Alien Arena 7.50 (a.k.a. Alien Arena 2011) was released yesterday and it comes with several new notable features regarding the physics engine, as well as two new maps, updated player and skins models, new music for various maps, revamped in-game IRC client, as well as several bug fixes and improvements.


Alien Arena is a free, open-source first-person shooter for Linux, Windows and Mac which takes place in retro science-fiction environments, with a fast pace, support for single player and multiplayer games, a host of interesting game modes besides the usual DM or CTF, like Team Core Assault, Deathball, Instagib, Vampire, Regeneration, Low Gravity.



Here are the main new features for this release:
- Ragdoll physics using the Open Dynamics Physics Engine
- two brand new maps, Total Annihilation and Neptune's Lost City
- rewritten in-game IRC client
- updated player and skin models
- fixed LOD meshes for all player models
- faster particle rendering
- True Type Font support
- new music for various maps
- various bug fixes, code cleanups and improvements

New map - Neptune

To compile the Alien Arena source in Debian/Ubuntu, type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get build-dep alien-arena
sudo apt-get install libode-dev
./configure
make
sudo make install

Important notices
The executable is called crx, and it is located in the /usr/local/bin/ directory (if no other path was specified at the command-line to the configure script). To run it type crx in a terminal or press Alt+F2 and type crx followed by Enter in the run box that appears.

The configuration directory for Alien Arena is located in ~/.codered/, where ~ is your home directory (e.g. /home/USER/.codered).

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recordMyDesktop - This is a powerful command-line screencasting application which uses open formats to save the obtaining video (Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio). recordMyDesktop also provides GTK and Qt frontends, for both GNOME and KDE (the Qt version is not included in Ubuntu's repositories, but it can be downloaded from SourceForge).

However, recordMyDesktop seems unable to record sound, the program hanging there so I had to kill it manually. It will successfully record 3D in Ubuntu if 3D effects are enabled. At start I though it was a video related issue, so I looked in the man page and the bugs section specifies that it will not work unless the --full-shots parameter is specified in the command-line. I did it and no result. I also tried changing the --fps option to 8 fps but still no result, with the program hanging there so I had to kill it manually. I used Ubuntu 10.10 with the version of recordMyDesktop which comes in the repositories (which seems to be unmaintained since 2009). However, I gave it a try by disabling sound recording, and it turned out that was the issue. After I googled it, I also tried to change the sound driver to hw:0,0 but again, no results, this time I got an I/O error. Should this have something with the sound driver? Maybe someone knows a workaround for this.

recordMyDesktop

To use it, just type recordmydesktop in a terminal and hit Ctrl+C when done, then wait for the file to be encoded. By default it will save the video in a file called out.ogv, in the current working directory. Options like --fps, --no-cursor, --on-the-fly-encoding or the output filename can also be specified. For example:

recordmydesktop --no-sound --fps 8 --on-the-fly-encoding myfile.ogv

Will encode a video called myfile.ogv of the entire screen, with no sound, using on the fly encoding and a framerate of 8 fps.

To install it in Ubuntu, type in a terminal: sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

Or, for the graphical frontend: sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

The graphical frontend offers a nice graphical configuration window, so some may be more comfortable with this one.

Istanbul - Istanbul is written in Python and it offers a few less features than recordMyDesktop. It allows to select area or window to record, 3D record, enable/disable mouse pointer recording, and choose the size of the video (full, half or quarter width and height). It saves the file as an Ogg Theora video. Again, I had problems with recording sound, I believe I'm doing something wrong here.

To install in Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install istanbul

Istanbul

Another application to include here would be Wink, a freeware software presentation application with ports for both Linux and Windows. Bear in mind though that Wink is not free software. Wink allows to create presentations, include voice recording, explanatory popup boxes, exporting to Flash video. I should also mention the powerful Xvidcap (GTK) and reKordmydesktop (KDE frontend to recordMyDesktop), which, although they don't seem to be maintained anymore, still offer a good amount of features.

Have some more? Please share!

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