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.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Linus Torvalds Blasts Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) for Attempting to 'Protect' Linux
- Like it 'protects' women
- New Record for GNU/Linux in Australia (at Microsoft's Expense)
- Windows is at an all-time low, GNU/Linux... all-time high
- Fighting Over Whose Pockets Are Deeper (or Who Borrows More Money)
- When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
- Starting a Book With a Flawed Premise or Weak Hypothesis
- To me, Schneier is a sort of "RMS of sec"
- Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
- "AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
- EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
- based in Germany and does not speak the language
- Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
- Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
-
- Links 28/12/2025: Fascination, Holidays, and Mormonism
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Weapon Against the Reality of XBox (the Console) Dying Seems to be LLM Slop
- XBox is dead/dying
- Raffles for the Immaterial: Unauthorised Bingo for Red Hat "Vouchers"
- This is IBM and some slop images
- Andy Farnell on Standing Up Against Technological Oppression
- some portions from it
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, December 27, 2025
- Once Again, GAFAM Deletes All Your Data, Only Corrects This After Millions of People Lead an Uproar Online ("Richard Stallman Warned Us About This")
- No lessons learned, eh?
- You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
- One day we'll write about all this in great depth
- "But Corruption is Everywhere"
- "We'll always have Polio..."
- Days Without Slop About "Linux"
- It's time to move on
- Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
- Links for the day
- Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
- Links for the day
- Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
- We said we'd continue in the weekend
- Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
- Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
- This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
- Victim-Blaming in Debian
- Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
- IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
- IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
- Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
- The Windows PCs were an utter failure
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
- But no strings attached
- Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
- There are 4.8k now
- Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
- Links for the day
- The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
- Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
- Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
- Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
- The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
- older articles
- Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
- FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
- Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
- Links for the day
- Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
- Links for the day
- Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
- I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
- Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
- "Quantum" is the future
- The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
- The important thing is optics
- Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
- Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
- So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
- In light of recent experiences
- Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
- now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
- So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
- An "AI-Infused" Windows
- Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
- Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
- Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
- Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
- Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
- The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
- What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
- And as the Year Turns...
- The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
- Appliances Versus Computers
- Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
- A Dark Side of Europe
- They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
- Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
- I will continue to publish for many decades to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
- Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
- Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
- A Tribute to Richard Stallman
- It's about knowledge and sharing
- Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
- Links for the day