Free and open source strategy-shooter Unvanquished 0.55 brings big enhancements

Unvanquished is having a bit of a big moment, with some fresh coders doing some great work on this strategy-shooter that's similar in basic idea to Natural Selection. This project was originally forked from the classic Tremulous.

In a news post announcing the release of Unvanquished 0.55 they've overhauled quite a lot of the visuals which includes fixes to some long-standing bugs, while also doing some huge optimizations.

There's a lot of really technical stuff most users likely won't understand from a new skybox that made the sky rendering go from 1000 triangles on the CPU every frame to just 12, to screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) optimizations and doing more precompute with shaders rather than doing things every frame. The gist, as the developers say, the "engine and the game are now much more faster than ever".

Pictured - Unvanquished 0.55 on Linux, click to enlarge the pics.

They dropped the requirements to run it down to OpenGL 2.1 and mentioned even a "Raspberry 3B+ can sustain up to 60 FPS on the lowest preset". Quite impressive really.

Not just performance work they've also fixed up and improved many parts of how the game looks like new weapon models, fixed fog, fixed various sprite rendering, dynamic lights are now less blocky, a fix for a 9 year old soft particles bug where some visuals didn't even show and improvements to the user interface.

There's also some new graphical toys included to modernize the look and rendering of the game with OpenGL 4.6 in an experimental stage like reflection mapping, plus a material system that will bump a lot of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU. Also AI improvements, lots of translations work and there's more to come now this release is out.

See more on the website.