Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.

Xonotic uses the Darkplaces game engine, an engine which started as a Quake modification, but it was under heavy development and new improvements were made. Currently the developers of Xonotic state that the game is “on the par with most commercial games from 2006-2007″. Which, for the Linux platform is pretty important.

Xonotic is a fast-paced shooter set in an unreal world, and comes with a wide range of weapons, maps, various player models and a whole bunch of community-created content. Its strong point is the multiplayer mode, however it also includes an instant action mode vs bots and a singleplayer campaign with bots support.

Here’s how Xonotic 0.5 looks like:

Xonotic is full-featured and provides ambient music, keyboard configuration (including switching from fullscreen mode to windowed-mode in-game, without restarting the game), various graphics effects, player models, weapons and maps. The toggle fullscreen option works like a charm, while screenshots can be found inside the ~/.xonotic/data/screenshots/ directory. I wasn’t able to take screenshots of the configuration options though from within the game, so I had to use an external application for that.

Configuring Xonotic

To install Xonotic 0.5 in Ubuntu 11.04, download the zip package from the official website, uncompress it and run the appropriate executable (e.g. ./xonotic-linux32-glx, ./xonotic-linux-glx.sh.