Warzone 2100 4.4.0 Beta 1 brings new high-quality terrain

Ah, what a classic! Warzone 2100 is a quality real-time strategy game that was originally a full proprietary commercial release from 1999 that's nowadays free and open source and it only keeps getting better!

The developers keeping it alive in the open source release just put out the first Beta for Warzone 2100 4.4.0 bringing with it some graphics improvements, along with various other fixes. The game now has a High quality option for terrain which includes bump and specular mapping, instanced rendering support for more performance, initial support for cascade shadow mapping and major improvements for classic model geometry issues.

Check out these shots of the new version (click to enlarge):

There's also the new Groups UI, plus bug fixes, balance improvements and some multiplayer improvements like:

• New Options for Handling Player Resources on Leave
  • “Distribute to Team” - evenly splits the departing player’s resources among any remaining team members
  • “Destroy (Classic)” - the classic behavior (all resources are destroyed when a player leaves)
• New Pre-Game (“Waiting for Players”) Screen
  • Better view of player / spectator loading status + animated count-down
• Add Team Strategy View
  • Team Strategy enables sharing with your (human) teammates your plans for research and unit types (without language barriers)
  • Available via both pre-game Team Planning time (if in a game with human teams) and in-game via the Intelligence screen
• Add “Quick Chat” in Lobby and In-game
  • Quick Chat provides a series of categorized chat messages / phrases which can be easily sent with either one click (or via quick keyboard commands)
  • Quick Chat messages are automatically displayed in the receiver’s language, and thus (once translations are updated) also provide an ability to bridge language / communication barriers
  • Quick Chat “Team” messages are sent via secured net messages between teammates

See more in their announcement. You can easily test out the Beta with Flatpak:

• flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
• flatpak install flathub-beta net.wz2100.wz2100
• And then to run: flatpak run --branch=beta net.wz2100.wz2100