Unvanquished game
Unvanquished development is proud to present you our game: Unvanquished.
Unvanquished is a free, open-source first-person strategy game shooter, pitting technologically advanced human soldiers against hordes of highly adaptable aliens. Players can choose from either team, providing for an entirely different experience on both sides, as humans focus on long-range firepower while aliens rely instead on quick movement and stealth. The goal of each match is to destroy the enemy base, preventing members of the opposing team from spawning. Upgrades for both teams are earned by a combination of individual performance and team map control, unlocking access to more powerful weapons and equipment for the humans, and larger, more ferocious forms for the aliens.
Our project has been in development since the summer of 2011, with our very first alpha release being made on February 29th, 2012. Ever since, we have made monthly alpha releases, with each new release adding new content in the form of assets, maps, gameplay, or engine features. Our development team consists of a mix of skilled hobbyists and seasoned professionals from around the world, and we are always receptive to new team members, both from the community and beyond.
Unvanquished is a fork of Tremulous, powered by the Dæmon engine. The Dæmon engine that powers our game is ultimately based off Quake 3, along with features from ET:XreaL, as well as our own coding efforts.
Contents
Download the game
The Unvanquished game can be downloaded from the download page.
Note
The Unvanquished launcher is the recommended way to install and run the Unvanquished game.
The Unvanquished launcher can be downloaded for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Game source code
Unvanquished source trees are tracked on Git repositories to make contributions easier and help projects to port their game on it:
Game mechanics
Real time strategy game
Unvanquished is a real time strategy game: build your base, strengthen your defenses, create outposts. To win the game your team must deny the opposite team the ability to return in game by destroying their spawnpoints.
Team-based first person shooter
As a player you play with a team. A game ends when either the human team wins or the alien team wins. Your feats of arm contribute to your team momentum and unlock abilities, weapons and buildables.
Class-based online warfare
As an alien you spawn as a builder or as an attack form, and you evolve to other classes as the game continues. As an human you chose the construction kit and do the builder job to fight the resource war, or prefer the rifle to fight and destroy. With your earned credits you buy more advanced weaponry and armors.
Game history
Unvanquished is a fork and a continuation of the Tremulous game, itself inspired by the Quake 2 mod Gloom. After having been a Quake 3 mod, Tremulous was released as standalone 1.1.0 version in 2006. Tremulous attracted a lot of attention and gained a wide popularity, benefiting from the open source release of Quake 3 code by idSoftware and from the open source community interest. At the time, Linux users have seen in games like Nexuiz (ancestor of Xonotic) and Tremulous the proof open source games were possible. It was also a time where Linux gaming market was very small and such games drained a lot of attention thanks to their care of the Linux user base.
The Tremulous 1.2 release that never came
Unfortunately, the highly-expected 1.2 version of Tremulous never came, despite a “gameplay preview” having been distributed. In the mean time, there was multiple projects working on the open sourced code of Quake 3, including the engine, with projects like ioquake3 and XreaL. Despite XreaL having never really been used by a game at the time except for a small proof of concept shooter, the showcase of the various implemented features caught the eyes of many peoples. People tried to build alternate engines for Tremulous reusing some XreaL improvements, those efforts gave birth to TremFusion in 2008.
The rise of XreaL and Tremfusion engines
The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory code was then open sourced and XreaL started to mix XreaL with it to produce ET:XreaL. A project to revive Tremulous attracted some people and some information was delivered about the project under the TremZ name, while the engine, forked of ET:XreaL was then named OpenWolf. The TremZ name was not definitive, neither the OpenWolf name. Another Tremulous mod that went nowhere kindly gave the Unvanquished name and the domain name. The git repository and organization was renamed from TremZ to Unvanquished, the engine renamed to Dæmon, and the game was released as first alpha under the Unvanquished name on February 29 of 2012.
The birth of Unvanquished and Dæmon engine
From the beginning, Unvanquished was heavily linked to Tremulous, as most early members of the Unvanquished project were already heavily invested in Tremulous or renowned Tremulous projects.
Stijn “Ingar” Buys was a member of the official Tremulous team when working on the Tremulous 1.2 project and joined the Unvanquished team as level designer and among other things contributed the Vega map and the Vega texture set, initially targeted for Tremulous, and then adapted and improved for the Dæmon engine features. Ingar was also known to distribute builds of the NetRadiant level editor and Tremulous game pack, he did it for Unvanquished for multiple years as well.
Jan “Stannum” van der Weg was a member of the original Tremulous team who already released standalone Tremulous 1.1.0 and earliest mods (his Transit map is one of the oldest Tremulous map, known to already been featured in tremulous-q3-1.0.0 froom 2005), Stannum joined the Unvanquished team for 3D Modeling & Animation and provided multiple models and textures for the game.
Amanieu d'Antras and Corentin “kangz” Wallez who were already known for their work on their successful TremFusion engine before joined the team for Engine Development.
Jack “EmperorJack” Purvis, Cody “Supertanker” Jackson, Paweł “Pevel” Micek and Maximilian “Viech” Stahlberg were renowned mappers from Tremulous community and were well known for their popular maps. They joined the Unvanquished team for Level Design and ported or remade some of their Tremulous maps for Unvanquished: Thunder (EmperorJack), Spacetracks and Station15 (Supertanker), Perseus, Antares and Yocto (Pevel), and Parpax (Viech).
Many others peoples who joined Unvanquished were already heavily invested in Tremulous community projects or related projects like ioquake3. You can read all their names and get more information about Unvanquished people and contributions on the Unvanquished About page.
Initial project head was composed of kharnov, Harsh “Ishq” Modi, and Maximilian “Viech” Stahlberg. In 2017 kharnov had chosen Thomas “illwieckz” Debesse to replace him at the project head as he had to focus on other topics in its life.
Free and open source again
Based on the free open source Tremulous game, the Unvanquished game was never intended to not be free, but with time some assets were merged with problematic licenses like Creative Commons licenses with non-commercial clauses and some models just lacked the appropriate license mention from the author. After multiple years of reaching pasts contributors, the game became libre again in 2020 (see our Now we are free! blog post).
On a related topic, Unvanquished wiki was using a license that was considered non-free because of a non-commercial clause, in fact nobody was able to explain why this clause was there, it may have been a mistake. After years of reaching contributors to get permissions to relicense and rewriting other pages, the wiki was liberated on 2021, see the Wiki relicensing page and the Unvanquished 0.52.1 blog post.
Game and engine features
More information about Dæmon engine and Unvanquished game features can be found on the Dæmon engine page.
