Free and open source first-person shooter Unvanquished combines real-time strategy elements with old-fashioned FPS gameplay. A new update has been released for the game as it moves closer to a Beta version.

We've been covering the Unvanquished project for the past three years, but it feels that it was a lot longer than that. The developers have advanced at their own pace, as the version number clearly demonstrates. They are only now closing the gap until the Beta is ready, but they have done a great job in the meantime.

The advantage is that they don't follow any particular schedule, and they can do pretty much what they want. They have added an insane number of changes and improvements in the past three years, so who knows what they are going to do next.

Unvanquished Beta is getting closer

Even if there is some pretty interesting information in the announcement, the fact that they said to be getting closer to a Beta release overshadows everything.

"Stay tuned in next month where we are working on several features as we begin to gear up towards beta. We are reworking the animation system to make it easier for artists to add human models to our game. Gamelogic Lua scripting remains a work in progress. We have shifted the design of the Lua scripting framework away from mirroring the C structs in the code to mapping entity names key/value pairs mappers," said the devs.

According to the changelog, the way the mouse is handled by the engine has been improved, engine and gamelogic crashes on Windows and Linux are now going to be spotted much easily with the help of a tool named Breakpad, and an assert framework has been added.

More details about this sci-fi title can be found on the official website. Keep in mind that this is work in progress and players will most likely encounter problems and other issues. You can download Unvanquished Alpha 48 right now from Softpedia.