Another free multiplayer shooter

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kraniac

New Member
I searched to see if this had been mentioned before but nothing came up, so...

Warsow is a game in the style of Quake/UT/Nexuiz. It's got a semi cel-shaded look to it, and it's quite fun, at least to me. Apparently some well-known former competitive UT2004 players have been playing it, and it's a fairly small download. I haven't played it online yet, because I'm still trying to figure out the movement system, and because even the AI players on Normal difficulty are owning me.
 
kraniac said:
I haven't played it online yet, because I'm still trying to figure out the movement system, and because even the AI players on Normal difficulty are owning me.
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AI cheats. Nerf AI.
 
:o Tek makes me laugh.

My favorite thing about it so far is the weapon design. There's only 7 guns, which eliminates some of the "function overlap" which I see in the weapons of Quake/UT. For instance, in UT2004, the Link Gun secondary fire, the Minigun, and the Assault Rifle are all slightly different versions of the same thing. In Warsow, all of these guns are condensed into the Laser Gun. Each weapon in Warsow is unique. The starting weapon is a passive melee weapon (touch someone with it equipped and you'll damage them) that is also a semi-automatic pistol, delivering a medium-speed projectile that does mild damage. There's a shotgun weapon for dealing massive damage at close range but weak damage at medium or long range, a plasma gun that rapidly shoots projectiles for medium range, a grenade launcher for blocking exits or covering your retreat, a rocket launcher for juggling opponents or predictive spam, a railgun-like powerful hitscan weapon with a long reload time, and a hitscan "stream" weapon with limited range like Quake's lightning gun. Pretty neat stuff.

The movement is difficult though. At first it seemed to be pretty close to the original Unreal Tournament, with two movement functions-- jump and dash-- with the dash approximating the dodge function of UT. Unlike the original UT, but like UT2004, you can also jump or dash into a wall and then spring off it.

However, being based on the Quake 2 engine, it seems that it's also possible to strafejump in the classical Quake sense, using a combination of mouse swings, strafing, and bunnyhopping to gain tremendous momentum over a series of jumps. If you dash, however, it breaks the momentum. I think it will take a while to get down. That's part of the fun though!
 
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It takes some getting used to not turning when I dodge in a direction since I don't have to let up on the key of the direction I want to dodge in. The game is pretty cool though, it's pretty good even at this early stage. Is there some sort of way to use the secondary function of weapons? Because I haven't been able to figure out how.
 
The function of the weapon depends on the ammo you have for it. There's weak ammo and strong ammo. The guns start with weak ammo, but most, if not all, of the ammo pickups in levels are strong ammo. You can tell how many you have of which type by looking on the weapon bar-- the weak ammo is below the weapon icon, and the strong ammo is above it.
 
Sorry for double posting, but I just found out something cool and useful relating to this. The in-game Warsow server browser is based on the server browser for Quake 2, which, as with any server browser in an ID Software game, is shoddily made. However, if you look in the folder in which you installed Warsow, there should be a subfolder named "browser", which will contain an executable java file named "wswBrowser.jar". If you have the JRE (and you should, really), you can run this file, and it brings up a much faster, lightweight Java server browser, that you can use to join a server. Straightaway, I changed my usual Warsow shortcut to point to the Java browser instead. It finds MANY more servers than the in-game browser, and faster too.
 
I also just realized that this game is tiny (67 MB), and does not use any registry entries. I put it on my 120 MB USB memory stick, and it ran just fine straight from the drive, without being copied to the desktop. I bet I could take this to the library and run it on one of their computers. :cool:
 
I played a bit of Warsow today and I must say that I like it. It definitely maintains that "old school" deathmatch feel, without the unnecessarily shiny graphics and redundant weapons of more popular team deathmatch games.
 
Did you try the external Java server browser? I'm not sure if it comes with the Linux version but I really see no reason why it shouldn't. If it doesn't, just get it from the Windows version.
 
Me and some dudes from some other UT clans have formed Almost Allstars (tag is *.*), which is a Warsow team consisting of UT players. We have a server at 216.86.151.72:27911, based in Chicago. It's got people playing on it somewhat often. (if you're on IRC-- and you should be-- we have the #team-aa channel on irc.enterthegame.com)
 
bleh library install time

EDIT: I love portage :P

EDIT: Ok game runs very smooth, probably hitting 200+ fps, you need to have the aux up for sound to run, im too lazy to determine if its using oss or alsa for sound, you may need to chmod +x <warsow dir>/browser/wswBrowser.jar if it wont execute and you have java installed
 
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I was playing tonight and I had another one of those "whoa" epiphany moments that this game is not at all played like I thought it was at first. Just like UT2004. There's a kind of jump maneuver that's not documented at all called the DDJ for "double dash jump" and every time I try it seems ludicrously impossible, yet there was a guy I played tonight that did it like it was nothing. Crazy.
 
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