Free and open source arena shooter Xonotic 0.8.5 now available

Love some fast-paced first-person shooting action? Xonotic (a fork of the original Nexuiz) has a brand new release available with tons of improvements.

This is a pretty big release for the project touching on nearly every part of the gameplay, with some big tech changes behind the scenes too. Thousands of changes for better and more refined gameplay, new and updated maps and player models, new sound effects, much more dangerous bots, a new HUD, more translations and so much more.

For those of you who don't play online, the changes to bots will be most welcome. Not only have they tweaked their difficulty but various bug fixes came in like underwater navigation, they will no longer get stuck in bad spots, they can properly jump and crouch, they have an improved ability to avoid danger while running and bunny hopping and they're better at chasing enemies down too.

It should be a bit easier to pick out players / bots from the maps to actually shoot them too thanks to improved visibility, plus new and improved primary shirt and secondary glow colouring on some models and they fixed primary and secondary colours getting mixed up.

Two new maps made it in too with Bromine by packer, a rusty styled map for large games!

Opium by cityy, a medium sized level with plenty of vertical action!

Various other maps saw updates, there's refreshed weapon and item sound effects to help you better distinguish them during combat and the list goes on and on.

A massive release overall and you can see all the changes in the blog post.