Nexiuz

Nexiuz is an open source Multi-user First Person Shooter, based on the Quake 1 engine.  It has potential for educational gaming applications but after spending a bit of time in the forums it seems that a good simple editor is still not available.  When or if this changes, I’ll be sure to update here.

I am still looking for free FPS alternatives to the full commercial version of Unreal Tournament for weapons-based play.  However for non-competitive applications, the educational version of UT has turned out to be really convenient.

Library UT Quiz

A new Unreal Tournament Quiz on using library resources is now available on the EduFrag wiki.  The bitmaps were provided by the library team (Josh Roberts, Jay Bhatt and Tim Siftar).  It took about 10 minutes to repackage using the template files into a downloadable zip.  

We would like to have students use this resource shortly.  Please provide any feedback you have on the map structure or the true/false doors.  Keep in mind that the questions will be scrambled so any true or false door should be unambiguous in any context.

Free Unreal Tournament Quizzes

Thanks to the MakeGames class, also on Wikispaces, I finally found the Free Educational Version of Unreal Tournament. It has the full UT2 Engine but without weapons. The editor is basically the same as the commercial version but the maps can't be copied back and forth.

This gave me the opportunity to redesign the Edufrag project into a much more modular format. Content creators and map developers can now operate independently without having to learn anything about what the other does. Also maps can be extended easily to accomodate virtually any number of quiz questions.

Following this design I have put together an organic chemistry quiz on Lewis structures that anyone with a PC can download and play freely. The content can also easily be adapted to the commercial versions of UT for competitive play.

Instructions to try out the quiz and more details on the specs are on the wiki.

FPS creator

There is a new First Person Shooter game design program coming out September 22.
From the video preview on the website it looks like it creates a decent play experience.
It supports online multi-player mode.
It is about the same price as UT2004 but the games/maps you create can be distributed without additional cost. This makes it very attractive for our educational gaming applications. I bought a copy to investigate. We'll have to see how easy it is to import textures.

Anyone else interested?

Thanks to Cory for the link.