Another week has dragged on and here we are, the weekend. It's time to go over a few little bits and find out what our readers have been playing this week.
For me, I've been playing rather a lot of DRAG, the fancy new racer from Orontes Games. As pretty as it is and how smooth the performance is, the game itself might be the most frustrated I've been with a racing game—ever. Not the kind of frustration to put me off because of technical issues, more at my own inability to keep the damn car from sliding about everywhere and then smashing into a tiny little tree and losing a precious wheel.
Have you ever had a game truly give you stress-sweats? It's not just because it's ridiculously warm in the GOL office, DRAG is nail-biting edge of your seat tough. It took me over 4 hours to beat the first set of time trials on the "Wood" medal (the lowest). 4 hours, split across a few levels that take ~30 seconds to beat most. Who set these crazy times? Orontes we need words. Challenging physics aside, DRAG is a great entry into the racing genre that I hope goes on to become a success. It's been a while since I was properly excited to see a racing game evolve and DRAG has such an impressive start. I did at least get a few good runs in like this on video.
Now how about a little round-up of some interesting recent news?
As for game engines, the cross-platform and open source Godot Engine is changing how it will provide rendering options with Godot 4.0 when it gains Vulkan support. Instead of a high-end and a low-end renderer, they will instead have a single renderer that is efficient for multiple uses. You can read more about that here. Additionally, Godot is getting a Volumetric fog implementation which is merged in ready for release (shots below).
Additionally, a normal Fog system is also back in for Godot 4.0 that's less complex than the system in the 3.x series that should look good with "less effort". The Godot team is also looking for help funding to hire more developers which you can do so on Patreon. If you're a game developer reading, I do urge you to look into using Godot.
This week we also had the KDE August 2020 application updates bringing with it improvements to the Dolphin file manager with lots of usability improvements, like improvements to how it cuts the filenames when they're too long and a new "Copy Location" option. This Copy Location ability was also added to Konsole, KDE's terminal app and there's plenty more updates across KDE apps. Digikam especially got a big upgrade with Digikam 7.0.0 with much better facial recognition.
Something very concerning is what's happening over at Mozilla. There's been some conflicting reports but they're definitely changing and letting go of 250 staff members. MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), practically one of the go-to places for reading up on web tech and standards also had its team gutted and they're trying to find a way forwards. Hopefully it's not all as bad as it sounds. It's alarming since they make Firefox, and it would be really bad if we ended up with just Chromium sticking around. Open source still sure, but Google pretty firmly control it. The somewhat good news, is that Mozilla has now managed to sign a new deal with Google for funding, which makes up the majority of their incoming monies.
Deals Reminder:
- Killing Floor Humble Bundle
- Humble Store - Racing Games Sale
- Dying Light - 66% off (Steam) - just had a new DLC
- The Traditional Roguelikes Bundle (Steam) - save on Caves of Qud, Sword of the Stars and more
- PAYDAY 2 (Steam) big anniversary sale - 50% off
- GOG have a sale on Automation games, with some great Zachtronics in there like Opus Magnum
Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately and what are you clicking on this weekend?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: slaapliedjeStill somewhat related to Linux, I installed the newly supported SVGA driver in the a0486 core on my MiSTer (which manages all the FPGA magic through Linux). Win95 is still f'ugly after all these years!I wish I could justify the expense of a MiSTer to myself. They ain't cheap.
But the MiSTer plays many of the arcade games written for it flawlessly and I'm finally able to put my Mayflash F300 to great use!
Mind you, I still have (almost*) all of the computers and consoles I ever owned. I just need to get around to checking and replacing some of the parts on the older ones. Especially the Amiga 500+. Those things are actively suicidal.
*Someone stole my 48K ZX Spectrum+. But I also have the 128K model (the relatively rare Sinclair “toastrack, so I'm not really losing out there. There are some incompatibilities, but they're pretty minor and although the 128 itself had quite a short production run due to the sale of Sinclair's computer business to Amstrad, it was the template for all the Amstrad-built models so they're not usually a problem.
Yup, worked fine. 8 jars of blackberry jelly; I spent 3 hours picking 'em. Had a step-stool with me so I could pick the stuff too high to reach that hadn't been picked over. My jelly and jam always turn out pretty well, but I don't have any special way of making 'em. I just use the instructions with the Certo pectin except I ignore where it says don't scant the sugar or it won't set and scant the sugar anyway by a cup or two. It always sets fine anyway and their way is too sweet.
One thing though--in my family we've found that if you want to keep jam a long time, freeze it. Not that it's freezer jam--freezer jam sucks. No, it's boiled up normally, but after it's made and cooled down we freeze most of it, that way it stays pretty much like new even a couple years later. If you just keep it on a shelf somewhere it gradually gets sort of darker and loses that powerful, fresh zingy fruitiness.[/quote]
Ikea? The swedish department store?I see
In my home we pick up lingonberry about 20-40 litre per year-depending on what kind of summer there has been. Then we smash our "catch" and make mash of it. Then we put it down to our cool basement and use it in a year.We have lingonberry almost every time on the table when we have dinner. Very tasty especially then when we add sugar on it.The word jam wasn't the right word to describe sorry.Mash is better
.I get soon banned here.I should be talking about games or open up lingonberry topic here which doesn't concern Linux gaming ofc. Well I must soon continue playing DEFCON or try something new like civilization 5 or 6. Sometimes it's hard to decideLast edited by Solarwing on 17 August 2020 at 5:53 pm UTC
slaapliedje Aug 17, 2020
Quoting: DuncMiSTer is nice due to the footprint of the system. Though I do have many older computers, my A4k has been without it's cover on for many moons now, every time I try to get it to be more stable, it disappoints me, and I haven't had the time to work out better cooling for it. The PPC likes to heat things up, even when not being used...Quoting: slaapliedjeStill somewhat related to Linux, I installed the newly supported SVGA driver in the a0486 core on my MiSTer (which manages all the FPGA magic through Linux). Win95 is still f'ugly after all these years!I wish I could justify the expense of a MiSTer to myself. They ain't cheap.
But the MiSTer plays many of the arcade games written for it flawlessly and I'm finally able to put my Mayflash F300 to great use!
Mind you, I still have (almost*) all of the computers and consoles I ever owned. I just need to get around to checking and replacing some of the parts on the older ones. Especially the Amiga 500+. Those things are actively suicidal.
*Someone stole my 48K ZX Spectrum+. But I also have the 128K model (the relatively rare Sinclair “toastrack, so I'm not really losing out there. There are some incompatibilities, but they're pretty minor and although the 128 itself had quite a short production run due to the sale of Sinclair's computer business to Amstrad, it was the template for all the Amstrad-built models so they're not usually a problem.
Funny thing about the MiSTer is that it was created as a hopefully cheaper version of the MiST, but it seems to have failed at that with all the add-ons...
Quoting: PatolaQuoting: denyasisStill learning Star Ruler 2. It's such a fun game, I'm sad it didn't get more attention, especially with it being open source. Even weirder it doesn't seem to appear in repos.On Ubuntu, it appears as a snap.snap install starruler2
well, I've learned something! I looked around the SUSE repos, didn't see anything, and assumed. I stand corrected!
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: sourpuzFinally tackled the Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine AddOns to Witcher 3. I love this game, the whole series. I've rarely played anything this atmospheric.
Did you finish both expansions? Feel free to discuss the game in the dedicated thread.
oldrocker99 Aug 18, 2020
slaapliedje Aug 18, 2020
Quoting: sourpuzNot yet, I think I'm in the middle of HoS and have begun B&W. Both seem very nice and I'm still surprised how flawlessly the game runs via Proton/Steam Play.For some reason mine wouldn't launch, I had to uninstall then re-install then it worked fine.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: sourpuzFinally tackled the Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine AddOns to Witcher 3. I love this game, the whole series. I've rarely played anything this atmospheric.
Did you finish both expansions? Feel free to discuss the game in the dedicated thread.
On a note of new games, the Marvel Avengers Beta just doesn't do anything in Proton. But it's a mess even in Windows, gamepad support seems to want to work, as when you push a button it then changes the dialogs, but then the buttons don't work (tried my PS4 clone controller that Windows sees as an xbox one, tried the switch pro and an xbox 360 one (old dependable)). But then it crashed after I played it with the mouse for like 10min :P
Hopefully that'll change once it actually releases.
Wish I had more time to beat TW2 so I could move onto TW3!
Quoting: slaapliedjeWish I had more time to beat TW2 so I could move onto TW3!
It's not a very long game, at least if you don't plan to play both Iorweth and Roche's paths for completeness. A lot shorter than TW3 overall. But each path provides quite different substory, so at some point you'd probably want to try both.
Last edited by Shmerl on 18 August 2020 at 5:13 pm UTC
slaapliedje Aug 18, 2020
Quoting: ShmerlYeah, I was wondering about that. At the moment, I chose Iorveth. I'm also playing it on Easy so I can kind of breeze through it.Quoting: slaapliedjeWish I had more time to beat TW2 so I could move onto TW3!
It's not a very long game, at least if you don't plan to play both Iorweth and Roche's paths for completeness. A lot shorter than TW3 overall. But each path provides quite different substory, so at some point you'd probably want to try both.
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