| Sauerbraten | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Wouter van Oortmerssen |
| Designer(s) | Wouter van Oortmerssen |
| License | Zlib License |
| Released | 22 December 2007 |
| Genre | First-person shooter, Role-playing game (still in development, RPG part named Eisenstern) |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer, Singleplayer |
| Ratings | ESRB: Not Rated (NR) |
| Platform(s) | Cross-platform |
| Media | Download |
| Input methods | Keyboard and Mouse, gamepad available with a third-party script |
Sauerbraten (also known as Cube 2 or Sauer) is a Quake-like first-person shooter computer game that runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. The game uses OpenGL and SDL, features single-player and multiplayer game play and contains a built-in level editor, which gives level designers “What you see is what you play” functionality. The game engine is free and open source software. The latest version of Sauerbraten was released on December 22, 2007 as the "Assassin Edition".[1]
Contents |
History
Sauerbraten started as a follow-up to the original Cube, and its first version released on May 6, 2004. Its updates are released subsequently since its first release, and in 2006, the updates are known as "editions". The game has been shown in a Burger King television commercial.[2] It also received four out of five stars in a MacWorld UK review.[3] In addition, the game was mentioned in Issue 3 of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine (as well as their 101 Free Games Article), where it was described as being "perfect for both stingy and creative gamers alike."[4]
Story
| “ | Official game storyline: 'You kill stuff. The End.' | ” |
|
—–Sauerbraten readme |
||
Technical details
Sauerbraten is a branch of the computer game Cube and expands its original concept. It shares most of its design goals and philosophy with Cube, but using a new 6-directional heightfield world model. This allows much more complex level geometry and easier editing. Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features and eye candy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine. The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code & design, and is free and open source, licensed under the zlib license − which is GPL-compatible. The game engine features a built-in real-time level editor that makes creating levels easier, circumventing the need to load the game to test a custom level, or to see the in-game effects of any changes. This enabled designers to add much detail to levels, creating many different paths while reducing the time spent on level design. It also allows the player to choose more approaches to solving goals, providing a more open and non-linear experience.
Real-time editing
The Cube 2 engine features numerous improvements to its predecessor, the Cube engine, driven by its new octree world model. Whereas the preceding Cube engine used a heightmap, much like a terrain engine, to represent the geometry of the floor and ceiling, Cube 2 represents the world geometry directly in the octree, allowing it to support room-over-room and arbitrary multi-tiered level layouts. Each cube-shaped node in the octree represents a renderable volume, simply referred to as a cube, where each edge of this cube can be lengthened or shortened to deform the cube into a variety of other shapes. This allows a level designer to directly modify the world structure in real time and inside the game as it is being rendered, since the representation that is edited and the representation that is rendered are exactly the same. This is in contrast to traditional modern polygon soup 3D engines which take a model generated as an essentially random batch of triangles from an external modeling program and attempt to spatially subdivide the model's triangles after the fact by splitting them to fit into tree structures, such as a BSP tree or even an octree, that require costly pre-processing to build. Cube 2's novelty thus lies in that the world representation is the octree itself, from which efficient triangle batches are generated for the graphics processing unit to render, without need for this extensive pre-processing cost. Level editing is extremely easy in the Sauerbraten environment. Players can start editing by pressing "e" to enter edit mode. Then a cube area can be selected and the scroll wheel on the mouse can be used to either increase or decrease the amount of cubes in the selected direction.
Rendering engine
Cube 2's rendering engine is designed around modern graphics processing units, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 which perform best with huge batches of geometry already stored in video memory. Lighting is precomputed into lightmaps for efficient batching, with an additional stored directional component, that allows for efficient shader-based lighting effects. The original Cube's rendering engine assumed that overdraw (where polygons that do not appear in the final scene are occluded via the z-buffer) was more expensive than sending new streams of triangles to the graphics processing every frame, which vastly limited its performance on more modern hardware where memory bandwidth is a greater limiting factor.
Gameplay
Changes to the gameplay include the addition of two new weapons, the pistol and the grenade launcher. A new game mode, capture, has also been added. This mode is similar to the Domination mode in Unreal Tournament. Other gameplay changes include voice announcements for gameplay events and automatic team selection. Some of the changes to the server include optimized networking code, server-side demo recording, and a "master mode" allowing players to control the server. The Cube 2 engine is used for an RPG called Eisenstern currently in pre-production.
The game currently has singleplayer and multiplayer modes. Multiplayer functionality is possible with LAN, Local, and Internet play, which gets its server data from a master server. Online offers deathmatch, last man standing, and "capture" gameplay (where teams vie over control of points on the map), also instagib versions of some of the game modes (Instagib, Insta-clan-arena, insta-capture) as well as online cooperative map editing, which is one of Sauerbraten's most interesting and popular features. There are also single player modes featuring both episodic gameplay and also deathmath on multiplayer maps with AI bots instead of human opponents over the internet.
See also
| Free software Portal |
| Video games Portal |
References
- ^ Wouter van Oortmerssen (2007). new release! assassin edition. Cube Engine Games. Retrieved on December 24, 2007.
- ^ Wouter van Oortmerssen (2006). Sauerbraten in Burger King TV commercial!!. Cube Engine Games. Retrieved on February 22, 2007.
- ^ Hodge, Karl (2007-06-29). Cube 2: Sauerbraten Review. MacWorld UK. Retrieved on 2007-07-17.
- ^ Games for Windows: The Official Magazine: page 58, February 2007
