I’ve been playing around with the Sauerbraten (Cube 2) engine the last few days. I’m toying with the idea of a full conversion Co-Op RPG, but launching a big project like that without getting more accustomed to the engine would be foolhardy. So I’m starting out in more humble fashion with a few maps using the game’s existing single-player campaign system. If that goes well, I’ll progress from there.

The engine is fully open source (zlib license, so quite permissive) and more capable than it first appears (on a glance, it looks a lot like Quake 2). The level editing works directly inside the game and you can even coop-edit, or coop-edit and deathmatch at the same time.

I found editing with cube transforms rather odd at first, but I’m getting the hang of it. It would probably give an experienced 3D artist an aneurysm to work this way.

The quality of art and content really varies, from stellar to um, not-so-stellar. I guess that should be expected with open source. There are a bunch of included textures, but each set of art has its own license, so not all are freely distributable.

The screenshots here are from what I’ve come up with so far, just one room on a spaceship, which is the start for my first single-player campaign.