If 2020 couldn't get more peculiar, today the SDL2 project mainlined support for the OS/2 operating system.

Warzone 2100 as the real-time strategy/tactics game that first premiered in 1999 before becoming open-source in 2004 and then fully open-source with game data in 2008 is now evolving in 2020 with Vulkan graphics support.

Not only did Unity Software experience a successful IPO last week but they also rolled out the Unity 2020.2 engine into public beta and with that comes some "major speed-ups" for performance.

Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses.

GameMode 1.6 is out as the Linux daemon developed by game porting firm Feral Interactive for setting the CPU frequency scaling governor and other helpers when launching games in an effort to enhance the Linux gaming performance and then returning the system to its prior state after the game has quit.

For those looking at enjoying some open-source Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.2 is out as the Mario Kart inspired racing game that is cross-platform and features the Linux mascot Tux.

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued.

The popular, cross-platform Unity game engine is planning for a very exciting 2021.

Linux game porter Ethan Lee who also develops FNA-XNA today released FAudio 20.08 as the open-source XAudio re-implementation.

The Unigine Engine appears to be having great success in the engineering and simulation space more so than for the competitive game engine space, but in any case Unigine 2.12 is now out with this visually stunning engine delivering even more life-like visuals while continuing to be Linux-friendly.

Last month on Phoronix were 350+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X vs. Intel Core i3 10100, including a number of Linux gaming performance tests. Following that I also ran some tests with the Core i5 10600K tossed in for those that may be weighing between the Ryzen 3 / Core i3 vs. Core i5 for gaming. Here are those additional data points.

Unity 2020.1 is out today as the latest feature release for this popular, cross-platform game engine.

The Lutris open-source gaming platform manager that also makes it easier installing Windows games via Steam is now employing the Valve-backed VKD3D-Proton fork for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan.

There is finally a new release out of The Dark Mod, the original total conversion mod for Doom 3 that transformed into its own standalone game powered by the open-source id Tech 4 engine. This remains the lone flagship example of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine in action by the community (besides the DHEWM3 / RBDOOM-3-BFG engine work) with ioDoom3 having never taken off like ioquake3.

While we are most excited about Godot 4.0 for its Vulkan renderer for this leading open-source game engine, there continues to be a lot of other improvements building up for this major release.

Following the recent release candidate, the Valve and CodeWeavers developers have officially promoted this latest Wine-based downstream for empowering Steam Play to their latest stable release.

Valve's May 2020 numbers show another uptick for Steam Linux gaming usage, pointing towards the Linux marketshare continuing to increase with the overall Steam user-base in this coronavirus period leading to record usage with the extra time spent by gamers at home.

While we have been eager for Godot 4.0 as the open-source game engine update bringing big renderer improvements and initial Vulkan support, it also turns out there will be a new offering on the editor front...

Adding to the amount of surprising news this week, Electronic Arts just announced they will be open-sourcing portions of Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert in order to help the mod community around this franchise.

Epic Games today offered the first glimpse at Unreal Engine 5, their next-generation game engine they hope to have out in preview form in early 2021 and for its official release before the end of next year.

FlightGear 2020.1 is out as the newest release to this long-running project providing an open-source flight simulator.

Yesterday marked fifteen years since the very first release of the Unigine Engine, the longtime Linux-friendly game engine that over the past decade has seemingly increased focus towards industrial simulations and AR but remaining well known among PC enthusiasts for the company's very demanding tech demos.

The open-source Godot Game Engine lead developer Juan Linietsky has published a new Vulkan progress report, the first in three months, and as such there are a lot of changes.

A number of additional game controllers / gamepads / input devices have been added to the SDL2 code-base in recent days.

For those with more time on their hands due to social distancing, DXVK 1.6.1 is out to kick off a new week of Linux gaming. The DXVK 1.6.1 while a point release does come with a fair number of improvements to this Direct3D-over-Vulkan translation layer.

Lutris 0.5.6 is out today as the popular open-source Linux game manager/launcher.

Unigine Corp has announced a new "Community" edition of their visually stunning, cross-platform game/simulation engine that will be available to non-commercial projects and academic entities.

A number of recent id Tech games (though seemingly not DOOM Eternal) have seen another performance optimization with Mesa 20.1's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver.

One of the most promising open-source game projects of the 2010s when it comes to gameplay and visual quality is the Unvanquished project but sadly in recent years has been fairly quiet although new code continues to be contributed to their repository. It looks like in the weeks ahead could finally be a new release.

Lutris 0.5.5 is out today as the newest version of this Linux game manager to assist in installing both native and emulated games on Linux. Lutris continues to expand the scope of its "runners" for improving the Linux gaming experience.