In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square.(thanks wikipedia)
So naturally the game Tesseract should be to the game Cube 2: Sauerbraten as the game Cube 2 is to the game Assault cube, that was my conclusion, and it was pretty much wrong.
Upon trying Tesseract, I noticed it handles like a very specialized version of Cube 2(Tess began life as a client-side mod for Cube 2, the beta I played was a standalone). It feels like if someone who only played Cube 2 for the editing had a chance to remake the game, their concoction would resemble Tesseract. This means that editing mode, the players capabilities have improved a ton, the editing interface is much greater, the game comes with myriad graphical options that weren't in cube 2(4 types of anti aliasing, and real-time global illumination/occlusion from a procedural generated sun and skybox to name some of the new ones), and what few mapmodels and textures the game has(it's the first edition I'm playing, I assume if it gets past this stage it will release with many more file assets) were phenomenal quality-wise.
Models now can manipulated on all 3 axis, and support full lighting and shaders, which brings out their bumpmapped textures perfectly. On the topic of textures, all the ones that come with the game have a higher default resolution than in Cube 2, and they all have bumpmapping and and shining, say goodbye to flat monotony. And oh yeah, real-time lightmaps! In cube 2, everytime you need to make a change to the map, you need to type /calclight or press k, even copying stuff to your clipboard requires it. With tesseract, the lighting calculates in real-time, no longer do you have to bother with that annoying remip and calc. And the lighting itself looks solid as well, it has some bugs when generating soft shadows when there are two lightsources right next to one-another, other than that I didn't notice any big bugs. Content creation is easy as ever, controls have been tweaked but the text commands are identical so if you want to re-bind them you can. Here's a room I made to demonstrate the effects of the lighting on mapmodels and on player-made geometry.
This one is in shooter mode, with the lighting turned on and shaders on, there's no water in this room but I can assure you it looks decent as well.
This what that same room looks like in editmode, with outline on and sans lighting. In this view its easy to tell the mapmodels apart from the geometry I made. The editing interface has also improved, I didn't capture the whole screen because the bottom was covered by the windows bar, but in fullscreen it looks solid, displaying your movement-speed and gridsize is super nice, also in editmode you can hold shift to toggle a second, faster floatspeed, both speeds are customizable. Also your binary settings like all-faces and showmat and fullbright are visible in to the right, which is awesome, since so many times in cube 2 I went to texture something only to texture all faces of it on accident. Also when you're blending textures, your blend paint mode is displayed to the left along with the v-layer of any polygon you select.
So all this shit is nice. Now for the sad part, the down sides T-T
Earlier I mentioned this game was in it's first edition, (you guys can find a copy of the first edition here if you want but I wouldn't recommend it tbh). The tragedy of this game's story is that I have a running theory it's never going to develop past this first edition. That's a harsh but common thing with free to play/use projects like this, there's no monetary incentive to keep them going so if the dev or team of devs loses interest, it's all over (see SC 1.0). And this first edition of Tesseract is not a version of the game that anyone should feel comfortable with releasing on a large scale. If you looked in the bottom right corner of my screenshots, you'll notice that my framerates during both shots were fucking atrocious. And it's always like that, they haven't optimized the game to handle the huge processing load that real-time lighting creates. Also, as I said at the beginning, Tesseract is like a specialized version of Cube 2, made for editors. The fighting mechanics have taken a turn for the worse. Now this runs along the same lines as battlefront EA not having a singleplayer campaign - most play for the multiplayer, so many don't mind, but that's half the damn game that they've omitted. Tesseract suffers from this problem, the guys who made it didn't care for Cube 2's fighting many game modes, so they're all gone except deathmatch and ctf, and items are gone and ammo is gone as well, and there are only 2 guns to play with. There are some nice mechanics like crouching and melee attacking brought back from Assault cube, but neither break new ground, and they certainly don't change the fact that the game is totally unplayable. All in all, there are many Cube 2 client mods out there that do much of the same stuff, a standalone project birthed from Cube 2 called Nexus is gonna release in a few months, go for those if you ask me, because this project failed, which is sad since given a bit more effort it could've been a great success.
