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Unvanquished (video game)

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Unvanquished
DeveloperGame community
Initial releaseFebruary 29, 2012; 14 years ago (2012-02-29)
Preview release
0.56.1 beta[1] / March 25, 2026; 48 days ago (2026-03-25)
EngineDæmon (game engine)
Operating systemLinux, macOS, Windows
TypeMultiplayer video game, first-person shooter, real-time strategy game
LicenseGNU GPLv3, CC BY-SA 2.5[2]
Websiteunvanquished.net
Repositorygithub.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished

Unvanquished is a free and open-source video game. It is a multiplayer first-person shooter and real-time strategy game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.

Gameplay

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A large alien Tyrant is being attacked by a human (background) and a machine-gun turret (offscreen, left) as it tries to demolish the human base.
A human player building a defensive structure

Players fight in an alien or human team with respective melee and conventional ballistic weaponry. The aim of the game is to destroy the enemy team and the structures that keep them alive, as well as ensure one's own team's bases and expansions are maintained. Players earn resources for themselves and their team via aggression.[3]

Commenting on gameplay, Lifewire noted: "One particularly fun aspect of Unvanquished is that as insects, players can crawl on the walls and ceilings, adding a new, though perhaps somewhat disorienting, take on game physics".[4]

Development

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Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to Tremulous. The gameplay and game resources are under the CC BY-SA 2.5 Creative Commons license whilst the Dæmon engine is under the GPLv3.[2]

Development began the summer of 2011 on SourceForge, with the first alpha version being released on February 29, 2012.[3] While the code development was already happening on GitHub since 2012,[5] the game release distribution moved from SourceForge to GitHub in 2015.[6]

Unvanquished is developed by a team of volunteers who used to release a new Alpha on the first Sunday of every month.[3] However, since the project reached a new stage of development, betas are released with less frequency.[citation needed]

Engine

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The lineage of the Daemon engine

Unvanquished uses the Dæmon Engine,[7][8] born from a merge of the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine (id Tech 3) and the XreaL engine.[9] That merge was initially named OpenWolf[10] before being renamed to Dæmon [11][12] before the first alpha release of Unvanquished was released.[13] Its development is now proceeding in its own path from its predecessors.

In 2015, with version 0.42, the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with developers of Xonotic.[14]

Written in C++[15], the Dæmon engine relies on OpenGL[16], OpenAL[17] and SDL[18][19] technologies for rendering, display, audio and input device management. The engine sandboxes the game in a Native Client[20] virtual machine, making possible for servers to distributes modifications (mod) written in C++ in a secure way for the player, and making possible for developers to produce game binaries independent from the operating system. Dæmon is multi-plateform and supports Linux, Windows, and macOS[21] operating systems, along with x86, AMD64, ARM and ARM64[22][23] architectures.

The engine handles DXTC/S3TC, DirectDraw Surface (DDS) and CRN image formats, WebP, PNG, JPEG and Truevision Targa (TGA) image formats, Opus, Vorbis and WAV audio formats, and 3D animated formats InterQuake Model (IQM)[24], MD5mesh/MD5anim[25] (Doom 3 format) and MD3[25] (Quake III Arena format). The game level format is the BSP format from Quake III Arena and de Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (implementing Binary space partitioning), the engine also supports the Quake III Arena material description format (also known as a “shader”), with extensions inspired by the Doom 3 format. The engine implements a multi-texture system that supports normal mapping, specular mapping, relief mapping, and PBR textures[26].

With the 0.56.0 release, Unvanquished and the Dæmon engine enabled the colorspace-aware rendering pipeline[27][28], freeing the rendering engine from limitations and mistakes inherited from historical games like Quake 3, as a requirement for physically based rendering[29].

Reception

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Michael Larabel from Phoronix.com praised Unvanquished's graphics in July 2012, while it was still in alpha state.[30][31] Lifewire praised the insect mechanic as an interesting twist and the ease of modding (referring to the level editor).[4]

Softpedia reviewed the game in version 0.49 in March 2016 and gave 3.5 stars.[32]

Between 2011 and June 2017 the game was downloaded alone from SourceForge over 1.3 million times.[33]

See also

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Wikimedia Commons logo
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Unvanquished.

References

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  1. ^ "Unvanquished 0.56: We deliver". unvanquished.net. 2026-03-25. Retrieved 2026-03-29.
  2. ^ a b "Copying". GitHub. Retrieved 19 August 2021.
  3. ^ a b c "About - Unvanquished". unvanquished.net. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  4. ^ a b Dave Rankin. "5 Open Source First-Person Shooter Video Games". Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  5. ^ Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix. Retrieved 2024-11-27. The development of this multi-platform game is also being done in the open and can be found on GitHub
  6. ^ Marius Nestor (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge". softpedia. Retrieved 2024-11-25. they would soon migrate away from the SourceForge website and that planned on releasing future versions of the game on GitHub
  7. ^ Larabel, Michael (2013-09-15). "Unvanquished Is Rewriting, Modernizing The Quake 3 Engine". Phoronix. Retrieved 2024-08-09.
  8. ^ Larabel, Michael (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished Makes Its Open-Source Engine Easy For Other Games". Phoronix. Retrieved 2024-08-09.
  9. ^ Larabel, Michael (2012-12-01). "The State Of XReaL, OpenWolf Game Engines". Phoronix. Retrieved 2024-11-27. Among the features to OpenWolf were 64-bit support, a modern OpenGL 3.2 renderer shared from XreaL
  10. ^ Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix. Retrieved 2015-07-07. The open-source Unvanquished game is being powered by the Dæmon engine, which is a fork of the OpenWolf engine.
  11. ^ "Renamed engine". GitHub.
  12. ^ "Rebrand to Daemon". GitHub.
  13. ^ "10 years and Unvanquished". unvanquished.net. The game was released on tremz.com as first alpha under the Unvanquished name on February 29 of 2012. The engine was already named Dæmon as it had been renamed from OpenWolf to Dæmon in January of 2012, one month prior that first alpha release.
  14. ^ Marius Nestor (2015-08-03). "Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge". softpedia. Retrieved 2024-11-25. the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with members of the Xonotic free and fast arena shooter game
  15. ^ Michael Larrabel (2013-11-27). "Unvanquished Begins Landing C++11 Engine Rewrite". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. incrementally rewriting the entire game engine to move from being C89 code to C++11
  16. ^ Michael Larrabel (2012-10-08). "Unvanquished Pushes Its OpenGL 3 GLSL Renderer". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. This is one of the first open-source games beginning to take OpenGL 3.x support very seriously.
  17. ^ Michael Larrabel (2014-01-05). "Unvanquished Alpha 23 Rewrites The Audio System". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. With the use of OpenAL everywhere, developers of this open-source first person shooter are adding in new audio effects.
  18. ^ Michael Larrabel. "Unvanquished Ported To SDL2 With Bots & Firebombs". Phoronix. SDL 2.x support for Unvanquished now allows for better handling of window manager hot keys, multiple monitors, mouse motion, etc.
  19. ^ Liam Dawe (2025-09-29). "Open source strategy shooter Unvanquished gets a big new release with SDL3". GamingOnLinux. Retrieved 2026-04-08. Unvanquished is a free and open source cross-platform humans versus aliens strategy shooter, with a big new release out now that features SDL3.
  20. ^ Michael Larrabel (2013-11-27). "Unvanquished Begins Landing C++11 Engine Rewrite". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. move from using the Quake 3 Virtual Machine system to now using Google's Portable Native Client (PNaCl)
  21. ^ Michael Larrabel (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. The Unvanquished Wiki explains the game as […] The game is available for most major platforms (Linux, Mac and Windows)
  22. ^ Liam Dawe (2023-01-31). "Free strategy shooter game Unvanquished v0.54 is out now". GamingOnLinux. Retrieved 2023-05-01. This release brings with it official ARM support for Linux
  23. ^ Michael Larrabel (2023-01-30). "Unvanquished 0.54 Brings More Renderer Improvements, ARM Binaries". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. Unvanquished 0.54 is working on both 32-bit and 64-bit ARM
  24. ^ Michael Larrabel (2014-01-05). "Unvanquished Alpha 23 Rewrites The Audio System". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. IQM format support for models and animations
  25. ^ a b Michael Larrabel (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. MD3 and MD5 model support
  26. ^ Michael Larrabel (2020-09-15). "Unvanquished Game, Assets Are Now Fully Open-Source Compliant". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-05-01. On the engine front, Dæmon/Unvanquished has been working on physically based shading, relief mapping, and other features.
  27. ^ Liam Dawe (2025-09-29). "Open source strategy shooter Unvanquished gets a big new release with SDL3". GamingOnLinux. Retrieved 2026-04-08. However, they have teased one thing coming, which is making the renderer colorspace-aware. Work has been ongoing since 2019 on this to improve the lighting in the game. It's not yet being used as there's still a bit of work to be done on it, but hopefully it will be in the 0.56 release.
  28. ^ Michael Larrabel (2026-05-25). "Unvanquished 0.56 Released With More Renderer Improvements, OpenMP Added To Engine". Phoronix. Retrieved 2026-04-08. Unvanquished 0.56 ships with many renderer improvements to its Daemon engine. This update introduces their linear blend regime for improved lighting
  29. ^ "Unvanquished 0.56: We deliver". unvanquished.net. 2026-03-25. Retrieved 2026-04-08. Such mistakes were present in many games from the early 2000s like Quake 3, Doom 3 and others… […] Fixing all those mistakes is required for physically based rendering, light computation and texture blending requires it to be correct.
  30. ^ Larabel, Michael (2012-07-01). "Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game". Phoronix. Retrieved 2015-07-07. OpenGL 3.x renderer from XreaL, Stereoscopic 3D renderer support, MD3 and MD5 model support, an improved shader system, procedural animation blending
  31. ^ Larabel, Michael (2012-08-25). "Unvanquished Still Looks Amazing For Open-Source". Phoronix. Retrieved 2024-11-27. Unvanquished is still on track to become one of the most compelling and visually impressive multi-platform open-source games
  32. ^ Alexandru Dulcianu (2016-03-14). "Unvanquished Review". softpedia.
  33. ^ "Statistics". SourceForge. 2017-06-06. Retrieved 2017-06-06.
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