today's howtos
| Games: FAudio, Wine Staging, Space Haven and More
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Game porter and software developer Ethan Lee announced the 20.08 releases of both of FNA and FAudio, as work continues on the newer FNA3D.
What are they? FNA is an accuracy-focused XNA4 reimplementation for open platforms with it being used by a ton of games including the likes of: Celeste, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Full Metal Furies, Owlboy and a plenty more. While FAudio is accuracy-focused XAudio reimplementation for open platforms, which is used for a number of games and also by the Wine / Proton compatibility layers.
For FNA, it was quite a quiet release as the majority of their work is going into bringing up FNA3D which will soon be merged in with FNA directly. They simply upgraded to the new FAudio, removed some dllmaps for iOS/tvOS due to macOS ARM and removed some dead code elsewhere in 'ModelReader' which 'should mildly improve load performance'.
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Wine Staging, the highly experimental area where all the latest (and often not "greatest") code comes in for Wine testing now has a Patreon so you can support it directly.
It's perhaps not as well known as the normal Wine project or Valve's fork with Proton but it is an important project itself. Containing a set of patches that are applied on top of the main development branch of Wine, the idea is to provide experimental features and fixes faster in a way that users can grab and test that eventually get upstreamed into the main Wine project once they're ready.
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Space Haven is an Early Access game that blends together elements of FTL, RimWorld and other such building and survival sims to create a promising mix of space exploration and people management.
After entering Early Access in May following a successful Alpha period for backers of their Kickstarter campaign, Bugbyte continue to expand the gameplay systems. It wasn't enough to deal with space pirates, ship to ship combat and aliens that pinch your crew members and put them into cocoons—you now have to deal with Space Hazards like: Solar Flares, Micrometeoroids, Siren Worlds (they mess with crew brains) and Nebulae to add a little more variety to your exploration.
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Something of a recent discovery is Aloof, an in-development puzzle-battler somewhat inspired by the likes of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Puyo Puyo Tetris with its own unique take on it.
According to the full description of the game, you summon and defend small islands all the while you build combos against your opponent. What makes it different is that the puzzle pieces don't descend by themselves and you can even move up, you can also flush them all away. They said the game ' isn't about zoning out. It's about responding to your opponent, taking your time to think and move fast when you can'.
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Sounds like it's going to be ridiculously feature-filled too. They're planning a full campaign that can be played solo or in co-op, there's going to be local and online competitive multiplayer, the ability to play it offline while also searching for an online opponent, multiple win conditions and of course full support of Linux.
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Sounds like it's going to be ridiculously feature-filled too. They're planning a full campaign that can be played solo or in co-op, there's going to be local and online competitive multiplayer, the ability to play it offline while also searching for an online opponent, multiple win conditions and of course full support of Linux.
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The original Half-Life turned out to look and feel rather different than what originally shown before release. This fan project seeks to give players a different experience more inline with that original design.
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I've tried the above instructions and can report that things work rather well. I was able to play for a while and progress without any issues. Now, Absolute Zero isn't quite finished yet and the game is still unbeatable as of the time of writing. It's the mod team's hope that things will be done by the end of October. Still, speaking as someone who has played through Half-Life a few times, it's really interesting to see this alternate visiion for the game.
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Coming from the same team as We Need To Go Deeper, Deli Interactive LLC have announced Camp Canyonwood which looks like it puts a quirky spin on building up a summer camp.
What can we expect from it? Well, you're going to be responsible for building the camp and looking after your visitors. Their fun, education and safety lies in your hands and things might go bump in the night. I'm getting a bit of a Don't Starve vibe from this.
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Speaking to the developer on Steam, they confirmed it will be supporting Linux.
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This diary explains more about character portraits and how they change over time. It sounds pretty fun and has more depth to it than the previous game, with each character having a DNA stream that determines their appearance based on their parents. Character features change over time due to age too along with their lifestyle and any diseases. It also goes over changes made to the vassal contract system and how user testing has helped along development.
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At release I'm hoping to take a look at it, from the perspective of someone new to it who struggled a lot with the previous entry. Thanks to the effort Paradox has put into the tutorial and help systems, it sounds like it won't be so overwhelming to get into it.
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Egosoft are continuing to improve and expand their detailed space trading, exploration and combat sim X4: Foundations.
Along with a bunch of gameplay improvements, one of the highlights of this release is the overhaul of the crew transfer feature. Instead of needing to make an order and having the ships meet up, it's been streamlined to be less of an annoyance. Now you can do it anywhere, along with it being possible to move any amount of people as they will use crew capsules to move around independently. Once you start getting far into the game and build up a little empire, this sounds like it will be much nicer.
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Bash Beginner Tutorial: String Operations in Bash
Learn to manipulate strings using a variety of string operations like getting length of a string, joining strings, extracting substrings, and much more.
| Kernel: Unicore32 and IO_uring in Linux
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It's arguably long overdue but with the just-opened Linux 5.9 kernel cycle the Unicore32 CPU architecture is being removed.
Unicore is a 32-bit RISC architecture developed at China's Peking University. Unicore is an ARM-like architecture. But with Unicore not being too popular and this code not seeing any maintenance for the mainline kernel paired with no upstream compiler support, it's time to gut the code out of the kernel.
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Facebook's Jens Axboe who oversees the Linux storage/block code and leads the IO_uring efforts summed up the changes for Linux 5.9 as "hardening the code and/or making it easier to read and fixing [bits]." There is though a big change and that is proper async buffered reads support. That work was previously covered but didn't end up getting pulled into Linux 5.8 due to a branching difference but is now ready to go with Linux 5.9. The async buffered reads support for IO_uring has some nice performance advantages and lower CPU usage while also working its way off KThreads for the fast code path once the async buffered write support is in place.
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