Sunday! It's here again already so let's go over some recent interesting news, some sales and whatever else we may have missed during the week that could be interesting.
First up, we missed the recent small update for the Vulkan-based D3D11 and D3D10 layer for Wine named DXVK. DXVK 1.4.2, was released late Friday with these changes and improvements:
- Minor reduction of CPU overhead
- Fixed a minor performance regression introduced in 1.4.1 in GPU-bound scenarios.
- Fixed a case of incorrect NaN behaviour in shaders.
- Fixed various minor DXGI issues to improve pass rate in wine tests.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered: Report all GPUs as Nvidia to work around game crashes.
D9VK 0.22 was also released recently for running D3D9 games with Vulkan and Wine.
It seems AMD CPU sales are going strong, with them recently hitting an all-time high when it comes to the actual number of CPUs being sold. It's not exactly surprising though, since the latest Ryzen processors offer good performance with a high core count when compared with Intel's often more expensive lineup.
Some sad news this week was HopFrog removing Linux support from the rather sweet game Forager, if you missed it the article was updated to include new info. It's still a little confusing but from what they said it will not be removed, it will see updates but no Linux-specific issues will be fixed. Most of the issues seem to come from Game Maker, which often has pretty iffy Linux support.
The co-op tactical shooter Police Stories was recently released and I gave it a rather positive look. I'm actually looking forward to playing more of this one, as it really does get intense. Especially when you've got one suspect left, a single bullet could end your current mission. It's tough but very fun to play with another person.
Phoronix recently did some testing to compare the classic LLVM compiler back-end against the newer Valve-funded ACO. Looks like ACO holds up well and can give some nice improvements here and there so it's looking quite good for the next big Mesa release with 19.3 coming up towards the end of the year.
More interesting open source projects to keep an eye on:
- Carnage3D, an attempt to remake Grand Theft Auto 1.
-
OpenSC, bringing classic Starcraft into the OpenRA game engine.
It's wonderful seeing so many open source game engine remakes lately like we've seen with SanAndreasUnity and openblack.
ROCKFISH Games, the developer of the awesome space action roguelike EVERSPACE who are currently crowdfunding EVERSPACE 2 on Kickstarter (will support Linux again) are doubling down on their promise to not go exclusive to the Epic Game Store, as they explained in an update to their previous campaign. This is obviously very good news for us, since Epic Games have no plans for the Epic Gamers Store on Linux. Their crowdfunding campaign for EVERSPACE 2 is going strong hitting well over €120,000 against their €450,000 goal.
MegaSphere, the story-based sci-fi action platformer with a seriously incredible style had a massive update recently. After putting a few more hours in across the week, I'm a little bit in love with it. Such vibrant colours, tough enemies and a very interesting story to follow.
The PSP emulator, PPSSPP, had a big new release lately with version 1.9. Plenty of optimisations were done, multiple games should work better, it now has support for installing texture packs and ISOs from zips and much more.
A bit of fun Valve news for you this week too! After they updated and fixed various issues with Half-Life 2 and the episodes they went back and did the same for Portal 2. For Linux gamers, Portal 2 gained a fix for material rendering which had plagued it for a long time. On top of that it now supports device specific glyphs from Steam Input API to help players using other gamepads like PlayStation and Switch Pro, there's also a few other nice gamepad related fixes and several potential exploits that were reported were solved.
The next massive update for the Zombie survival game 7 Days to Die is coming up! The developer has announced an "experimental" build to be up tomorrow. You can see some of what's coming on their release notes. Our livestreamer, Sin, is a massive fan and has shown it off a lot and hopefully will be jumping in again when that build is up. Be sure to follow GamingOnLinux on Twitch to see.
Weekend deals reminder:
- Humble Book Bundle: Linux & UNIX by O'Reilly
- Humble Builder Bundle - Tricky Towers, Bridge Constructor Portal, SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell + more
- Humble One Special Day Bundle 2019 - Broken Age, The Swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse, Bomber Crew, Tannenberg, DiRT 4 + more.
- A new Humble Monthly - Both Spyro and Crash should work in Steam Play.
- Aspyr Media weekend sale on Steam - lots of their Linux ports are on sale.
- Fanatical has a Team 17 sale - a number of Linux games are included too.
- GOG's 11 year celebration sale with staff picks is still going for a little while longer.
Apologies again for the News Punch roundup podcast not coming back. It's been a mixture of things between multiple microphones dying on me and my voice vanishing. My voice is really coming back now and so the podcast shall return again soon!
If you enjoy what we do here you can support us through places like Patreon, Paypal, Liberapay, Flattr and Twitch. In addition our our affiliate links with GOG and Humble Store (which really do help!).
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
And while the Aspyr Sale is nice and all, I'd rather like them to fix their Borderlands ports to be on par with the HD releases for Windows from a long time ago earlier this year. Wanted to finish the Pre-Sequel co-op before Borderlands 3 came out with some co-workers, but Linux and Mac are still a version behind and cannot connect with Windows players.
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