Nexuiz in the 2020s

Nexuiz is my favorite first person shooter game. To wit:

Free and open source. Both the game and the assets are GPL licensed (with some exceptions in this version)
Works on low-end hardware. The version I used works on a 2010 era low-cost Netbook, or a 2007 era business laptop.
Newbie friendly. The bots vary in difficulty from very easy to almost impossible to kill, with nine levels of difficulty to suit players of any skill level.
Tiny. A fully playable game with seven maps fits in under 70 megabytes.
Fast action. Games are played very quickly and the action is very fast.
Replayable. This is a game with a high level of replay value: Instead of keeping the game interesting with novelty, the game stays interesting because the bots can become as hard to defeat as possible.
Lan party! This game comes from an era when it was normal to run your own server, allowing the same game to be played and enjoyed by multiple players on different computers in the same location.

Nexuiz is (was?) an open source first person shooter in the style of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament from the first 2000s decade. In the early 2010s, when low cost small “netbook” computers based on the Intel Atom chipset were popular, multiple efforts to make a version of Nexuiz for netbooks came out, including one I did.

I now have made a version updated for the 2020s. In this version, there are seven maps, all of which run quickly on any modern computer (my 2017 business class notebook with only basic Intel graphics acceleration gets over 500 frames a second; it gets 60 frams a second on a 2007 business laptop, again with basic Intel graphics acceleration).

Since this version is not compatible with Nexuiz 2.5.2 (missing textures, models, etc.), looking for servers on the Internet is disabled. LAN support is still present.

This version can be downloaded:

Files are also available at Sourceforge and there is a repo at GitHub.

==2022 files==

I have added a number of files for 2022, incluing one which removes all health from maps, and another which puts all weapons in all maps.

Click here to see and download the files

==The Graphite map==

The map Graphite is a popular 1-on-1 (duel) map for Xonotic. I have converted this compact, fun map in to Nexuiz format. The map itself is GPLv3 licensed; the textures are GPLv2+ licensed.

Above is a blueprint of the Graphite map. In this blueprint, grey is impassible; white is lower level. Yellow is upper level. Blue is the blue teleporter; orange is the orange teleporter. Green is two-level, where it’s possible to walk on both the lower and upper level. Purple is the jump pad. “MH” is the mega-health. “MA” is the mega-armor. “Str” is the strength.

The map has four rooms, as seen in the blueprint:

On the upper left, we have the “jump pad” room, which has a crylink and a rocket launcher, in addition to an orange teleporter.
On the upper right, we have the mega health room, which has both the orange and blue two-way teleports, not to mention a machine gun right in front of the blue teleport. There is a vortex on the lower hallway between this room and the strength room.
In the lower right of the blueprint, we have the strength room. In the bottom left of this room, we can jump up in to a hidden hallway which leads to the mega armor.
The lower left room has mainly the mega armor and the other blue teleporter.

To go from the lower level (white) to the upper level, we can use the jump pad, go up stairs, or, in the strength room, go up a ramp.

==Playing the Graphite map in Nexuiz==

To use this map in Nexuiz 2.3 or Nexuiz 2.5.2, take these two .pk3 files and place them in Nexuiz’s data/ folder.

Here are the files:

==Netbook Nexuiz remixes in the 2010s==

I made a remix of Nexuiz for Netbooks (small, inexpensive computers made with Intel Atom chips. These computers which were popular between 2008 and 2011, during the then economic recession) back in 2011.

The remix I made for Netbooks in 2011 isn’t the first Nexuiz remix for netbooks out there. There is also Nexuiz remix (local mirror; local copy for Windows machines; source code), as well as Darn small Nexuiz.

The advantage of this remix is that it has all of Nexuiz’s graphics intact. This particular remix of Nexuiz is based on Nexuiz 2.3, which has better performance on slower hardware than newer versions of Nexuiz, with the number of maps and models reduced to a minimum. All of the textures used in the maps available are still present.

Playing a 1-on-1 deathmatch game against one robot, I usually get (at 800x600) about 60 frames per second, with it only rarely going down to 20 or 30 FPS on an Intel Atom N455 system with the underpowered GMA 3150 chipset using fairly low settings.

The file can be downloaded here (50 meg download); source code is also available.