Games: Valve, Hot Lava, Drawn Down Abyss and More

• A French court has ruled that Valve should allow people to re-sell their digital games

  Valve and game developers have a bit of a fight on their hands here, with a French court ruling that Valve should allow users to re-sell their digital games. Reported by the French website Next Inpact, the French consumers group UFC Que Choisir had a victory against Valve as French courts have ruled against them on the topic of reselling digital content. From what I've read and tried to understand, the courts have basically said that when you buy something on Steam it is indeed a proper purchase and not a subscription. Valve has been ordered to pay damages at €20K plus €10K to cover some costs. On top of that, they will also have to publish the judgement on Steam's home page (presumably only for users in France) and for it to remain visible for three months. If they don't, they will get a fine for each day of €3K. To Valve though, that's likely pocket change. The bigger issue though, is how other countries inside and outside the EU could follow it.

• Hot Lava from Klei Entertainment is in the works for Linux

  Just recently Klei Entertainment (Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included) released their amusing parkour game Hot Lava and it's not only planned for Linux they're actually working on it. It looks and sounds like a ridiculous amount of fun too, a 3D platformer inspired by the classic kids game. I'm sure everyone has played it at some point in their lives. Get a bunch of pillows and cushions, throw them around and don't touch the floor! Klei managed to turn that into a pretty good looking game PC game.

• Post-apocalyptic road-trip strategy game Overland has officially released, some thoughts

  After a few years in Early Access on itch.io, Finji have officially released their post-apocalyptic road-trip strategy game Overland.

• Dota 2 is going through multiple big ban waves and some matchmaking changes

  Valve are trying to clean up the Dota 2 community and make matchmaking better, with some big changes being done. First up, let's talk a little about the recent major ban waves. Valve said they have removed players from Dota 2 with "exceptionally low behavior scores" and they will continue to do so regularly, which is good and very much needed to keep the online community healthy. They have also done a second ban wave for anyone who has been "detected of violating the Steam Service Agreement that prevents the purchase or sale of Steam accounts"—ouch. A third wave happened, to remove players who've been using "exploits to gain an advantage over other players" and they will be adjusting how they detect such things over the coming weeks. Not only that, bans will also now block the phone number associated with the account permanently, so people will have to setup a new phone making it more difficult for nuisance players to come right back. Linking directly with that, Valve said they closed a hole that allowed "a large number of users to play ranked without a unique phone number attached" to help against smurf accounts. On top of all that again, to gain access to Ranked play you need to have 100 hours logged in the game.

• Drawn Down Abyss takes an action platformer and adds in card deck-building for abilities

  Platformers are probably the most common type of game available on any platform and yet, some developers are still able to make them seem a little unique. Drawn Down Abyss is one such game, a pixel art action-focused platformer. The difference here, is they're pulling in the card-based deck-building for your abilities. Deck-building is massively popular right now, it's one of those things that one or two games did really well and now more want to try it. I'm happy about this, I'm a fan of collecting cards and using them to battle with so trying it out with an action platformer has piqued my interest.

• Top-down racer Bloody Rally Show looks great in the new trailer

  One racing game I am genuinely excited about is Bloody Rally Show, a top-down racer that looks genuinely good and it has a fresh trailer up to show off recent development progress. It will fully supported Linux too, as I tested out previously. One of the reasons I'm excited about this, is that it firmly reminds me of some classic early racers from the Amiga only with everything turned up a notch or two. Not only that, something of a rarity in racing games is that it will have a fully featured campaign story mode with cut-scenes and all. This campaign mode can even be played in local co-op.

OpenZFS Could Soon See Much Better Deduplication Support

This is good news for OpenZFS performance assuming the dedup support is punctually opened up and is an acceptable state for quickly landing in this ZFS file-system code used by Linux with "ZFS On Linux" and in the process of by the likes of FreeBSD. The ZFS file-system has supported data deduplication for the past decade. However, it's not widely recommended due to being very heavy on RAM usage as well as relatively taxing on the CPU, so it will be interesting to see just how effective is the Panzura implementation.

today's howtos and programming leftovers

• How to hide and unhide files or folder on a Linux computer

• How to Install Opera Browser on Debian 10

• How To Change The Timezone on Debian 10 Buster

• Running a non-root container on Fedora with podman and systemd (Home Assistant example)

• Bash bang commands: A must-know trick for the Linux command line

• Create a simple image search engine in OpenCV and Flask

  I recently started playing with OpenCV, an open-source Computer Vision library for image processing. Luckily there are Python bindings available. More luck that the guys like Adrian has done a great service by releasing both book and blog on a similar topic. So what is it all about? Well, it is simple, or I say, the simplest demonstration of using OpenCV to load an image and finding color-related to that image and show insights in a Flask based web application. This is not a state of art application neither it is currently serving the way I intend to do but hey, it is just a start, not the end. I could not find a better excuse other than converting my basic learning of pixels into a product (Google! Beware!!) I am not going int nitty-gritty details of both OpenCV and Flask and I will be covering what the application is actually doing.