Enemy Territory: Quake Wars For Linux

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pits the armies of Earth against the invading alien Strogg in the ultimate online strategic shooter.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pits the armies of Earth against the invading alien Strogg in the ultimate online strategic shooter. Featuring strategic team play, persistent character promotions, day and nighttime combat missions, and the universe's most powerful weapons and vehicles, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars transports players to the front lines of an epic new war for Earth.

As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in either the EDF (Earth Defense Force - humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies, each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. Troops utilize over 40 conventional and futuristic vehicles, deployable structures, and defense systems like quad-bikes, tanks, and alien walkers for epic ground assaults; or helicopters and anti-gravity ships to lend firepower from the air.

Throughout each battle, teams establish bases, deploy defense structures, artillery, radar, and advanced forward-command systems into enemy territory while constructing and demolishing obstacles to speed progress and gain a tactical advantage over the enemy and finally win the war.

Requirements:

· Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or Athlon XP 2000+ processor · 512 MB RAM · Kernel 2.6, configured for 1000Hz tick and other low latency settings · SDL >= 1.2 (>= 1.2.10 recommended) · latest OpenGL drivers - correctly configured! · nVidia GeForce 5700 (except LE and VE) · ATI Radeon 9700 · OpenAL · An Internet broadband connection (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) for online/LAN play

What's New in This Release:

Work on the 1.5 game update for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars is steaming ahead at full knots and we're now testing the latest version of it internally to see if there are any glaring issues left to fix. Even more exciting, we've put together the final changelog for the update, which you can find concealed somewhere within this blog update. In a smallish nutshell, 1.5 brings a number of new features and customization options to ETQW and fixes all of the issues left over from 1.4. Let's have a look:

User Interface Improvements

We've packed tons of small UI and HUD improvements into the 1.5 update, lots of which are the result of feedback from our players. We've added new customization options for turret lock-on warnings, so you can now get the full warning (beep and text), just the warning tone, just the HUD text, or nothing at all. Mine trigger warnings can similarly be toggled on or off and it's also possible to set the size of the mine indicators on the HUD or turn those off completely.

The Limbo menu sees the addition of an Auto-Join button, which, as the name might imply, joins the team that is currently short in numbers. We also found that a lot of people didn't quite understand the Hot Servers tab in the server browser, so we've thrown that out in favor of a much more straightforward 'Join Best Server' button. The functionality is still the same, of course, so pressing that button will put you on an available server that's close to you.

New Customization Cvars

A lot of our players are really into the game and would like to customize as many aspects of it as possible. To that extent, 1.5 brings a variety of new cvars that can be used to really adapt the game to how you want it. It's now possible to set mouse sensitivity on a per-vehicle basis, so if you'd like your mouse to be really twitchy in flying vehicles and far less responsive in, say, the Trojan APC, you can do just that. We've also included new cvars for quickly switching spawn points for those who want to avoid the limbo menu whenever possible.

Matchcasters will no doubt enjoy the new spectator mode functionality in 1.5. There are several new commands that allow spectators to switch to the next/previous player, and to directly hop to a specific client. You can also jump to players currently completing the objective, and even set a custom camera position and angle that you can hop to at the touch of a button.

Ranks and Statistics

In the statistics department, the in-game scoreboard once again correctly displays player ranks, so you can quickly tell who's experienced and thus safe to follow around in the game. Vehicle and deployable kills are now counted correctly in your statistics, and there have also been a few smaller fixes related to objectives giving no or too much XP.

On the Ranked Server side, servers are now restricted to a maximum number of 24 players, since that is what the maps were balanced for. It's also no longer possible to start a ranked match with fewer than six players.

Bot Improvements

John Dean over at id Software has been busy teaching the ETQW bots new tricks for the upcoming console versions. We didn't want our PC players to miss out on these, so 1.5 features a truly colossal number of bot-related improvements. In general, bots now understand the battlefield even better than before and will act more like a human player would. Your AI teammates have also been conditioned to pay more attention to what you're doing and they'll better support you in vehicles and when attacking objectives. There are loads of other bot-related fixes and improvements - check the changelog below for more.

Miscellaneous Fixes

1.5 also comes with a large number of bug and exploit fixes. Some of these are actually quite inventive, such as using the Third Eye Camera to transmit an objective when the player is actually nowhere near it, or using an Icarus vehicle drop to teleport inside a building. There were also several map holes that have now been plugged and number of smaller fixes that were made (such as the MCP sometimes dropping in sideways).

Closing Thoughts

We've completed internal testing of the update and we're now coordinating with all the other companies that are part of the actual release process. This is actually a tad more complicated than it sounds since we've got quite a few moving parts there. 1.5 has to be coordinated with id Software (Windows and Linux), Activision, Aspyr (Mac version), Valve Software (Steam version), DemonWare (online accounts), and all the game server providers to make sure they update their servers in time for release. But fear not, we're currently coordinating with all of the involved parties to figure out the best release timing for the update. As soon as we've nailed down a date, we'll announce it here in the blog.

Before I tumble back into my storage closet, let me extend a special thank you to all the people who participated in the public beta and left their feedback on the boards. We also appreciate your patience during this longer than anticipated beta beta phase - we know waiting for the thing hasn't always been the most joyous of activities, but we're confident that 1.5 is a better update because of it.