Xonotic 0.8.6 Release

Posted by Xonotic Team on June 20, 2023

This release should have been nerfed by the balance council because there’s a lot here for a point version.
Two maps popular for years have been polished up and included. There’s new gametypes and moderation features, new bot capabilities, new HUD and interface features, quality of life and customisation features for players and server admins, XonStat upgrades, and as usual more fixes and optimisations than you can swing a shotgun at.

SECURITY ALERT: a bug was discovered in versions older than 0.8.6 that is believed to be exploitable by malicious server admins to crash clients or, if they defeat mitigations, execute arbitrary code. No working exploit code is known to exist at this time, however all users are urged to upgrade immediately, and not use versions older than 0.8.6 to join online servers.

Download it here or upgrade from an older version.

Artwork

New official maps

Go by dublpaws and Debugger

A space CTF map with a futuristic theme! (Author: Mirio) 43
With fixes and visual upgrades by SpiKe and Mirio, waypoints by terencehill.

click to view full size
Trident by proraide

Fight in an abandoned building! (Author: Amadeusz Sławiński) 169
With fixes by SpiKe and Mirio, waypoints by terencehill.

click to view full size

Existing maps

Removed Drain and Oil Rig. (Author: SpiKe) 161
Stormkeep: Fixed an invisible crouching spot near the Mega Health. (Author: SpiKe) 162
Implosion: Added flare lights on top of the radio pylons, clipped the walls in the corridors, brush and texture cleanups. (Author: SpiKe) 163
Added copies of crate and jumppad LOD models that work with automatic LOD loading. (Author: Mario) 165
Atelier: fixed players sometimes getting stuck by placing the teleporter exits slightly above the ground and making the decals underneath non-solid. (Author: SpiKe) 166
Updated the map screenshots, hid old Nexuiz assets and map items. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 168
Fixed wrong minimap scales on Dance, Implosion, Space-Elevator and Xoylent. (Author: SpiKe) 170
Bromine: disabled the grass shadows, minor fixes. (Author: SpiKe) 179
Rebuilt some maps with our new q3map2 default light settings. (Author: bones_was_here) 180 (partially merged)
Fixed a few minor visual issues on Erbium, Opium and Solarium. (Author: SpiKe)
Packaged a xoncompat repository containing assets from maps (Drain and Oil Rig) removed in this release. (Author: bones_was_here) 102

Monsters

Added LOD models for the monsters to boost performance with lots of monsters in the map and fixed some LOD related bugs. (Author: Mario) 1069

Weapons

Optimized h_ok_grenade, h_ok_hmg, h_ok_mg, h_ok_rl and h_ok_sniper models to reduce file size. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 1106
Updated and optimized Akordeon, Devastator, Fireball, Tuba and Vortex v_* models, scaled by -15%. Fixed Fireball Gloss material, scaled Tuba UVs by -20% and scaled v_kleinbottle by -35%. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 1113
Optimized g_fireball. Fixed g_fireball and v_fireball UVs. Enhanced a few slight details in the Fireball’s textures. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 1123
Fixed Fireball having wrong player glow color. (Author: terencehill) [cd6c2c93]
Fixed dropped weapons having wrong player glow color. (Author: terencehill) [40b83807]
Made Crylink’s screen brighter. (Author: MusicGoat) [4d874ab3]

Items

Fixed Invisibility and Speed powerups not displaying their 2D icons when these aren’t available for pickup. (Author: LegendaryGuard) [aaec1d16]

Gameplay

Mayhem

Created the Mayhem and Team Mayhem gametypes. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 884
Mayhem is a mode full of chaos and deathmatching where players respawn with all weapons and full health/armor stack!
In these gametypes score is given 75% based on damage dealt and 25% based on frags.
In Free For All Mayhem the player (and in Team Mayhem the team) with the most damage dealt and frags earned at the end of a match wins!

Keepaway

Added Team Keepaway. (Author: Mario) 1045
Team Keepaway is the teamplay variant of Free For All Keepaway.
Points are awarded for each kill to the team in possession of the ball and for killing opposing teams’ ball carriers!

Fixed several Keepaway issues. (Author: bones_was_here) 1175

Survival

Added Survival, a gametype where a few randomly selected hunters must frag all of the survivors without being identified and stopped. (Author: Mario) 1072

Last Man Standing

Implemented 4 new features for LMS. (Author: terencehill) 808
Players are now allowed to get back into the game if they moved to spectator. (Author: terencehill) 1051

Freeze Tag

Armor, ammo and weapons are no longer reset when a player is gibbed, for example for players falling into the void. (Author: terencehill) 1179

Capture the Flag

Fixed not getting notifications in CTF if another team gets yet another team’s flag in 3-4 team CTF. (Author: z411) 1087

Clan Arena

Created a new opt-in feature for fewer stalemates in CA when round timer runs out. (Co-Authors: Dr. Jaska & z411) 1068
Added a server-side option to disable dead players being able to spectate with freecam in Clan Arena (enabled by default only in XPM-ruleset). (Author: z411) 1081

Mutators

Allowed dropping powerups with the use key and fixed powerups dropping outside of the map. (Author: z411) 1074
Added overkill blaster keepforce and keepdamage cvars. (Author: bones_was_here) 1158

Fixed a few issues with instagib/LMS items and in particular extralife. (Author: terencehill) 1164
Fixed Extralife pickup sound canceling long powerup sounds and improved instagib powerup replacement system. (Author: terencehill) 1174
Fixed pokenades causing a crash when monsters are disabled. (Author: Mario) 1041

Physics

Made all remaining entities use physics logic handled by QuakeC gamecode rather than the engine, allowing for future advancements in movement and gameplay. (Author: Mario) 1044
Compensated for Quake 3 frametime-dependent gravity in configs and jump pad code. (Author: bones_was_here) 1138

Balance

Made the variables g_*_weaponarena no longer list servers as modified if they are set to "most" or "most_available". (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1103

Created the Xonotic Balance Council responsible for future gameplay balance changes. (Author: bones_was_here) 72
Disabled the weapon recoil by default (g_norecoil 1). 5

Weapons

Made Crylink full-auto instead of semi-automatic when it has only 1 spike (pellet). (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1153

Fixed some Shotgun bugs related to bots or the weapon being reloadable. (Author: terencehill) 1061
Fixed inverted (lower value for core than outer edge) damage and edgedamage values for splash damage having completely wrong force calculations. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1145
Fixed Crylink and Vaporizer being able to fire with empty magazines. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1147
Fixed Arc not having a suicide death message. (Author: terencehill) 1032

Monsters

Added an off-switch for monster loot (g_monsters_drop). (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1162

User Interface

HUD

Improved StrafeHUD a lot with many new features and bugfixes. (Author: Juhu) 1066
Made it possible to switch between the default quickmenu and a customized quickmenu, if one is provided by the server. (Author: terencehill) 1018
Allowed players to make the server’s custom quickmenu default. (Author: terencehill) 1090
Added an option in HUD editor to show a line for centering panels. (Author: terencehill) 1157
Made the speed unit a global, consistent setting. (Author: z411) 1130
Improved duel centerprint title. (Author: terencehill) 1039
Made moveto* votes always show player ID and name, 2 other minor voting related fixes. (Author: terencehill) 1198
Cleaned up ammo sorting in the HUD to not reference items directly. (Author: Mario) 1121

Scoreboard

Implemented team selection in the scoreboard and added a scoreboard user interface (TAB-ESC to enter). (Author: terencehill) 1027
Made scoreboard pings colored! (Author: z411) 968
By default the best pings are green, decent pings are yellow, bad pings are orange, and the worst pings are red.
Made showing the average scores per round in the scoreboard possible. (Author: terencehill) 975
Created a new HUD panel that displays item pickups. (Author: z411) 1094

Fixed mismatching player sorting between server and client. (Author: terencehill) 1026
Disabled CTS recording damage taken and dealt. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1025
Removed useless damage dealt, damage taken and ELO scoreboard columns from CTS. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1030

Added the menu_gamemenu client cvar to enable/disable the Game menu. (Author: z411) 1101
Fixed the welcome dialog popping up instead of the Game menu on the first ESC key press when replaying a demo. (Author: terencehill) 1058
Fixed Settings button in the Game menu opening a standard settings page. (Author: terencehill) [d99f5ca5]

Voting Screens and Intermission

Made the map voting screen’s chosen levelshot expand to the center of the screen for a second before it is loaded. (Author: terencehill) 1060

Made 100% abstain votes in map voting choose a random map. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1172
Fixed voting for endmatch successfully during an intermission skipping the next map and going into a random map. (Author: terencehill) [22f4e736]
Fixed not notifying about the vote in progress being canceled when the match ends. (Author: terencehill) 1181
Fixed crashes in map voting screen related to gametypes with low amount of supported maps. (Author: terencehill) 1188
Fixed sv_vote_gametype_options so that it defaults to the current gametype if it doesn’t have a single valid gametype. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1190

Text

Changed default font hinting to 2. Clearer small text than 1, less distortion than 3. (Author: bones_was_here) 1048
Added %o and %O to chat formatting so that players can easily check and/or tell their coordinates, e.g. check step height. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1166

Translations

New localizations for Chinese (Hong Kong), Indonesian and Latin have been added to the game (thanks to our new translators).
Allowed showing translated campaign level descriptions in game and added Chinese translations of the campaign from NaitLee. (Author: terencehill) 1205

Campaign

The campaign has received an overhaul! There are many new levels and improvements. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 178

Updates

Level 09: Changed Erbium instagib to Darkzone.
Level 12: Changed Warfare Freeze Tag to Erbium.
Level 16: Changed Runningman Keepaway into Team Keepaway.
Level 18: Changed Bromine Deathmatch into Clan Arena.
Level 27: Added forced respawn and 5min timelimit to Fuse Duel.
Level 30: Changed from DM into Mayhem to avoid kill stealing.

New levels

Level 03: A new easy Mayhem level early in the campaign.
Level 15: CTF in Go.
Level 21: Team Mayhem in Trident.
Level 23: Onslaught in Running Man.
Level 28: Vampire Mutator CA in Warfare.
Level 31: A brutal END GAME level of Free For All Mayhem with superbots for true veterans on Trident.

Bots

New extremely tough bots, superbots! (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1053
These superbots have no aim limitations, actively dodge projectiles, strafe randomly while in combat
and prioritize low health targets instead of always targeting the closest opponent!
To opt in to these superbots set skill to 101 or any higher number, for toughest normal bots set skill to 100 or below.
Be warned that these bots are a real challenge to even the best veteran players.
For these bots to be fun it is recommended to not give superbots hitscan weapons like the Vortex.

Improved bot aiming abilities and fixed several minor issues, including premature detonation of Devastator rockets. (Author: terencehill) 1063
Fixed bots being unable to fire fireball alt fire. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1104

XonStat

Added support for the Mayhem, Team Mayhem, LMS, and Team Keepaway game modes.
Endmatch reports now store anticheat telemetry to help identify suspicious behavior.
Fixed the server identification routine to prefer active servers when duplicate hashkey entries are found.
Defined an alpha version of a balance endpoint to provide the foundation for dynamic team balancing in the future.
Fixed a bug where deactivated servers were still accessible in the UI.
Dramatically improved CTS support (tolerance for players leaving the match, spectator recording, lap time sorting, and alivetime display)

Moderation

New banning systems and features for moderation purposes. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 945
In short, players are able to locally ignore someone’s chat messages via ignore #player_id,
server admins and moderators can use chatban #player_id to prevent them from sending chat messages in any chat,
voteban #player_id to disallow them from voting and/or playban #player_id to force them to stay in spectator.
Checkout the new moderation tools wiki page for more information!

Visual Effects

Made Vortex’s charging use the player’s color instead of predefined colors. (Author: Mario) 1098
Tweaked gibs’ settings to reduce exaggerated throw velocity. (Author: terencehill) 1114
Replaced the Disability buff’s smoke effect, players that are hit by someone holding the Disability buff will have a new electricity effect. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 1062
Implemented cl_gunoffset and bullet casings fixes and refactoring. (Author: bones_was_here) 1100
This allows you to adjust the first person weapon model position relative to your camera.
Changed to the engine’s default r_ambient 0 setting, thus allowing true black and giving mappers full control of contrast. (Author: bones_was_here) 993
Made CTF flags to be colored by gamecode instead of assets being colored. (Author: Mario) 1038

Changed HLAC’s secondary attack to only play a single sound and muzzle flash effect when fired. (Author: Mario) 1040
Fixed a few cases where particles and/or decals did not appear for some weapons at times. (Author: terencehill) 1112
Fixed 2 more decal related issues. (Author: terencehill) 1127
Smoothed the effect of v_deathtiltangle. (Author: terencehill) [3389f6aa]

Items overhaul (Author: bones_was_here) 1202

Added despawning effects for dropped items, if you’re quick there’s still enough time to grab them.
May be disabled with cl_items_animate.
Implemented immediate switching between simple item models and 3D item models with cl_simple_items.
Smoothed the motion of thrown items.
Reduced bandwidth used by items coming into view or drawing particle effects.
Replaced use of ghost items when in a vehicle with an effect indicating items can’t be picked up, customisable with cl_items_vehicle_alpha and cl_items_vehicle_color.
Added cvar cl_items_fadedist to adjust fading out of distant items.
Removed ability to override server’s g_items_maxdist for fairness.
Added regular position and velocity updates for dropped items to resync the client’s view after any errors or interruptions.
Prevented bobbing animations from moving the physics hitbox.

Game Logic

Implemented announcer queue to prevent overlapping announcements. (Author: z411) 1075
Created new automatic per-map min & max player limits. Fixed many warmup, player count and Welcome dialog things. (Author: bones_was_here) 1022
Implemented g_warmup > 1 and related fixes and refactoring. (Author: bones_was_here) 1082
The new g_warmup settings allow the server to stay in warmup until the minimum number of players have joined.
Made autopause work for dedicated servers and improved autopause for listen servers. (Author: bones_was_here) 1144
By default single player pauses while the menu or console are open, and empty servers pause after the map changes.

Fixed issues with dropped powerups by also deleting item waypoints when deleting their items. (Author: Mario) 1070
Fixed weapon_shotgun and weapon_vortex aliases missing. (Author: Mario) 1052
Fixed dedicated servers panicking when gotomap vote passes during an intermission. (Author: terencehill) 1055
Fixed demo camera’s (camera_enable 1 when replaying demos) jerky mouse movement. (Author: terencehill) 1151
Fixed g_maplist_remove completely breaking and always removing the 2nd option. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1156
Fixed several minor issues. (Author: Mario) 1095

Map Entities and Compatibility

Implemented support for reading mapinfo files (.defi and .arena) from Quake 3 (and its mods). (Author: Mario) 856
Allowed mappers to define item skins. (Author: Mario) 1107
Implemented teleporter entity flags from Quake 3 DeFRaG. (Author: Juhu) 1135
Added Quake 3 jump pad trajectory compatibility. (Author: Juhu) 1134

Fixes for teamed items and support for them on Quake 3 maps added (requires the server has the latest DarkPlaces engine). (Author: bones_was_here) 1079
Fixed blocking of moving map entities with a BSP model being broken. (Author: terencehill) 1092
Fixed error spam which occurred when standing in the way of rotating doors. (Author: Mario) 1105

Behind the Scenes

Added useful in-game tools for debugging. (Author: terencehill) 1152
The files in the release zips now have correct date modified metadata. (Author: bones_was_here) [9a55f9d2]
Added Overkill weaponry decompiled sources (Blender 2.79b source files) to mediasource repository and organized weapon directory structure to be similar to xonotic-data.pk3dir/models/weapons/. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 24
Website polishing and optimising, including:
- Implement and document asset processing for markdown images. (Author: bones_was_here) 68
- Features and fixes for nav bar and footer. (Author: bones_was_here) 67
Freddy has developed PyTIBot to support the team and development, including:
- Xonotic Team and Balance Council voting
- Git chat notifications and automation

Fixed error when unzipping cygiconv-2.dll with Windows Explorer. (Author: bones_was_here) [9a55f9d2]
Fixed URLs and syntax errors in AppData. (Author: AsciiWolf) 96
Fixed make scripts failing with preset MAKEFLAGS which did not start with a dash. (Author: kiwixz) 97

DarkPlaces Engine

Increased the response buffer to allow listing more players in the in-game server browser. (Author: terencehill) [1d7fd4d7]

Worked around various obscure bugs in physics and logic caused by GCC and Clang compilers optimizing incorrectly for CPUs with the AVX extension. (Author: bones_was_here)

Utilities

Created misc/tools/fov-calc.py, a utility python script for Field of View (FOV) calculating. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 98
Did you know that due to its legacy the DarkPlaces engine calculates actual FOV based on what your FOV would look like were you to have a 4:3 monitor?
This means that for example with a 16:9 your fov 90 setting won’t show 90 degrees horizontally but around 106 degrees.
There is now a utility tool for calculating your actual horizontal and vertical FOV on any resolution, with or without zoom scaling (e.g. Vortex’s scope multiplier).
Fun fact: This FOV calculation behavior also exists in many other games like Counter Strike games and Half-Life games due to their shared roots of the Quake 1 game engine!

Code Quality

Fixes

Implemented safe removal of elements of an intrusive list while looping over them. (Author: terencehill) 1148
Added checks to make sure neither entity has been deleted when calling touch functions. (Author: Mario) 1139
Fixes for WarpZoneLib_BoxTouchesBrush function. (Author: bones_was_here) 1142

Refactoring

Moved handling of the nade orb overlay to client-side, thus resolving the need to network orb states via STAT macroes. (Author: Mario) 1035
Some minor tweaks to the QuakeC physics logic. (Author: Mario) 1077
Changed male pronouns to gender-neutral pronouns when referring to the player. (Author: squidink7) 1111
Added a registry field for renamed weapons to define their previous name to maintain compatibility. (Author: Mario) 1119
Cleaned up ammo_pickupevalfunc function to not reference items directly. (Author: Mario) 1120
Added a new function to copy fields from items to replacements. (Author: Mario) 1124
Switched to QuakeC-based setcolor function implementation. (Author: Mario) 1126
Improved xonotic-linux-sdl.sh script slightly. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 99
Updated rsync scripts and their README. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 100
Improved usability of WarpZoneLib_ExactTrigger_Touch function. (Author: bones_was_here) [9956823e] [7a46019a]

Cruft Removal

Removed view projecting function cs_project. (Author: Mario) 1043
Cleaned up obsolete warmup info messages. (Author: z411) 1088
Deleted 4 unused model files. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1149
Removed flag respawn printing backtrace if called twice within half a second. (Author: Dr. Jaska) 1155
Removed map entity whitelist checks. (Author: LegendaryGuard) 1180
Removed legacy MOTD. (Author: bones_was_here) 1012
Removed override of engine +showscores command. (Author: bones_was_here) 1128
Removed trigger_init function as it was in the way and mostly duplicating WarpZoneLib_ExactTrigger_Init function’s code. (Author: bones_was_here) [2b46f62d]

Mapping Support package and NetRadiant gamepack

Added the Arc entity definition. (Author: SpiKe) 173
Updated entity definition bounding boxes to match 0.8.6. (Author: bones_was_here) 175
Added the new xoncompat repository to the list of NetRadiant forbidden paths. (Author: SpiKe) 8
Removed levelshots, lightmaps, minimaps and other unneeded directories from the Mapping Support package. (Authors: bones_was_here and SpiKe) [7db1b19f] and 103

Compatibility with previous versions

This release includes several new or updated assets which older versions lack.

Maps 171

43: Add the map Go by dublpaws and Debugger.
161: Remove Drain and Oilrig.
162, 163, 166 and 179: Changes to the stock maps.
169: Add the map Trident by proraide.
New stock maps are expected to be on the client and thus will not be sent if a client does not have them.
This means that the maps with updates and changes to them will not have the changed visuals and/or geometry on old clients causing desync and mispredictions with what server hosts and client sees.
In the case of new maps, if the old client doesn’t have them, they will only see a dark void with networked entities.

Gametypes 1178

1045: Add Team Keepaway.
1072: Add Survival.
These gametypes do not involve new assets other than their gametype icons.
This means that old clients playing them on up-to-date servers have gamecode compatibility,
but they will not be able to see the new icons on the gametype voting screen.
1038: Made CTF flags to be colored by gamecode instead of assets being colored.
If a current client plays on an old server, flags will lack colour.
The flags have forward compatibility though, meaning that old clients on up-to-date servers see the correct flag colors.

Translations

Localized strings are not sent by the server and thus up-to-date clients on old servers and old clients on up-to-date servers will have translation desynchronization if they have changed notably.

Xonotic is a fast paced first person shooter where crisp movement, nuanced weapons, and in-your-face action combine to create addictive arena-style gameplay.
Xonotic is free to play and modify under the copyleft GPLv3+ license. Download it today!

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