Games: Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift, Godot, and Sky Fleet

• Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift offers up top-down combat tactics out now | GamingOnLinux

  QED Games just released their first full title with Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift, a top-down turn-based tactical combat game with "the feeling of 80's sci-fi movies". Across a 20 hour single-player campaign you command a troop of elite soldiers across a grid-less map, while you also explore the dangerous planet Anthracite. With no grid the movement system really does look good, and if you're a fan of turn-based tactics this looks like a really good choice to pick up. Across the campaign you fight through 41 missions against local fauna, bandits, robots and other well equipped soldiers.

• Godot Engine - Godot Web progress report #7: Virtual keyboard on the Web, better HTTPClient

  Howdy Godotters! It's time for another brief update on the status of Godot on the Web. If you read through the last post, you already got the spoiler that Godot 3.3 is getting experimental virtual keyboard support on the Web. This has been a highly requested feature, but also a hard one to implement (as you might also guess by the fact that most engines, even famous ones, do not support that). It is still in experimental state, and comes with limitations, but should be enough to allow your users to insert their high-score name, or simple chat messages.

• Sky Fleet will bring together base-building, tower defense and a shooter in the skies

  Building a city in the skies and defending it with towers, while you also ride an airship - Sky Fleet definitely blends a number of things together and it sounds great.

Graphics: Intel and NVIDIA

• Intel Compute Runtime 21.15.19533 Released With Initial Level Zero 1.1 Support - Phoronix

  Intel's engineers working on their open-source Linux-based Compute Runtime stack just released their latest version. Intel Compute Runtime 21.15.19533 is the new release for this open-source compute stack for their graphics hardware to expose OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero functionality. The main change with v21.15.19533 is exposing Level Zero 1.1 support. Last month was the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.2.3 with Level Zero 1.1 specification support as an incremental step forward for this low-level Intel interface for interacting with the bare metal hardware. The initial Level Zero 1.1 headers and loader came back in January.

• Mesa 21.2 Begins Seeing Intel Xe-HP Graphics Driver Changes - Phoronix

  With Mesa 21.1 now branched for this collection of primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers for Linux, feature development is on for Mesa 21.2 that will debut in Q3. One of the first major changes to land for Mesa 21.2 is the beginning of the graphics compiler support for Intel's forthcoming Xe-HP high performance graphics processor.

• NVIDIA CUDA 11.3 Released - Previews Better Python Support - Phoronix

  For GTC21 week NVIDIA has released version 11.3 of their CUDA toolkit. CUDA 11.3 is bringing CUDA Graph enhancements, new stream priorities, Steam-ordered memory allocator enhancements, new APIs, support for virtual aliasing across kernel boundaries, and also support now for the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS point release. CUDA 11.3 also ships improvements to the NVIDIA C++ Standard Library (libcu++), various compiler improvements, and more.

Annual Report 2020: TDF and the Pandemic

2020 was a year to remember, because of LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary and the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted our lives, hindered travel and canceled community meetings [...] We were planning LibreOffice events in Asia and Latin America, as in 2019, and a LibreOffice Conference in Germany, in the lovely medieval city of Nuremberg. We were also planning to attend conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, to celebrate LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary. We were planning local meetings of native language communities, to engage new volunteers, and talks at local events, to advocate the use of LibreOffice and the Open Document Format. We were planning meetups with other community members, for a chat over food and drinks, as we have been used to doing on a regular basis over the last 10 – or even 20 – years (in the OpenOffice.org project). Unfortunately, since March 2020 we have been forced to spend most of our time at home, to protect each other from COVID-19. Although our community has not been hit severely, we have suffered from the pandemic like anyone else, to the point that we will not remember 2020 as the year of the 10th LibreOffice anniversary, but as the year of the big lockdown.