COR Entertainment announces the latest release of it's freeware, open sourced FPS shooter, Alien Arena 2008!

Version 7.20 features a host of improvements, optimizations, and new features such as the implementation of per-pixel GLSL effects including parallax, normal and specular mapping/highliting, occulusion culling of entities, shader performance boosts, new and improved weapon/event effects, and much more. The end result is a game that not only looks great, but also runs considerably faster than previous releases.

On the gameplay aspect, a brand new reward system has been implemented, allowing players to choose from three powerups when reaching a certain achievement total. Weapons have received further balancing, powerup effects made more smooth, and various bugs have been squashed. Several brand new levels have been added, as well as player skins that improve visibility and an HUD based weapon inventory.



7.1 - 7.20 changelog

1. Added Invisibility powerup
2. Added reward system.
3. Reduced power of vaporizer, and increased spawn time of vaporizer to twice of other weapons.
4. Added weapon inventory display in HUD.
5. Shockwave weapon effects. Increased efficiency of several weapon effects.
6. New CTF flag effects.
7. Added rotating particle effects.
8. Fixed buffer overrun with ps.stats
9. Bots now use alt-fire in vehicles.
10. Haste and sproing greatly improved.
11. New death effects.
12. Bot node files only load at start of level, rather than previously when a player joins.
13. Noshadows option for static map meshes.
14. Fixed "disappearing ctf flag" bug!
15. Added tangent light space vector normalization to per-pixel mesh rendering.
16. Added level of detail system for player models.
17. Bounding boxes calc'ed at load time, performance increase.
18. Occulusion culling of entites, huge performance increase.
19. Added GLSL program management.
20. Added parallax mapping.
21. Added glsl normal/specular mapping for dynamic lighting.
22. Added glsl specular lighting.
23. Removed old fixed functions for dynamic and specular lighting on normalmaps. (some where broken anyway).
24. Changed some skin colors of players and weapons to be more visible(and eye pleasing).
25. Added new water shaders, so that mappers can fake reflections.
26. Added distortion shader to basic water(disabled due to some bugginess).
27. Vertex lerping no longer batched in separate loop, now done inside of texture mapping loop, nice peformance increase.
28. Anti-lag added, backwards reconciliation portion. More to follow.
29. Fixed a few video menu bugs.
30. New weapon icons.
31. Cvar's added to specify log and motd files.
32. Heartbeat's now only re-resolve master if it cannot reach it.
33. Faster image filtering.
34. Rscript optimizations using hash keys.
35. Removed flashlight code.
36. Added support for Linux/X11 clipboard.
37. Linux directory support.
38. Linux windowed mouse fixes.
39. Netname string made larger.
40. Fixed escape character removal in death messages.
41. Names no longer cut off in team scoreboard.
42. New glass effects, now uses a semi-true reflection.
43. Option to place player id's over players, as well as identify flags.
44. Rcon password changes - can now have spaces, and protection against overflows.
45. Fixed bug with random() that caused some dedicated servers to segfault in linux.
46. Rscript optimization - removed redundant loading in meshes.
47. New bloodstain effects using decals. Removed old stain code. Looks cooler, and performs better.
48. Added 3 new maps: Dm-liberation, Ctf-cryogenic, Tca-cryogenic.
49. Better bullethole effects.
50. Fixed fov bug.