Games: Interrogation, Ravenfield, Abstractanks

• Uncover the truth in Interrogation: You will be deceived, out now

  With a seriously cool Noir style, the detective conversational puzzle-sim Interrogation: You will be deceived is out now.

• Indie FPS Ravenfield's work in progress Conquest Mode gets a tech tree

  Ravenfield, the highly amusing and incredibly moddable indie FPS that's in Early Access continues expanding the new Conquest Mode. While Ravenfield has been fun for a while, only recently has it gained a game mode that has you do more than just run around, shoot and laugh at the ragdolls. The new (and heavily work-in-progress) Conquest Mode has you fight against the AI across map-nodes, acting as a sort-of lengthier campaign option. While it's early, it's very promising and certainly quite different for an FPS to have a game mode like this.

• Abstractanks, the indie fast-paced RTS continues evolving into a fun niche strategy game

  Ever tried Abstractanks? It's an indie real-time strategy game we took a look at a long time ago and it's gained some huge features. The core idea of the game is that it's simple and streamlined, fast and easy to get into while also giving you a healthy challenge that will keep you wanting to come back for more. Battles can end up huge too, with each side controlling swarms of units.

Akademy 2019

At this year's Akademy I had great moments with new and already known people. Akedemy gives me much power for hopefully the rest of the year. I really enjoyed the daytrip to the lake. It was calm and beautiful environment. The daytrip helped me to calm down again. Together with Leiner, Florian and Valorie we sat down to discuss issues for newcomers attending Akademy the first time while having an amazing lunch. Is it often hard to remember how hard it can be to attend the Akademy the first time without knowing lots of people. The outcome of this discussion will feed back to community after some more cleanup of our notes. Hopefully we can make the next Akademy even better for newcomers next year! My highlights from the first two days of great talks are Kirogi and "Developers Italia". I really enjoyed seeing that Open Source reaches more and more domains and now you can even control your drone with Open Source named Kirogi. The software itself looks already quite usable and I'm looking forward what features we will see there in future... "Developers Italia" was an eye opener, in how governments can change the laws so administrations must invest in Open Source. In Italy, administrations are forced to search for an existing solution in Open Source and then use this solution. If the software does not work for them they can pay developers to implement their needed features, but still the code will be owned by the administration and they need to publish the code afterwards under an Open Source license. I'm very interested to see how this will develop in future, because at the moment I still have the bad feeling that some big companies may have the ability and also the desire to destroy this revolutionary idea, with the result that only some big companies will get all the big grants, and the result will be bloated unusable Open Source software. But none the less, let's give the Italy administrations a warm welcome and give them a hand to become good Open Source citizens. I also enjoyed the talk by Albert about the status of fuzzing KDE software. Albert explained, that the first Frameworks are covered by fuzzing, and the results that were found by the fuzzer. The first days and weeks spit out a lot of interesting issues, but nowadays, the fuzzer takes a lot of time to find new issues. So it is time now to add the next set ready to be fuzzed. I talked with Albert about what would be the most valuable parts of KDEPIM that should be covered by fuzzing. The first set is KMime, KContacts and KCalenderCore as they handle input without any user interaction.

Games: Plague Inc: Evolved, Dungeon 2 and OBS Studio

• Trick the world in the Fake News update to Plague Inc: Evolved

  Plague Inc: Evolved just got another big free update with a fun new Fake News scenario giving you a chance to deceive the whole world. A great game you could already have a lot of fun with, as I did before naming a Bacteria after someone close. Now though, you're not dealing with coughs and colds but the spread of misinformation. Starting off with only one person being Deceived, you begin writing your Fake News Manifesto to evolve the information and it shall begin to spread. I decided to spread some fake news in the USA, that was started by Aliens because they just wanted to watch the world burn. You certainly can make some amusing things with it.

• In AI Dungeon 2 the game is created as you play and it can be both impressive and ridiculous

  I can't even begin to understand the fancy AI learning stuff behind the scenes, but AI Dungeon 2 is certainly a very fun idea and a possible look into the future of games. AI Dungeon 2 is a text adventure, like the classics but with a huge twist as it's built with OpenAI opening up a huge amount of ever-expanding actions that are possible. It can be impressive, there's some really surprising and amusing interactions you can have with it.

• OBS Studio 24.0.4 is out with numerous bug fixes, better Linux Window Capture

  A few days ago, a "Hotfix" update was released for the video capture and livestreaming FOSS application OBS Studio. OBS Studio 24.0.4 is quite a small release, but for those of you creating video content on Linux you might find this version working a lot better. For Linux especially, the Window Capture function got multiple fixes like certain windows just not appearing and sometimes multiple 0x0 windows would appear. Display Capture on Linux was also fixed up where the crop value would shift the cursor's captured position incorrectly.