The Unvanquished 0.55 open-source game that was recently teased for its OpenGL 4.6 renderer work is out today with its shiny new release. As it's been more than one and a half years since Unvanquished 0.54, this new beta comes with a load of improvements especially around optimizing its Daemon open-source engine that is long derived from id Tech 3.
Linux Gaming News Archives
2,003 Linux Gaming open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
OGRE-Next 3.0 has debuted this week as the newest version of the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine Next Generation for serving as an open-source 3D graphics rendering engine.
It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.
The Open 3D Engine as the open-source game engine developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella and began as an advanced version of the Amazon Lumberyard engine is out with a new feature release. Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 24.09 is out today with a variety of enhancements for this cross-platform game engine.
FEX 2410 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on Linux AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) systems, including for games and software like Steam. With FEX 2410 there are yet more fixes as well as some new JIT optimizations.
Sam Lantinga released SDL 3.1.3 on Friday as their "stable ABI preview" version ahead of the SDL 3.2.0 stable release. The developer at Valve notes that SDL3 has already been "battle tested by millions of people in DOTA, CS2 and Steam" and they are now gearing up for the SDL 3.2 stable release to get SDL3 out to the masses.
It's been nearly three months since the last DXVK release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop Vulkan for Steam Play (Proton) / Wine. That changed today with Philip Rebohle having just released DXVK 2.4.1.
The SDL abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API. Direct3D 12 has been demoted lower in priority compared to Vulkan for this Simple DirectMedia Layer.
The Godot open-source, cross-platform game engine continues advancing wonderfully as an alternative to the more well established but proprietary and commercial-focused game engines. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 released today as the first tagged development snapshot toward the next version of this great game engine.
Cemu is the Wii U emulator that went open-source and began building on Linux two years ago. Since then they've continued building up their Linux support and out today is the Cemu 2.1 emulator release with even better Linux support.
While the Unigine SDK these days is more known for its simulation and engineering offerings rather than as a game engine, this engine remains visually impressive and continues advancing. Unigine 2.19 has been released that brings a number of improvements to the engine and leaves us clamoring to see a new/updated benchmark.
GameMode as the open-source daemon from Feral Interactive to optimize Linux system performance on-demand when running games is out with its first release of 2024.
For those enjoying the classic game Snake (Blockade) or rather wanting to learn about the SDL3 API to develop your own software using this cross-platform software/hardware abstraction library, a game of Snake has been added to the SDL3 repository to serve as a more full-featured example.
Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux.
This month's FEX 2407 release as the open-source emulator for running x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) is a big one with now handling AVX/AVX2.
When Steam on Linux debuted a decade ago it maintained around a 2% marketshare before receding and then beginning its long climb back up following the debut of Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux and then with the much anticipated Steam Deck handheld game console and the modern Arch-based SteamOS. Valve just published their May 2024 numbers for the Steam Survey and they indicate the Linux marketshare is finally back above 2%.
The open-source Godot game engine has worked its way up to the Godot 4.3 Beta 1 milestone with some exciting achievements.
Box64 is out as the newest version of this Linux user-space x86_64 emulator for running on ARM64 Linux devices. There is also an updated version of Box86 too for that x86 32-bit version on ARM.
While Linux 6.10 is poised to merge the initial NTSYNC driver for a Windows NT Synchronization Primitive driver that can help with faster Windows gaming performance under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), the driver isn't complete. The initial patches have been in Greg Kroah-Hartman's char-misc-next branch for several weeks to expose the NTSYNC character device, it isn't the entire patch series. Greg has now marked the driver as "broken" for Linux 6.10.
The Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly-opened Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Among the HID driver updates coming with Linux 6.10 are supporting the Steam Deck IMU motion sensors as well as HID coverage for the ASUS ROG Ally and ASUS ROG Z13 devices.
Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support.
FEX as the open-source project to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems is out with its newest monthly release. With FEX 2405, they are close to having the game Far Cry (2004) running on ARM Linux devices.
Valve and CodeWeavers have announced the availability of Proton 9.0-1 as their Wine downstream that pulls in DXVK and VKD3D-Proton along with other changes and powers Steam Play for Linux desktop gaming and on the Steam Deck.
The newest SDL3 development release is out today with PipeWire preferred over PulseAudio and other changes.
The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users.
Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.
FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines.
Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux.
Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce "LibGodot" to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps.
OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux.
For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire.
A new release of Lutris is now available, the open-source game manager that's popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for managing games from Steam, GOG, a number of retro game consoles and emulators, and other sources from one convenient UI.
The Simple DirectMedia Layer software/hardware abstraction layer commonly used by games and other cross-platform software is out with a new SDL 2.30.2 stable release as well as a new SDL3 preview release.
No, nothing to do with April Fools' Day, but the Steam Survey results are out for March 2024 and they put the Steam on Linux use inching up -- back closer to the Linux gaming highs of around 2%.
A new version of Flax Engine 1.8 has been released, the open-source game engine that's available for free for non-commercial and education use but with a 4% royalty for commercial games.
CodeWeavers' Elizabeth Figura has been working on the NTSYNC driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel in order to help the performance of various Windows games running on Linux by the likes of Wine / Valve's Proton (Steam Play). The third iteration of that driver was posted overnight as it seeks to go into the mainline Linux kernel.
Following several days of discussions from both sides of the table over whether SDL 3.0 should revert its Wayland over X11 preference in light of some aspects of the Wayland ecosystem support not being in good shape, for now at least SDL 3.0 is sticking to the Wayland support by default. It may be revisited though closer to release to see how the upstream support is for users of this hardware/software abstraction library widely used by cross-platform games.
With the SDL library that's widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par.
Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API.
Announced back in 2021 by the Linux Foundation was Amazon Lumberyard becoming the Open 3D Engine and the Linux Foundation fostering the Open 3D Foundation for evolving this new open-source game engine. Three years later there is now a commercial game announced for the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).
DXVK 2.3.1 has been released for this Steam Play component that implements the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan. Notable with DXVK 2.3.1 is VK_NV_raw_access_chains support for more efficient shader code generation on NVIDIA GPUs.
Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0.
FEX as the open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems continues making good progress not for only enjoying Linux x86 binaries on ARM but also Windows games by way of Steam Play / Wine.
In time for weekend Linux gamers, Valve and their CodeWeavers partners today rolled out their first public beta of Proton 9.0 as their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with ease under the Steam client.
The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software.
When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console.
While all major feature development for the Simple DirectMedia Layer "SDL" is currently focused on SDL 3.0 for this library commonly used by cross-platform games for various hardware/software abstractions, SDL 2.30 released on Thursday as a new point release in the SDL2 series.
Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software.
While SDL 3.0 remains under development as the next major release for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by games and other software for cross-platform handling, SDL 2.30 RC1 was released today as the newest of the SDL2 series.
Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game.
2003 Linux Gaming news articles published on Phoronix.