Xonotic India, and Beyond!

(Builds upon Jan's talk and also serves as a project update if we have anything noteworthy)

"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! (It was always a local server or a shared hosting provider who would restrict my options🥺)

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!

As a continuation from the previous talk, I also wish to introduce a superset project that aims to bring more open source shooters under its wing. This would've never happened if not for the previous talk and the people I met through that, so thank you :D

The local Xonotic India game server (still lol) has under 3 to 5 consistent users, and is empty most of the time. This talk also 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.

• Slides: Content is almost completely manually typed, with the exception of LLM assistance for HTML and mermaid snippets for diagrams and formatting.

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.