Xonotic India: local Game Server and Community for (hopefully) still popular Open Source Shooter

"Xonotic is an addictive arena-style first person shooter with crisp movement and a wide array of weapons." as per Official Website, https://xonotic.org/

Xonotic is a popular Free And Open Source first-person-shooter game that pits users in an arena with various maps, and game modes. From Duel, Team Deathmatch to Capture The Flag, it has something for everyone!

If you spent an idle evening looking through your Linux distribution's GUI application store, you've definitely caught a glimpse of this in the gaming section!

If you find this interesting, I highly suggest burning a lazy saturday afternoon with some friends here :D

I have attached a quick video guide on getting started with the game after downloading it from:
https://xonotic.org/download/
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.xonotic.Xonotic

The problem I was stuck with was that xonotic had no community servers in India. Fun Fact: This was also the first server I ever deployed from a VPS ever!

My talk is about running the Xonotic India server since 2022(mostly passively, and without as much care as it deserves) and also sending a Call to Action to the local open source community to hop on and frag for an afternoon or two!

The local Xonotic India game server currently has under 3 to 5 consistent users, and is empty most of the time. This talk aims to bring attention to this server and remind people that it still exists :D

The server is discoverable within the game as "Unofficial Xonotic India Mumbai Server"

If presentation time is sufficient, I will also try to cover:

• Challenges with running the server (and community)

• an extremely quick overview of how it evolved from the Quake, Unreal Tournament family of shooters

• How our server falls short, with limitations related to stats.xonotic.org
  
  

LLM Involvement Breakdown will be published along with slides. So far:

• Landing Website(india.xonotic.au): Code is LLM assisted.

• Server: maintained manually with tmux, ssh and a crappy start script. No AI/LLM.

• Proposal: Hand-typed. No AI/LLM.

After attending this talk, you will:

• Know what a "Xonotic" is

• Explore the Idea of Arena Shooters

• Know that there is a community that still exists and cares for open source shooters.