Links 7/4/2014: Games
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-07 08:47:26 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-07 08:47:26 UTC
The Linux land has a reputation, especially among developers used to Windows, of being – let's say – somewhat savage, uncivilized. We've all heard the ghost stories: things being downright broken, lack of documentation and general despair; people coming, exclaiming: "what the fuck?!" and going right back.
In little over a year since the first stable version of Steam for Linux emerged, the number of Linux-supported games continues to grow at a rapid pace. Valve's digital game distribution currently hosts 376 games for Linux, with many quality commercial titles such as Shadowrun: Dragonfall, System Shock 2, and Europa Universalis IV to name-drop just a few of our favorites. With more game engines being natively ported to Linux, this trend is going to continue. For example, the CryEngine technology has recently been natively ported to Linux, so we could see ports of games like Ryse: Son of Rome and Crysis 3.
Every month Valve publishes a comprehensive hardware and software survey that reflects what is being used to run the Steam client. It’s been pretty accurate until now, but a couple of months ago Valve made a few small modification and eliminated most of the inconsequential entries for various other distros.
In the past I had a look at 17 free games available for Linux, overviewed here and here. In this article I will have a look at five more completely free and open-source games available to install in any distribution out there.
Shipwrecked. Captured. Betrayed. Forced to perform for an audience of cats? Yes, all that and more when you unlock BattleBlock Theater! This game just sounds funny!
It has only been a week since we let you know about Icebound, but it's now been released! Icebound is a dark fantasy visual novel that takes place in a steampunk world locked in the depths of an ice age, where alchemists possess supernatural powers.
Star Gem and Gaijin Entertainment’s inter-galactic MMORPG, Star Conflict, is celebrating its two year anniversary with a pretty hefty update that will see it gain Oculus Rift and Linux support.
We're extremely excited that Epic is porting Unreal Engine 4 to Linux -- see the official announcement or some press here and here. Once we heard UE4 Linux was coming we pretty much dropped everything to ensure vogl can handle UE4 callstreams. The latest code on github now supports full-stream tracing/replaying and trimming of UE4 callstreams in either GL3 or GL4 mode. UI support for UE4 is still in the early stages, but now that we can snapshot/restore UE4 and continue to play back the callstream without diverging it's only matter of time before the UI comes up to speed.
FaeVerse Alchemy, a puzzle game developed and published by Subsoap, has been released on Steam for Linux with a small 9% discount.
Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden, a point and click adventure developed and published on Steam by Artifex Mundi sp. z o.o., has also received a Linux version and a sizable discount.
Harvester, a disturbing adventure video game developed by DigiFX Interactive and published by Night Dive Studios, is now available on Steam for Linux.
While the voglperf code has been public for some time within Git, the first initial release of Voglperf was tagged on Tuesday evening by a Valve developer.
Getting games to stream properly from Windows to Linux seems to be the main focus of the Valve developers and many of the patches deal strictly with this feature. It's unlikely that In-Home Streaming will exist the Beta stages too soon, but the developers might surprise us with the next stable release.
One month after releasing Unreal Engine 4 and talking about Unreal Engine 4 Linux support, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4.1 preview today and it's paired with first-rate Linux support.
The Unreal developers from Epic Games have expressed their support before for the Linux platform, but now they actually made it possible with the latest update for the Unreal Engine 4.
Good news for gamers who've been eyeing Valve's upcoming Steam Machines: Unreal Engine 4.1 will support the Linux-based SteamOS after a pending update. In a blog post today, Epic Games' Mike Fricker announced that the source code now includes "initial support for running and packaging games for Linux and Steam OS." This means that upcoming UE4 titles like Daylight and Fortnite could be ported to the systems.
Unreal Engine 4, the newest version of the game engine that powers many a AAA gaming title, just got a feature that may prove quite important in the near feature: the ability to build games that run on Linux.
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