Open source strategy shooter Unvanquished gets a big new release with SDL3

Unvanquished is a free and open source cross-platform humans versus aliens strategy shooter, with a big new release out now that features SDL3.

Release Unvanquished 0.55.5 is now available, but it's mostly work on the back-end in preparation for more gameplay upgrades with the 0.56.0 series to come.

However, they have teased one thing coming, which is making the renderer colorspace-aware. Work has been ongoing since 2019 on this to improve the lighting in the game. It's not yet being used as there's still a bit of work to be done on it, but hopefully it will be in the 0.56 release.

On the left: legacy naive lighting, on the right: colorspace-aware lighting.

The release also includes memory leak fixes, render optimizations, various graphical glitches were fixed and more.

A lot of work for this release went into their game engine behind the scenes, to bring more of it up to modern standards. With SDL3 it now has Wayland support, along with all the other goodies the bump from SDL2 to SDL3 brings like enhanced support for basically everything from windowing to input.

To make it easier for developers new and old, they also reworked their build system moving their Linux baseline from Debian Buster to Debian Bullseye, to be a bit more modern while supporting as many systems as possible. And hopefully thanks to all the background upgrades from compilers to libraries - a better overall game.

Nice to see this open source game more alive than ever.