An update on Insurgency: Sandstorm, Day of Infamy and competitive play for Insurgency

Insurgency is supposed to be getting competitive features for the online play, but their UI is holding them up. They have written up a post to explain it and they talk about their new games Day of Infamy and Insurgency: Sandstorm too.

The blog post isn't short, so I will simply reference some parts I found interesting for you. I do suggest reading it though, as it's all quite nice to read.

We aren't exactly short on FPS games on Linux now, but we don't have many shooters that have great and active online gameplay.

Insurgency: Sandstorm
Sounds like it will be quite a different experience to the first Insurgency game and will have some sort of story. Not only that, but it will do the story in co-op:

QuoteOne of the areas we wish to grow as a company is in developing narrative-inspired experiences. We now have motion capture and voice talent at our studio so that we can have the production required to accomplish this. When it comes to Sandstorm, we plan to deliver some great multiplayer gameplay and expand upon it with ranking systems, matchmaking, aesthetic unlocks and more. We’ve also decided we would like to push the story side of the game to become fully playable in 4 player cooperative with friends, as well as split-screen on console.

On top of that it will have much bigger maps with vehicles too. It is starting to sound a bit more like Battlefield, which is cool.

Sounds very ambitious, and will be incredible to have such an FPS on Linux. I am looking forward to them revealing it properly in future.

Day of Infamy

QuoteAfter the mod version of Day of Infamy launched, we reached out to Valve to get their thoughts on the project. The original DoD creators checked it out and gave us their thumbs up. Valve offered to license Source Engine again to us so we could make the DoD-inspired game. They also encouraged us to make maps inspired by the classic DoD maps and provided permission to use art from their games.

I knew I recognised one of the maps shown in the recent reveal trailer! This has me excited, as I played quite a bit of Day of Defeat years ago and loved it dearly.

They mention a lot of the art shown is actually straight from DoD: Source (as they are using Valve's Source engine) and they do plan to replace it.

Insurgency
It looks like they will be using Coherent UI for both Day of Infamy their new WWII shooter and Sandstorm the next Insurgency game. The problem is Insurgency uses VGUI which is proving to be an issue for them to work quickly:

QuoteWe are still working on these systems for Insurgency, but we are a bit limited in what we can do compared to Sandstorm and Day of Infamy. For these projects we have licensed Coherent GT to produce and iterate on better menus. The problem with Coherent for Insurgency is that it does not support Linux 32 bit yet, so technically if we did the matchmaking menus with it we would not be able to include them in Insurgency without removing Linux support. The folks at Coherent are working on Linux 32 bit support, so perhaps eventually it will be possibly to back-port Day of Infamy’s snazzy new menus into Insurgency.

I like how open they are being about it. I don't see why you need to support 32bit nowadays anyway, especially for bigger games like Insurgency. Even our last survey showed overwhelming support of 64bit from users systems.

I have bad memories of Coherent UI as it's the same thing used in Planetary Annihilation and it caused a ton of issues, some of which still aren't fixed. I hope Coherent manage to polish up the Linux support in their software. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.