Since the release of Nexuiz 1.0 in 2005, we have been tracking its progress as one of the leading open-source first person shooters. With time, this fast-pace game has picked up a nice level of artificial intelligence for its in-game bots, engine optimizations, single-player campaign missions, and a variety of technical advancements. Nexuiz has always been one of the leading open-source first person shooter games, and with the release of Nexuiz 2.4 yesterday it reaffirms that you don't need to be a major game studio -- or a game studio at all -- to develop a quality title and even for being a free software game it has impressive graphics. With the graphical settings near maximized, a GeForce 8600GT on a quad-core system was brought to its knees by this free software (and free content) game.

While Nexuiz is still based upon the DarkPlaces engine, which in turn is based upon the Quake engine with significant modifications, the graphical capabilities for this game continue to advance. Nexuiz supports such features as real-time dynamic lighting, offset mapping, and HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering. Yesterday's release of Nexuiz 2.4 has many texture improvements throughout the game, added water reflections, completely new particle effects, and improved fog rendering.

Aside from the graphical improvements, Nexuiz 2.4 has a completely new menu design and user-interface graphics. These improvements are to facilitate easier server browsing, player setup, and game creation options. For the game content, Nexuiz 2.4 offers two new maps: Strength and Blood Prison CTF.

Improved in Nexuiz 2.4 are the overall game performance, networking performance, and memory usage. The bots have also been improved with its artificial intelligence for CTF and Domination game-modes as well as the map voting system. There have also been updated models for several items including three of the weapons.

As Nexuiz 2.3 was released almost a year ago, we decided to fire up this updated version for a few hours to explore the latest work of AlienTrap Software. While many criticize open-source games as looking like something they'd play back in the 80's or early 90's, the developers behind Nexuiz have turned this around and produced great looking graphics for this game that is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Nexuiz 2.4 is certainly playable with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT with an AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core and 2GB of RAM, but we were surprised to see how much it was able to strain the system once turning on the full graphic capabilities of this game. The frame-rate had remained stead between 20 to 30+ frames per second, but it had dropped as low as low as 12 FPS in some areas.

While this game cannot be compared by any means to id Software's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we were much impressed by Nexuiz's graphics as well as the overall game-play for being a free software title. We are engraved so much by this game's graphics capabilities and it pushing the limits of modern-day hardware that we are looking to adopt Nexuiz as part of the Phoronix Test Suite. The developers behind this open-source game have done a truly amazing job. Specifically in Nexuiz 2.4 we appreciate the improved menu system, performance (including network and memory) improvements, and AI bot updates.

Nexuiz 2.4 can be downloaded from the AlienTrap website.