Mesa Graphics Development

• RADV's Iffy 16-bit Integer Support Merged Into Mesa

  Just days after the patches were published for enabling 16-bit integers within shaders for the RADV driver, this Radeon Vulkan driver code has been merged. The code came out last week by Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset for enabling shaderInt16, the capability allowing 16-bit signed/unsigned integers within the shader code.

• Mesa Eyeing The Removal Of Autotools Build Support In Favor Of Meson

  For those currently relying upon Autotools for building Mesa3D, the days are numbered and soon will likely need to shift over to their modern Meson build system support. For the past year now, Mesa developers have been working on bringing up their Meson build system support for its faster build speeds with Ninja, better cross-platform compatibility, and other benefits. Meson has co-existed with the Autotools (and SCons and Android build systems) support over the past year of Mesa releases, but moving forward they are likely very soon to drop the Autotools support.

BSD: OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD and Upcoming OpenZFS Developer Summit 2018

• OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve

  When I was writing a blog post about the process title, I needed a couple of virtual machines with OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu. Before that day I mainly used FreeBSD and Windows with bhyve. I spent some time trying to set up an OpenBSD using bhyve and UEFI as described here. I had numerous problems trying to use it, and this was the day I discovered the grub2-bhyve tool, and I love it! The grub2-bhyve allows you to load a kernel using GRUB bootloader. GRUB supports most of the operating systems with a standard configuration, so exactly the same method can be used to install NetBSD or Ubuntu. [...]

• OpenZFS Developer Summit 2018

  The sixth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place September 10th and 11th in San Francisco, California with an expanded focus on non-technical topics like community development and cross-project coordination. It also marked the “light at the end of the tunnel” status of several long-term OpenZFS features, notably dRAID, the distributed spare technology originally developed by Intel. [...]

Games: Siralim 3, Humble, and Victory At Sea Pacific

• Monster taming RPG 'Siralim 3' now has a Linux version on Steam

  Siralim 3, the deep monster taming RPG from Thylacine Studios now has a Linux version available for those who gotta catch 'em all. While it's not exactly graphically impressive, the Siralim titles usually make it for it and then some with the amount of features they have. Seems to be a hit with users too, with a nice positive rating.

• Humble has a pretty good Game Development book bundle

  For those thinking about or already creating games, you might want to take a look over at Humble with their game development book bundle.

• Naval strategy game Victory At Sea Pacific is now available with Linux support

  Set during World War II, Victory At Sea Pacific from Evil Twin Artworks is an interesting naval strategy game that released recently with Linux support.

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