Bit - Animation Editor is now supported on Linux and it looks seriously slick | GamingOnLinux

Bit - Animation Editor is a very interesting tool to help people compose and design animated pixel art. Created by the two-person Swedish indie game studio Morgondag, the team behind the 2015 chilled-out space odyssey RymdResa and the 2017 clicking-puzzler imprint-X.

Morgondag try to set it apart from other tools, mentioning clearly it's "not a drawing tool". You're not drawing pixel-by-pixel or anything like that. Instead, you bundle together all sorts of included assets to create something new and then export it ready for game engines for games, gifs and more.

The example they gave when announcing Linux support to us on Twitter was somewhat amusing too...

Chaotic track-building co-op game Unrailed! gets PC cross-play with the Switch | GamingOnLinux

Have a friend or two that mainly play on the Nintendo Switch? Here's a good choice that you can now play with them with cross-play supported across Linux, macOS, Windows and now the Switch too.

In a short and sweet announcement, Indoor Astronaut and Daedalic Entertainment mentioned that as of the small update released on November 23 it's now all hooked up. So you can get building a train-track, chop down trees, do a little mining and have plenty of laughs with friends in Unrailed!

For those who haven't played it the idea is simple: build the track as far as you can, without letting your train fall of a get destroyed. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds, as you're against an ever-changing map along with various obstacles. As you progress you get to upgrade your train with better and more interesting parts like auto-mining, lights, faster building or more storage and lots more. The train gets gradually faster too, so the further you go the more challenging it is.

Kerbal Space Program 1.11 will let you fix up your craft during a spacewalk | GamingOnLinux

Kerbal Space Program 1.11: Some Reassembly Required will be arriving later this Winter, with it some major new features and it sounds super exciting.

With it comes a new EVA Construction Mode, allowing your Kerbals to repair and reassemble your craft while outside. Just like a real spaceperson, you will do spacewalks and get to work. You will have similar tools as in the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Spaceplane Hangar with place, rotate, and move and you can visualize the center of mass, center of thrust, and the center of lift for a vessel. There's some obvious limitations like your range to parts, weight and more. The game is also not paused, so you have to try and not crash while doing so if your craft is moving.

The fab strategy sim Mini Metro now has full Steam Workshop support | GamingOnLinux

After recently expanding the game with a free update with Nigeria and Chile, Dinosaur Polo Club have given users another reason to come back to their excellent strategy sim.

This update comes six years after the original release, so it seems good things come to those who wait. Adding in Steam Workshop support, you can now make your own maps and share them with everyone. They also crafted detailed instructions on how to actually get map-making, which doesn't seem to be too complicated. Everything is done through plain JSON files with no special tools needed.

Valve updates the Steam Linux Container Runtime for Proton 5.13, helps tools like MangoHud | GamingOnLinux

With the Steam Play Proton 5.13 compatibility tool being a major upgrade, along with it now using the Steam Linux Container Runtime, it did come with some annoying issues that they're now trying to solve.

One of the problems was that since the Windows games are contained and isolated from your system, you couldn't then run tools like MangoHud or the post-processing layer vkBasalt. Valve have now updated the container systems, to allow them to import Vulkan layers from the host system.

Unigine 2.13 Continues Enhancing Their OpenGL Engine While Still Porting To Vulkan - Phoronix

Unigine 2 remains one of the most visually stunning game and simulation engines out there. That's even with still using OpenGL (or Direct3D 11 also on Windows) while their Vulkan renderer remains in the works. Unigine 2.13 is out this week as their latest iteration of this visually incredible engine with first-rate Linux support.

Unigine 2.13 adds a GPU lightmapper tool, adds subpixel reconstruction anti-aliasing, even better looking 3D volumetric clouds, performance optimizations, tessellation improvements, new samples, and a variety of other engine improvements.

UNIGINE 2.13: GPU Lightmapper, Volumetric Clouds Upgrade, Better Anti-Aliasing, New Terrain Tools Preview - Unigine Developer

A pirate quartermaster is a very quirky game about pirate life - Linux version now up | GamingOnLinux

A pirate quartermaster from developer Ivan Armandy released back in October, and now it's available and supported directly on Linux too.

You're not the captain here, instead your job is to put yourself in the shoes of a quartermaster, the first mate of a pirate ship. Really though, you're responsible for everything and you will need to deal with the wishes of the captain and often contradicting their orders to appease the crew. The game has a surprising amount of everything, it's quite a detailed pirating adventure that needs you to learn and fast too. It even teaches you a little about sailing, in its own quirky fantasy sort of way. From setting up gun positions, to organising your crew, there's plenty of dialogue to read through and when it comes to ship to ship combat - it turns into a weird real-time typing game as you rush out orders to the crew.

Best Command Line Games for Linux – Linux Hint

This article will list various command line games available for Linux. These games do not require you to commit a lot of time and can be played in short bursts. If you are using a lightweight Linux distribution with minimal UI elements or using a headless OS based on Linux, this list should be useful for you.

Tristam Island is a Infocom-inspired text adventure available on over 30 platforms | GamingOnLinux

Okay, now this is quite impressive. Tristam Island is a text adventure designed like old Infocom works and it's playable across more platforms than you might expect.

Developed by Hugo Labrande using modern, open source tools on Linux naturally it has first-class Linux support. However, it's also available on over 30 other platforms too. From Linux to Windows, Amiga to Spectrum and even some calculators can run it. The technical details of it are just as impressive as the adventure you go on. The developer also supplies the plain ".z3" file to run in your favourite interactive fiction interpreter. It could run pretty much anywhere.

"After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and find out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave? And why is there a fence around the white house at the top of the hill?"

SteamOS-like couch gaming Linux distribution GamerOS expands with a new release | GamingOnLinux

Need an up to date Linux distribution for your living room big screen experience? GamerOS can fill that gap for you while Valve sit on SteamOS.

GamerOS is one of the easiest ways to get a full-screen Steam experience on a big screen, with no-fuss updates and a whole bunch of special tweaks to make it run as nicely as possible. Not only that, it has a bunch of extras to support other stores and platforms too.

With the release of GamerOS 21 the standard components included have been upgraded like the Linux Kernel 5.9.9, Mesa 20.2.2, NVIDIA 455.38, RetroArch 1.9 and updates to their Steam Tweaks and Steam Buddy apps too. Their Steam Buddy is web-based tool you use to manage non-Steam stuff, with these release it expanded to support the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation Portable through emulators. It also now has audio controls, it will generate banner images based on game titles when one isn't available, fixes gamepads not working with the Epic Games Store and more fixes.

Cloud Gaming Services: Explained and Tested on Linux - Boiling Steam

Here’s a quick test run of some of these game streaming services, and I’ll explain what they do. In particular, we’ll see how well each service fares on the desktop Linux side.

340 or so days later and I am still lost in The Longing | GamingOnLinux

Remember the unique mix of point and click adventuring with an idle game in The Longing? It's supposed to have taken people 400 days to finish and it released back in March 2020 - to which I was impressed with it.

This is because when you start, a big timer at the top of your screen will count down from 400 real-time days. It's a painfully slow game, and one that's very much the anti-AAA shot some readers might be needing. It's all about loneliness, and the longing to know more and have more. It's such a thoroughly strange experience.

The Longing sits between a point and click adventure with an idle game. You can walk around, interact with things and explore for a while. However, certain parts of it force you to wait. You might need something to grow or get broken before you can pass, or even just opening a big door might take an hour or two. You can just quit and come back, and time will continue on so you don't need to have it open.

Jedi: Fallen Order arrives on Stadia, six new free games for Stadia Pro for December | GamingOnLinux

Google continues to boost their game selection with many fan favourites continuing to arrive on their Stadia game streaming service. They also have big plans.

As of right now, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is available to buy on Stadia and it's 60% off at $23.99 / €27.99 / £23.99. The sale on that will end on December 3. They're also offering a free Stadia Premiere Edition (Controller + Chromecast Ultra) with pre-orders of Cyberpunk 2077 and I do have to admit I love the feel of my own Stadia Controller.

Re-live the experience of Half-Life with Black Mesa: Definitive Edition out now | GamingOnLinux

Black Mesa: Definitive Edition is the final big update to the re-imagined fan-made Half-Life game, and it's looking pretty awesome. Easily the best way to experience the first part of Half-Life.

Don't get me wrong, the original from Valve still has plenty of true charm but for modern audiences it's not the ideal way to try and get into it. Black Mesa (especially now with the Definitive Edition) makes it easier for a new generation to get invested into the crazy world that is Half-Life and experience the adventure of Dr. Gordon Freeman.

NVIDIA plan to support Linux with GeForce NOW using Chrome | GamingOnLinux

For a while now you've been able to stream games using NVIDIA GeForce NOW in your browser, however it looks like NVIDIA will be making that a bit more official for Linux.

Currently on certain platforms like Windows and macOS, NVIDIA have a dedicated downloadable application for their GeForce NOW streaming service. They expanded support into the browser for ChromeOS / Chromebooks in the Summer, which initially needed other platforms to spoof their browser string to ChromeOS but that hasn't been needed for a while.

Radeon RX 6800 Series 1440p Linux Gaming Benchmarks With 15 GPUs - Phoronix

While the new Radeon RX 6800 series is suited for 4K gaming, a number of premium readers inquired about seeing 1440p gaming benchmarks for the cards. Now that all the initial launch coverage is out of the way, here is a look at the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT with 15 graphics cards in total for this round of Linux gaming benchmarks focused at 1440p.

Up for this comparison based on the cards I had available were the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070 , RTX 2070 SUPER, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER, TITAN RTX, RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 3080 (unfortunately, the RTX 3080 remains my lone Ampere card at the moment with NVIDIA not yet sending out the RTX 3090/3070 for Linux testing). On the Radeon side is the RX 5600 XT, RX 5700, RX 5700 XT, Radeon VII, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT.

The very latest open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers were used for this testing, which does incorporate the recent driver optimizations. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan test cases were conducted. The GPU power consumption and GPU core temperatures were also monitored on a per-test basis.

You can now try the RetroArch Playtest on Steam for Linux | GamingOnLinux

With the awesome RetroArch application for running emulators and all sorts coming to Steam, they now have a Playtest available you can opt into to try it out.

Using the new dedicated Steam Playtest feature announced by Valve in early November, developers can have a banner on their Steam store page letting users request access. So the Libretro team have put this up, and as of today it also has Linux builds available for testing.

PulseAudio 14.0 Released With Better USB Gaming Headset Support - Phoronix

While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0.

PulseAudio 14.0 comes with many changes compared to PulseAudio 13.0 that shipped all the way back in September of 2019.

"Anarch", a new, public-domain Doom-like game coded from scratch in <256K

I've argued that the video-game "Doom" is a sort of cultural version of Turing Completeness. Given that we're jamming computers and screens into just about any device these days, inevitably (and delightfully) someone gets it to run Doom: Watches, digital cameras, ATMs, pregnancy sticks.

But you know what's even cooler? Creating your own new, original game in the exactly style of Doom, and making it so wildly resource-efficient that it fits in under 256K and will run on just about any computational device around.

That's what the programmer Miloslav Číž has done, with his new game "Anarch". You can play it in your browser here or download it here; I just blasted away in it for a while, and it's a hoot — he neatly channels the mechanics and twitchy low-rez aesthetics of the original. Gameplay trailer is here; he put it in the public domain, and the code is all here on Gitlab.

A Monster's Expedition, one of 2020's best puzzle games is now on Linux | GamingOnLinux

After an initial release in early September, Draknek & Friends have now put up a Linux build of their absolutely gorgeous puzzle game A Monster's Expedition. Created by some of the same talent behind other great games like A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, which our contributor flesk called a "must-have" in a previous review.

It's an open-world styled puzzle game where you walk around little islands, pushing around trees to create paths between them and learn about the history of "humanity". Seems this is set in the far future, as the idea is you're learning about "the mythical humans from the perspective of curious monsters".

Want a great virtual tabletop for RPGs? Check out Foundry VTT | GamingOnLinux

After we pointed out Fantasy Grounds Unity adding Linux support a while ago, some readers pointed out another virtual tabletop experience for fans of making and playing tabletop RPGs with Foundry VTT.

Foundry VTT (Foundry Virtual Tabletop), is a self-hosted solution making it quite brilliant actually. Only the "game master" needs to buy it, and they then host it for players to be able to join. There's no special tiers or editions, just one single purchase to gain access to the entire setup. Buy it, set it up and get users to join in the browser - it couldn't get easier. It has wide support for various features like character sheets, rolling dice, exploring battlemaps, moving heroic tokens and the list just goes on to include rich dynamic lighting, fog of war, audio playlists, video chat using webcams and so on. It really is huge.

Valve expand Steam Input to support more of the PS5 DualSense Controller | GamingOnLinux

As for how it works on Linux, you're going to need some updated udev rules to work fully. Valve contractor Timothee Besset mentioned on Twitter they've put out an update to the Steam Installer, and you can also find the full udev rules on Valve's steam-devices GitHub.