Interestingly (as someone who works in games industry doing marketing shit) I've never heard of OpenArena at all... but will definitely read up on it now you've mentioned it.

For Warsow, really pleased for them that they've reached 1.0, but from everything I've heard, specially over the past few months, they've made it a lot harder on themselves than it should have been, by the way they are organised (or not so organised) internally.

They are quite organized, it's pretty hard to be disorganized, when you only have 2 main developers, and 2-3 occasional helpers.

I think the biggest hurdle in developing this version was actually the choice of using libRocket to script the UI with. Turns out the lib is very slow, and it needed lots of work to get working properly.

Yeah that is correct.

There's vic, me and toukka doing any coding and kimza mapping some, jihnsius doing the music, and have pretty good agreement over everything we do, so I wouldn't call us disorganized :)

Same in OpenArena, the organisation is quite messy. There are some modelers, coders, people who make maps in the hope of making it to releases... But nothing is really organized. Releases are not planned, and when they are planned they easily go 3 months overdue. But there is progress, and I think the game is already fairly complete as it is. Thousands of players seem to think so too.

OpenArena's goal is to make a completely open-source and free Quake 3 clone with some additions like delag, and it's actually the opensource competitor for Quake Live. It could use some more developers I think :)

What's the user base like in these games? I feel like every FOSS FPS I've ever played, besides UrbanTerror, has few to no players.

You can find people to play with on public server all the time, however I think most of those are hosted it europe so YMMV. The main problem I have with Warsow is that the greater part of the regular userbase is very experienced and when you try to get into it at first it can be a very... punishing experience.

It's very fast paced and requires quite a lot of skill and muscle memory to become good at it. There are a couple of "noob" servers that are quite enjoyable however. Overall a very good game.

Just so you know, UrbanTerror isn't open-source, sadly - still very good fun though.

There's a pretty fun FOSS FPS called AssaultCube which I used to play a lot - it's simple but it's fun. That has quite a high number of players. Unsure about how active the other FPSs are but whenever I've tried them out I've always been able to get a game.

Ehhh the public user base perhaps isn't really so important in foss fps games because these games are most often used as LAN games when not everyone owns the same collection of games. Before tf2, Warsow was pretty much the only good fps LAN parties could use legally.

Xonotic and its predecessor Nexuiz are also 100% free and open source (git.xonotic.org). Even the media like models and sounds are also released with source links, which considerably different from what Warsow is doing.

Disclosure: I'm on the Xonotic core team :)

UrbanTerror doesnt have that big of a userbase either.

But somehow UT feels very much like a community. More so, than the other ones. (i like world-of-padman though)

Relatively small but there's been around 4000-6000 unique players per day since the launch of 1.0.

I don't think that's small - OpenArena has enough players for me, that's probably less than 4000-6000 a week. It's actually kind of nice to know some people on every server you go. And being anonymous is easy, just rename to unnamedplayer or some random name (the default name).

i agree - a user base count would be interesting