Unvanquished
Unvanquished is a free and open-source video game. It is a multiplayer first-person shooter and real-time strategy game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.
Unvanquished

CC BY-SA 2.5
- Name
- Unvanquished
- Language
- English
- Genre
- first-person shooter · strategy video game · real-time
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Unvanquished is a free and open-source video game. It is a multiplayer first-person shooter and real-time strategy game where Humans and Aliens fight for domination.
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wikidata · Q14629261
In this article
Key facts
Key facts
• Name — Unvanquished • Developer — Game community • Latest Preview Version — 0.56.2 beta • Repo — https: github.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished • License — GNU GPLv3, CC BY-SA 2.5 • Engine — Dæmon (game engine) • Operating System — Linux, macOS, Windows • Genre — Multiplayer video game, first-person shooter, real-time strategy game • Website — https: unvanquished.net
Gameplay
Gameplay
• Illustration — A large alien Tyrant is being attacked by a human (background) and a machine-gun turret (offscreen, left) as it tries to demolish the human base. • Illustration — A human player building a defensive structure Players fight in an alien or human team with respective melee and conventional ballistic weaponry. The aim of the game is to destroy the enemy team and the structures that keep them alive, as well as ensure one's own team's bases and expansions are maintained. Players earn resources for themselves and their team via aggression. Commenting on gameplay, Lifewire noted: "One particularly fun aspect of Unvanquished is that as insects, players can crawl on the walls and ceilings, adding a new, though perhaps somewhat disorienting, take on game physics".
Development
Development
Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to Tremulous. The gameplay and game resources are under the CC BY-SA 2.5 Creative Commons license whilst the Dæmon engine is under the GPLv3. Development began the summer of 2011 on SourceForge, with the first alpha version being released on February 29, 2012. While the code development was already happening on GitHub since 2012, the game release distribution moved from SourceForge to GitHub in 2015. Unvanquished is developed by a team of volunteers who used to release a new Alpha on the first Sunday of every month. However, since the project reached a new stage of development, betas are released with less frequency.
Engine
Engine
• Illustration — The lineage of the Daemon engine Unvanquished uses the Dæmon Engine, born from a merge of the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine (id Tech 3) and the XreaL engine. That merge was initially named OpenWolf before being renamed to Dæmon before the first alpha release of Unvanquished was released. Its development is now proceeding in its own path from its predecessors. In 2015, with version 0.42, the Unvanquished developers managed to separate the game's engine code from the game's code by teaming up with developers of Xonotic. Written in C++, the Dæmon engine relies on OpenGL, OpenAL and SDL technologies for rendering, display, audio and input device management. The engine sandboxes the game in a Native Client virtual machine, making possible for servers to distributes modifications (mod) written in C++ in a secure way for the player, and making possible for developers to produce game binaries independent from the operating system. Dæmon is multi-plateform and supports Linux, Windows, and macOS operating systems, along with x86, AMD64, ARM and ARM64 architectures. The engine handles DXTC/S3TC, DirectDraw Surface (DDS) and CRN image formats, WebP, PNG, JPEG and Truevision Targa (TGA) image formats, Opus, Vorbis and WAV audio formats, and 3D animated formats InterQuake Model (IQM), MD5mesh/MD5anim (Doom 3 format) and MD3 (Quake III Arena format). The game level format is the BSP format from Quake III Arena and de Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (implementing Binary space partitioning), the engine also supports the Quake III Arena material description format (also known as a “shader”), with extensions inspired by the Doom 3 format. The engine implements a multi-texture system that supports normal mapping, specular mapping, relief mapping, and PBR textures. With the 0.56.0 release, Unvanquished and the Dæmon engine enabled the colorspace-aware rendering pipeline, freeing the rendering engine from limitations and mistakes inherited from historical games like Quake 3, as a requirement for physically based rendering.
Reception
Michael Larabel from Phoronix.com praised Unvanquisheds graphics in July 2012, while it was still in alpha state. Lifewire praised the insect mechanic as an interesting twist and the ease of modding (referring to the level editor). Softpedia reviewed the game in version 0.49 in March 2016 and gave 3.5 stars. Between 2011 and June 2017 the game was downloaded alone from SourceForge over 1.3 million times.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Unvanquished 0.56.2, quality!. unvanquished.net. 2026-05-12.
- 2.Copying. GitHub.
- 3.About - Unvanquished. unvanquished.net.
- 4.Dave Rankin. 5 Open Source First-Person Shooter Video Games.
- 5.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game. Phoronix. 2012-07-01.
- 6.Marius Nestor. Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge. softpedia. 2015-08-03.
- 7.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished Is Rewriting, Modernizing The Quake 3 Engine. Phoronix. 2013-09-15.
- 8.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished Makes Its Open-Source Engine Easy For Other Games. Phoronix. 2015-08-03.
- 9.Larabel, Michael. The State Of XReaL, OpenWolf Game Engines. Phoronix. 2012-12-01.
- 10.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game. Phoronix. 2012-07-01.
- 11.Renamed engine. GitHub.
- 12.Rebrand to Daemon. GitHub.
- 13.10 years and Unvanquished. unvanquished.net.
- 14.Marius Nestor. Unvanquished FPS Game Gets Tremulous' Vega Map, Plans on Leaving SourceForge. softpedia. 2015-08-03.
- 15.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Begins Landing C++11 Engine Rewrite. Phoronix. 2013-11-27.
- 16.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Pushes Its OpenGL 3 GLSL Renderer. Phoronix. 2012-10-08.
- 17.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Alpha 23 Rewrites The Audio System. Phoronix. 2014-01-05.
- 18.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Ported To SDL2 With Bots & Firebombs. Phoronix.
- 19.Liam Dawe. Open source strategy shooter Unvanquished gets a big new release with SDL3. GamingOnLinux. 2025-09-29.
- 20.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Begins Landing C++11 Engine Rewrite. Phoronix. 2013-11-27.
- 21.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game. Phoronix. 2012-07-01.
- 22.Liam Dawe. Free strategy shooter game Unvanquished v0.54 is out now. GamingOnLinux. 2023-01-31.
- 23.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished 0.54 Brings More Renderer Improvements, ARM Binaries. Phoronix. 2023-01-30.
- 24.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Alpha 23 Rewrites The Audio System. Phoronix. 2014-01-05.
- 25.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game. Phoronix. 2012-07-01.
- 26.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished Game, Assets Are Now Fully Open-Source Compliant. Phoronix. 2020-09-15.
- 27.Liam Dawe. Open source strategy shooter Unvanquished gets a big new release with SDL3. GamingOnLinux. 2025-09-29.
- 28.Michael Larrabel. Unvanquished 0.56 Released With More Renderer Improvements, OpenMP Added To Engine. Phoronix. 2026-05-25.
- 29.Unvanquished 0.56: We deliver. unvanquished.net. 2026-03-25.
- 30.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished: A Very Promising Open-Source Game. Phoronix. 2012-07-01.
- 31.Larabel, Michael. Unvanquished Still Looks Amazing For Open-Source. Phoronix. 2012-08-25.
- 32.Alexandru Dulcianu. Unvanquished Review. softpedia. 2016-03-14.
- 33.Statistics. SourceForge. 2017-06-06.
References
Citations
References
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The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 18 August 2026.
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