Red Eclipse is a free, open-source first-person shooter based upon the Cube 2 engine, with both single-player and multi-player support. It’s a fantasy shooter that bundles a very large number of maps and comes with modes such as DM, CTF or Defend and Control. For some reason, the game always gives me a feeling of calm, and the music theme is really great. So let’s take a brief look at this new version.

The latest version is Red Eclipse 1.5, codenamed “Aurora”, and released yesterday, after two years of development. This new version ships with a big number of new features, including new maps, AI orders, better physics, footstep sounds, weapon balances, improved interface. The game comes with a huge number of maps, game modes, mutators, co-op map editor, and a gameplay that includes movement tricks, parkour, boosts or dashing. It’s based on the Cube 2 engine, used in games such as Sauerbraten, or AssaultCube, which uses the Cube 1 engine.

Here are some of the noteworthy changes that went into Aurora, according to this announcement on the official forums:

• Support for giving AI orders (“defend”, “attack”, “base”, “goal”, “ball”, “forget”).
• Better physics and bounce sounds for affinities (flags/points/bombs).
• Footstep sounds, hear people approaching!
• Auto team balancing, so you’re never stuck with uneven team counts.
• Rebalanced all weapons, making for a fairer game.
• New weapon, the “zapper”. Electrify your friends and foes!
• Increased weapon spread when in air / impulsing
• Rebranded Defend-The-Flag to Defend-And-Control, with a new look.
• Increased buffing timeout tolerances when defending affinities.
• Slicker menus, tips and rollover help text.
• Scoreboard redesign and better colouring.
• Ability to send a message to a specific player with “whisper”.

Except for these, 7 new race maps and 13 new maps for the other modes have been introduced in Red Eclipse 1.5, together with new items and several new textures.

The new Abuse map:

There are six modes in Red Eclipse, and except for the usual deathmatch (DM) and capture the flag (CTF) modes, there are also the following: editing (co-op), defend-and-control, bomber-ball and race. In defend-and-control, your team needs to defend various control points to score, while in bomber-ball you need to carry the bomb into the enemy goal to score. However, the behavior of each mode can be changed by using various mutators, like instagib, survivor, duel, vampire, multi (to have four teams) or ffa (free for all).

Creating a new game – choose from various maps, modes and mutators:

The new Canyon map:

Redesigned scoreboard:

And the scoreboard layout and displayed information can be customized:

New Convolution map:

New Enyo map:

New Octavus map:

Graphics settings:

The commands and scripts work in a similar way with the ones from AssaultCube (see a guide here). To open the console, type ~ or /.

An in-game IRC client is included, which will automatically join the #redeclipse channel on Freenode.

Install Red Eclipse in Ubuntu 14.04/14.10 and Mint 17/17.1

Red Eclipse is available as an archive, which I recommend to download using the torrent (direct link here) provided on their download page, since direct download via HTTP doesn’t always seem to work.

Once downloaded, just uncompress the redeclipse_1.5_nix.tar.bz2 file and run the redeclipse.sh script, which will launch the binary for your architecture (both 32-bit and 64-bit are included in the same package).