Games: Godot Engine, Various Games and Google Pursuing Steam Support in Chrome OS

• Godot Engine 3.2 is almost here with a first Release Candidate

  Godot Engine, the quickly improving free and open source game engine is getting real close to a major release with the first Release Candidate now up for Godot 3.2. What was suppose to be a reasonable small release, has grown into something rather large with a lot of new features coming in to help developers make their games. With thousands of code commits by hundreds of different developers to the point that they expect Godot 3.2 to be "much more mature than 3.1 in all aspects".

• RELEASE CANDIDATE: GODOT 3.2 RC 1

• The hero is dead so it's up to you to fix a glitched world - Lenna's Inception is out now

  In Lenna's Inception you will be exploring a little island, filled full of dangerous dungeons as you work to bring order to a kingdom falling apart from glitches. Designed in a way that's much like classic Zelda titles, however it has a clever idea of letting you play through in either 8-bit or 32-bit pixel art styles and they each have a distinct soundtrack.

• Detailed open-world space sandbox game 'Avorion' leaving Early Access soon

  Boxelware have announced that Avorion, their procedural co-op space sandbox where you build your own spaceship will leave Early Access soon. After being in development for years, first appearing on Steam in early 2017 it's been seriously fun to watch it grow into such a massive game. Incredibly fun too.

• Wizard of Legend gets a little electric in a huge content update out now

  Contingent99 just released a massive upgrade to Wizard of Legend, their fast-paced magical action game and it continues to be brilliant. The Thundering Keep update brings in an entirely new stage complete with new enemies and a big boss battle which should make runs through it more interesting. Also added in this update you will find over 20 new Arcana (card spells), over 30 new Relics (items you equip to buff you up), new special moves, new outfits and plenty of balance changes and bug fixes.

• Steam reportedly coming to Chrome OS - Linux gaming across even more devices

  Android Police have an article up mentioning that Google is reportedly working on getting Steam working officially and supported on Chrome OS. While the details of this are a little sketchy, since neither Valve or Google have announced this, Android Police claim they spoke directly to Kan Liu at CES, the Director of Product Management for Google's Chrome OS who told them of their plans to make it happen. Note: You can get Steam working on it in some form with some manual effort now, although it's not great. This seems to be about making it all official. Having it properly integrated, enabling ease of use would be good, part of what Chrome OS is supposed to be about?being simple and easy.

• Exclusive: Google is working to bring official Steam support to Chrome OS

  Last week in Las Vegas while at CES, I spoke with Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Google's Chrome OS. In a wide-ranging discussion about the Chrome platform and ecosystem, Liu dropped something of a bombshell on me: the Chrome team is working—very possibly in cooperation with Valve—to bring Steam to Chromebooks. Liu declined to provide a timeline for the project, but did confirm it would be enabled by Chrome OS's Linux compatibility. The Steam client would, presumably, run inside Linux on Chrome—a platform for which it is already available. Liu implied, though would not directly confirm, that Google was working in direct cooperation with Valve on this project. Valve's motive here is largely in being the first major gaming storefront on a platform that, to date, has had no compatibility with mainstream PC or console releases. Valve also seems like a good fit, as the company has no particular loyalty to any one platform, and is increasingly facing competition from players like Epic and Microsoft on its most popular OS, Windows. Currently, it is possible to install the Steam Linux client on Chrome OS using the Crostini Linux compatibility layer, but there's no official support, and performance has been pretty lamentable even when comparing identical Linux-native systems to Chrome. Even getting games running in a remotely playable way is kind of a nightmare.

Intel graphics patch "wrecks" Gen7 iGPU Linux performance

• Intel graphics patch "wrecks" Gen7 iGPU Linux performance

  Earlier this week Intel released details about a vulnerability in its integrated graphics hardware. Its advisory ID was INTEL-SA-00314 and it talked about the CVE-2019-14615 vulnerability. Products from 3rd Gen Core up to 10th Gen are affected including the contemporaneous Xeon, Pentium, Celeron and Atom products. Intel was made aware of this vulnerability as far back as August so already has patches available and links to recommended new drivers for both Windows and Linux users (scroll down this page about half way). All so regular and nothing surprising so far… However, since the updated drivers have been released, Linux-centric tech site Phoronix has been busy checking and testing the new drivers (on Linux of course) to see if there are any performance penalties, or other aberrations, delivered with the vulnerability patches. Intel describes the CVE-2019-14615 vulnerability as follows: "Insufficient control flow in certain data structures for some Intel Processors with Intel Processor Graphics may allow an unauthenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access." Please note the key phrase - local access - but Phoronix thinks that WebGL within web browsers is another possible attack vector. In its Linux testing, Phoronix was initially unperturbed by results on processors sportin

• Intel's Mitigation For CVE-2019-14615 Graphics Vulnerability Obliterates Gen7 iGPU Performance

  Yesterday we noted that the Linux kernel picked up a patch mitigating an Intel Gen9 graphics vulnerability. It didn't sound too bad at first but then seeing Ivy Bridge Gen7 and Haswell Gen7.5 graphics are also affected raised eyebrows especially with that requiring a much larger mitigation. Now in testing the performance impact, the current mitigation patches completely wreck the performance of Ivybridge/Haswell graphics performance. The vulnerability being discussed and analyzed this week is CVE-2019-14615. This CVE still hasn't been made public over 24 hours later (though there are the Intel SA-00314 details for this disclosure), but from going through kernel patches and other resources, it certainly caught our interest right away and have been benchmarking it since yesterday evening. The CVE-2019-14615 vulnerability amounts to a new information disclosure issue due to insufficient control flow in certain data structures. Local access is required for exploiting this control flow issue in the hardware, but it's not yet known/published if say WebGL within web browsers could exploit this issue. This is a hardware issue with all operating systems being affected. Our testing today, of course, is under Linux.

How to Upgrade From Windows 7 to Linux

If you’re still using Windows 7 because you just don’t like Windows 10, that’s understandable. But there’s an alternative upgrade path: You can install Linux on your PC for free, and you’ll have a supported operating system that’s still getting updates. This is easier than you might think. You can try Linux on your PC before installing it, and you can even install it alongside Windows 7 when you make the leap. Here’s what you need to know.