A well-known game for those who love, or loved, unconventional gameplay is certainly Forsaken, a first-person shooter featuring 3D capabilities, because it makes available for the players "Six Degrees Of Freedom", or shortly 6DoF. As a mechanical engineer already knows, this acronym refers to the freedom of movement of a rigid body in a three-dimensional space.

And in fact the DirectX 6 graphics engine of Forsaken allows 360-degree movements, and so the players are free to fly on board of higly customizable "bikes". They can move in any direction - forward and backward, up and down, and left and right - and rotate along any axis without limits due to the gravity.

Forsaken is similar to another game named Descent, according to some reports of its time focusing to the gameplay type. Even so Forsaken was developed by Probe Entertainment, a division of Acclaim Entertainment, for the Microsoft Windows and PlayStation gaming platforms and by Iguana UK for the Nintendo 64 mobile console, during the 1996-1998 temporal window; then Acclaim published the game in 1998.

In 2007, and so about nine year after the commercial launch (I remember you that the game was shipped also with the retail bundle of some NVIDIA Riva TNT cards, like those branded by Creative), the source code of Forsaken, without music and cutscenes, was considered Abandonware and released into the public domain.

This event has triggered the laborious minds of some members of both the Forsaken and Descent fan communities: they started the project named ProjectX, and the original Forsaken code "has been heavily modified and extended from its original state". Furthermore, many parts of the new ProjectX game are complete works of the communities' members.

In this way, a "new" Forsaken, or better ProjectX, a game very, very similar to it of course, also dubbed "ForsakenX", or also "Forsaken Source Port", was released; and now this software - that's still being regularly updated - is capable to run on Mac OS X (32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) platforms as well as on modern Windows systems. This's a interesting goal if you consider that the original Forsaken showed off some critical compatibility issues and graphical limitations with new Windows PCs and it never was released for Linux and Mac OS X.

In addition to the single-player mode and the slightly updated user graphical interface, the free ProjectX arcade shooter brings out also nice functionalities for sessions of on line and LAN multiplayer. Furthermore ProjectX has the capabilities to work at video resolutions as high as 1920 x 1080 pixel with 32-bit color depth - your GeForce or Radeon video cards will be happy of course - and to support some modern game controllers for the Windows and non-Windows systems.

If you want reuse any part of this project you should check whether the specific code segment is covered by the GPL, while the download of ProjectX and the playing with it are free for all. And so builds of ProjectX for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are available to download and ready for all your modern systems. Wiki and Documentation are available as well. Of course feel free to leave a comment in our forums if you like it: a reference thread about ProjectX is open.

• ProjectX - Main Site
• ProjectX - Download
• ProjectX - Wiki and Documentation
• Uncompressed ProjectX Screenshots included in this article
• ProjectX - The thread on our forums