Medal of Honor: Allied Assault open source remake gets a first Beta release

The day has arrived! Medal of Honor: Allied Assault including the Spearhead and Breakthrough expansions can be played easily on modern systems, with various enhancements thanks to the OpenMoHAA project.

Just announced in the last day is version v0.80.0-beta, where they said "As all of the features from the original game are implemented and the stability increased, the project is transitioning from alpha to beta." — so it may be finally time to jump in.

More: "The main goal of OpenMoHAA is to ensure the future and continuity of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on all platforms/architectures by providing new patches/features. Thanks to the ioquake3 project and the F.A.K.K SDK, OpenMoHAA has already reached more than half of its goal: an open-source version of MoH:AA (based on version 2.40) that is fully compatible with the original game (in terms of protocol, assets, and scripts)."

Pictured - OpenMoHAA on Linux, taken today

There's a fair amount of enhancements to the game like full 64-bit support, an SDL2 backend, OpenAL sound support, cross-platform support, lots of bug fixes, demo recording, smoother animations, bots for servers, IP bans for servers and so on.

For anyone who did try it previously, the highlights of new stuff to the Beta include:

• Added 3 launchers for simplicity, to start Allied Assault, Spearhead or Breakthrough
• Rendering
  • Better lighting
  • Decals / level marks are now rendered
  • Dynamic lights are now renderered properly, no more ground blinking issues when shooting rockets
  • Entities are now lit better by sphere lights (some artifacts are still present)
  • Sunflares are now rendered
• AI fixes (animations, logic, seeing through windows, holding turrets, speech animation...)
• Animation fixes + smoother animations
• Audio system enhancement
• Better FX
• Briefing videos from Spearhead and Breakthrough and game intro are working
• Crashes fix
• Demos are now supported using +set com_target_demo 1 launch command-line
• Fixed mods not loading properly
• Fixed weird movement artifacts when running server on ARM
• Less crashes
• Network profiling
• Script engine fixes + better mod support

You can buy the original game for the data files it needs from GOG.com.

See more on the project GitHub.

Running it on Linux was quite easy. I used the Heroic Launcher to download the game from GOG, then dropped the release files from the OpenMoHAA into the installed folder and launched it.