It’s been three years since the last version of AssaultCube was released, but the wait was well-worth, since 1.2 brings several major new features and a ton of improvements. First, I must say AssaultCube is one of my favorite shooters because of its simplicity yet pretty addictive gameplay and a nice community.

If you’ve never played AssaultCube before, here is a short introduction. The game is a classic style first-person shooter using the Cube 2 engine. There are several game modes, like the classical DM (deathmatch aka free for all), TDM (team deathmatch), CTF (capture the flag), but also some interesting ones like LSS (Last Swiss Standing, mode in which you only play with knife and grenades), PF (Pistol Frenzy), or the very popular TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill, a mode somewhat similar with Instagib – you are given 1 HP and a rifle and you kill enemies by shooting them once). The game includes 26 maps and various weapons, like the SMG, pistol, grenades, rifle for sniping and knife. There is also the akimbo mode, which will give you two pistols that fire at a very fast rate allowing you to make a killing spree in no time. Just use it wisely, since the clip gets empty very quick.

Main menu

The changelog is rather huge, and according to the announcement, 1703 commits went into this release.

AC 1.2 comes with some really neat new features, one of the most important being the addition of bots in all game modes. You can play in single-player against bots on every map that comes with AC, and in any mode. You can set the match length, and you can choose to have idle bots and bots that will not attack, very useful if you just want to test stuff without being bothered by the bots. Difficulty levels range from low to very good, which makes their aim highly accurate while still looking human.

Single-player mode with bots is available for all modes in 1.2:

Two more modes are now included in 1.2: Team Last Swiss Standing and Team Pistol Frenzy. These are just as LSS and PF, with the only change that they now support teams (they used to be FFA only).

Other changes include weapon damage tweaks, few improvements to the HUD, server browser. Not to mention a huge amount of fixes and improvements to CubeScript. Hopefully in the days to come I will find the time to make a guide to AC configuration and server-related stuff. The graphics and the engine are pretty much the same.

A lot of new map models and textures found their way into 1.2 too. Ten new maps have been created as well, like Venison, Amazon, Cavern, Edifice, Swamp or Lainio.

Avenue

Lainio

There is now a Connect as Admin entry in the Multi-player menu for server owners.

The servers for 1.2 are already full of players, here’s the server browser:

Configuration file of AssaultCube is very powerful, allowing aliases, separating commands by commas, but also if else instructions, which is really neat and can be used to write some really powerful configuration scripts. You can put your config options inside the autoexec.cfg file, which gets executed every time AssaultCube runs. This file is located inside the $HOME/.assaultcube_v1.2/config/ directory.

There seems to be, however, a nasty bug with showing scores. This is by default bound to the TAB key, which doesn’t seem to work in 1.2. I’m sure it will get fixed in the incremental versions to come (if it is really a bug or not just a problem on my system).

If you haven’t already played AssaultCube and you’re a FPS fan, definitely give it a chance. It may be worth your time. And for those who already play AC, go ahead and download it, the new stuff will definitely be a good award after such a long wait.

Just download the package from here, uncompress it to a location of your choice and then run the assaultcube.sh script from inside the AssaultCube directory.

Edifice

Stellar

Two classics: Desert & Douze