The Alien Arena Website now offers a new version 7.45 of Alien Arena 2010, the freeware first-person shooter, for Windows and Linux. Word is: "The latest edition of this open sourced, freeware FPS has been updated with a number of important improvements and bugfixes that not only enhance the visual appearance, but greatly improve the performance of the game." Here's the complete change log, and the highlights follow.

• New skeletal model format.
• Soft shadows.
• Faster, more accurate lighting.
• Major optimizations for faster rendering.
• Fixes for old vertex animated meshes.
• All player models re-animated with new skeletal format.
• Fixes in IRC client