ITT I am sharing recorded live streams of online multiplayer matches from Red Eclipse. These are casual matches organized among eom.dev members and open to the public. Check the Owncast calendar or join our Matrix room to learn more about these events.
First Impressions
Description
Welcome to Red Eclipse, a free and open source arena shooter! In this live stream, @ThisNurseKills, @Zephyr, and I try the game for the first time and, as has been the case with all of the open source games Iāve tried so far, my expectations for this project were significantly exceeded. We had some technical difficulties finding compatible versions and an accessible server, but once solved the we enjoyed the intense gameplay.
AI Content
As a side note, I wanted to share this discussion from the project GitHub regarding using generative models to produce artwork for the game. The author mentions this subject often spurs heated debates, so I thought I would mention it here.
Gaming Library
At this point, a number of different open source games have been introduced on this platform:
SuperTuxKart - a cartoon racing game similar to Super Mario Kart
FreeCiv - a turn-based strategy game similar to Sid Meyerās Civilization
Red Eclipse - an arena shooter similar to Quake III
Luanti being the only one currently hosted persistently. I am looking for more games in other genres to add to this list, and I intend to cycle through all of them over time.
As you know by now I am not anti-AI. I have long felt that automating processes does not intrinsically remove the human touch of community or social responsibility. As always, technology is agnostic to the motivations of the people that wield it. That being said, it would be highly irresponsible criminal to give a toddler a hand grenade to play with.
My biggest problem has always been technology solely in the hands of For Profit entities (whether or not they actually make a profit) b/c truely transformative automated processes need to be accessible to communities that use them. The tools need to be stress tested and refined in a transparent and openly communicated manner for individual and community safety. A methodology that For Profit ideologues are fond of avoiding.
I applaud Quin Reevesā approach to tackling the āart bottleneckā of Red Eclipse. And you and I know this is far from the only FOSS project that would benefit from using tools that are already in wide spread use elsewhere.
I fear we all lose out in this āAge of Egregious Offenseā where one half of the population engages in Purity Testing the other half, but 100% of the time.Context and common language are stripped away and replaced with a laundry list of perceived offences.
So what Quin said bears repeating: āCan we have a nuanced discussion about using AI as an assistive tool for a specific goal like this, even with all the noise out there?..Letās actually discuss this without the bias for once.ā
For those unaware, Quinton is the lead developer of Red Eclipse and the author of the AI content discussion I linked in the post.
We will try to use the latest version next time we play. Being on Debian I often end up with older client versions; although it seems that 2.0.0 is the latest version available on FlatHub.
The game is a lot of fun and Iāve been playing a lot off camera as well. We will definitely be streaming it again. Thanks for the work youāve done!
That is the latest version on the website, GitHub, and FlatHub, but it looks like 2.0.9 is available on Steam, so I will probably be able to get it there.
Yeah, a viral thing happen and had to jury rig a deployment on Steam so we werenāt getting coverage of the old version (which sucks, comparatively).
Versions in package managers are always out of date no matter how hard anyone tries, simply because maintenance of the packages is outside our control. The packages on the website though is all my fault, so much is a work in progress still that the rest of the team isnāt ready to call it v2.1 yet
Glad everyone likes the game, and look forward to playing with everyone in the future
I am really impressed with this game. It is the same kind of fun Iāve had playing games like Quake, but feels modern, looks great, and runs really well. I was mostly playing against bots in this episode and it was pretty amazing how well they utilize mechanics like parkour and teamwork. I am generally not very good at games like this, but I am finding Red Eclipse to be in a sweet spot of challenging and rewarding - I was able to hold my own and even win a few matches by the end of the stream. It does a great job at just being a fun game. Iāll schedule another stream for it soon - maybe on a weekend morning to accommodate Australian timezones.
ITT I am sharing recorded live streams of online multiplayer matches from Red Eclipse. These are casual matches organized among eom.dev members and open to the public. Check the Owncast calendar or join our Matrix room to learn more about these events.
we couldāve come and played with you.
