Category: Editorial

This is what I have been waiting for! Dota 2 has officially announced a major engine update and a slick new UI.

Multiplatform VR support, procedural foliage systems and plugins from select partners are among the changes.

Less than a week after opening up for pre-orders of the first Steam Hardware, 35% of the units have already been sold.

Valve has made some of the Steam Universe hardware available for pre-order and you can even get them early. This includes the Steam Controller and Steam Link.

More bad news has emerged surrounding Desura, with its parent company Bad JuJu Games filing for bankruptcy only two weeks after it emerged that they were behind in paying developers and only seven months after it was announced that they had acquired Desura from Linden Lab.

Remember folks, it doesn't matter if the overall Linux percentage drops right now. There's a lot of room for errors, we have tons of games to come, and Linux is still awesome.

XCOM 2 is going to be awesome, that’s pretty much a given. The annoying thing is we have to play catch up to IGN’s obviously paid for exclusivity here. IGN will be stretching it out as long as possible of course.

About damn time. Valve have a history of really poor support, especially when it comes to refunds, so this is very welcome.

Good news for those of us annoyed by the poor OpenGL performance of games built with Unity, as the Unity engine will have a unified OpenGL rendering system.

This is fun to see, Valve have added "Source 2 Dota 2 Content" as DLC for Dota 2. We already knew Dota 2 would be first since Valve stated it was due a big upgrade this year, but it could be soon!

In an unsurprising move, Steam has replaced the Linux icon of "tux" with their own SteamOS icon. I completely understand why they did this, but it does make things confusing.

Welcome to the Palladium issue of The Funding Crowd! Yep, 46 appears to be a reasonably interesting number: it's a semiprime, i.e. a natural number which is a product of two primes (2x23), it's the designation of Messier object in the Puppis Constellation, it's the number of human chromosomes and finally, it has nothing to do with Douglas Adams.

It looks like the newer owners of Desura haven't been paying developers, uh oh. It's a bit of an odd story, as it seems it has taken months for Desura to even comment on it.

Victor Vran was released recently, and I gave it a small write up, but a major graphic bug stopped me from getting far. This was fixed incredibly quickly, and I've now sunk some time into it.

Gas Guzzlers Extreme was causing major excitement when it was planned for Linux, but sadly things didn't turn out so well.

Endless Legend was originally going to come to Linux, and then the developers decided it wasn't worth it. The Linux client had even been started and was looking good, but was dropped after the Windows and Mac OS clients were deemed too buggy. Now SteamOS has appeared in Amplitude's voting system for what to work on, and it needs votes.

We already knew that the Linux port of Van Helsing was put on hold, but now it seems the developers aren't going to port any of them to Linux.

Looks like Linux may get a newer Star Wars game with Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

Well then, hope none of you were going to get an Oculus Rift, as development for it is currently on hold for Linux, and no timeline for us at all.

The folks at SCS Software released a big patch for Euro Truck Simulator 2, along with a Scandinavia DLC, so I decided it was a good time to revisit the game and give some commentary on it and the expansion.