this post and clicked on it because I couldn't figure out what the headline meant, and was even more confused because on the Sauerworld page it's not immediately apparent what it is about either. Ok, the sauerbraten.org page linked in the footer is more informative, and I understand that this is primarily a page "by fans for fans", but still maybe the "about" section should be more prominently featured...
It's pretty amazing to see this project still going. I remember Sauerbraten more because of its unique engine. Maps are basically a big octree with something like marching-cubes applied, and can be edited in realtime (and in multiplayer).
The developers have many notable side projects in the gaming space, too. Aardappel has a programming language, Lobster[0]. And eihrul created the ENet library for UDP networking[1]. I think Sauerbraten itself uses ENet.
I don’t know game engine tech, but I watched this[0] (which was awesome), and was immediately reminded of BZFlag[1][2], though the world looks more visually sophisticated.
The graphics haven't changed significantly. It looks like the biggest addition is new maps, which the community still seems to be quite involved in. There is a fork of the cube 2 engine intended to introduce modern graphics, called tesseract.
It's common to take map geometry from a level editor and process the polygon soup into some kind of space partitioning tree structure, but here the octree is manipulated more directly. The idea is to accept some limitations on what shapes can be created, for the sake of better real-time editing performance.
The original Cube engine is almost as old as Quake III: Team Arena, which can do more free-form geometry and has pretty light-maps, but ‘compiling’ these maps was a lengthy, compute-intensive task at the time, which made online multiplayer in-game level editing impossible.
Ecstatic to see this project still alive. A good 15 years ago now I helped to run the mapping site for it (Quadropolis) on a Drupal instance.
While people tend to focus on the mapping and the stripped-down Quake gameplay, I think there are some subtle innovations that Sauerbraten did that are unrecognized. For example, the announcer loudly notifying you when a major powerup is about to drop. It was always silly that, in old twitch-FPS arena games, the gameplay was heavily based around memorizing the spawn locations and times of the major pickups... Sauerbraten/Cube2 made that informal thing formal by including it in in-game announcements.
And the on-screen text... back then, games were resistent to just sticking the user's name over the player model and uglying up their game. Now, of course, nobody would dream of putting the art over the multiplayer experience like that. Cute related features are how chat text similarly appears over the speaker's head. Also, on-screen numerical damage. Little things that many FPS games of the time insisted on not doing because of "immersion", but MMOs had proven that informative, clear gameplay was more important than immersion.
I mean, saurworld.org is a news/blog site for this game: http://sauerbraten.org. Can't really blame them for assuming their readership knows what the game is.
As a rule, landing pages for online communities should have some type of link to a "Wait, what the hell is this stuff, and why should I care?" page.
Willing to bet a fair number of folks found this, figured out it was some kind of game, and immediately wanted to know more (I certainly did)... but had to dig around to do so. "Sauerbraten" is a very common German dish, for which every search engine (correctly) returns a big list of recipes.
I was looking for the information, too. But luckily, it wasn't too hard to find: you scrolled to the bottom and in the footer it says "the game" which includes a link to the game website.
Turns out Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer & singleplayer first person shooter, the successor of a game called Cube. Here is a youtube video of the gameplay https://youtu.be/fX7o-1OH-WM
Wow. I had never heard of the project before. Just saw their teaser video and it instantly threw me back to the late 90ies with LAN parties playing death match Duke Nukem or Doom.
The times when we kept our Burgers warm by placing them on the 17'' monitor heat outlets. Not that they really stayed warm, but that didn't matter to us when gaming away the school holidays.
It was the time I got introduced to some very cool people on these nights who taught me html, taught me that there is more than Windows (something called Linux) and a lot of other stuff. Damn - these were interesting times. And it put me onto a track that led me to were I am right now.
got my start programming making "hacks" for sauerbraten maybe 15 years ago. Got a huge kick out of making myself invisible, flying, infinite ammo, etc.
Simpler times..
The feeling of power at such a young age was intoxicating
I love this engine, sadly it got stuck in MP-only land, making SP games with it is just too hard.
When I was in college I did one of my projects using it, to great results (also I went overboard with the easy to use engine and made even the furniture inside rooms inside buildings... so the FPS tanked whenever you were outdoors and looked at the city buildings, thankfully the demo for presentation was entirely indoors, so my extreme detail was visible only through windows, where it worked fine, excellent culling system the engine has).
Also I wanted to join the Wouter's course in SMU at Guildhall, but too expensive for me :( (also in another country entirely, making things more complicated), this was after tinkering with Sauer source, and wanting to be that good at coding :)
Ah, good times.
Back when most games didn't have mac versions (before everyone used unity/unreal/godot), this was a real boon for me. I have since moved to windows but I still appreciate the effort.
R.I.P. that venice instagib server that I played the hell out of as a teenager.
Nice. One question though. It says there are 200 new levels, but doesn't say how many single-player levels there are. I remember Cube having a decent set of high quality fun single-player levels, while Sauerbraten has hardly any at all - has this improved?
the new release brings two more SP maps, in total there are 11. tbh, SP is the only official game mode that the community can contribute maps quickly (without needing a game release for the map to become playable, or without depending on other players), so the amount of SP maps that comes with the installer is not important at all...
Goodness I played this game for YEARS and ever since I drop in every few years to check it out. It's seemed dead for so long, a release coming now makes me eager to jump in again.
Good news for a special game. Will definitely hop on to see the improvements and catch a game or two. SB it's a great fast paced game like quake and unreal, in case anyone is wondering.
I'm surprised this project is still seeing big updates! I loved open-source games back in the day. I liked Sauerbraten's capture the flag mode in particular. I played more of the Sauerbraten fork Red Eclipse, which saw a 2.0 release in 2019! The dedication of these project leaders is incredible.
I looked at using this for a game years ago but it didn't fit my needs at the time as well as some other engines. I liked what they did, though. The comments in here are a great legacy for it, my goal with my next game is to have similar comments years from now.
I remember making maps with the amazing map editor when I was 13. I was hit by an avalanche of memories and feelings seeing this. I am very happy that the project is going on and I will download to play it soon.
I remember tweaking the Cube source to compile with MinGW, to allow for community mods on Windows (even the most basic version of VC++ cost a lot of money back then!). And then the CubeCTF mod that I made with that, back in 2003. It wasn't just the editor that was fun to poke around; the source code was also very educational.
As others have helpfully pointed out, Sauerbraten is an open source Quake-like arena FPS. It's been around for years, and this is this first major release since 2013.
The community is still quite active, and there's been a particular hubbub of activity preparing for this new release. It's a super fun game if you're into arena FPS with lots of opportunities for tinkering, modding, and freeform content creation through its fairly unique online map editor.
I'm happy to answer any questions, and there's also the community discord server: https://discord.gg/j3kyxtj