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      Free first-person strategy shooter 'Unvanquished' releases version 0.52 Beta

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Friday, 14 May, 2021 - 17:34 · 1 minute

    After a long time of waiting with the last proper release in 2018, the Unvanquished team have managed to do it! The next version 0.52 Beta is officially out now and waiting to be played.

    What is it? A free and open source first-person shooter with strategy elements, that puts humans vs aliens. It's a fork of the classic Tremulous, think of it like the well-known Natural Selection series with both sides providing very different gameplay overall.

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    This marks the first Beta release too, as the team explained they "think the engine and the game experience are polished enough to remove the alpha flag and wear the beta one". The game engine used, the Dæmon engine, also saw its own dedicated blog post to explain all the advances over the last two years - as expected there's been a huge amount of changes, including a "single rounding error that was the cause of many bugs" - oops. The amount of work that went into the underlying game engine is simply marvellous, with it being more bug free and advanced than ever.

    As for the game itself, the list of what's changed is just as ridiculously long. The new player experience is much improved, there's new presets for different keyboard layouts, the UI now scales with your screen resolution, there's now graphics presets to easily switch between modes, many graphics improvements and the list goes on. It's pretty safe to say that Unvanquished 0.52 Beta is like a different game.

    Check it out on the Unvanquished website .

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      Fingeance is a fishy shoot 'em up that needs team-play rather than twitch-reflexes

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Thursday, 13 May, 2021 - 08:59

    Free Game Thursday! Now this is great, a shoot 'em up that tries to do away with the traditional twitchy gameplay in favour of something a little more interesting with co-op.

    The idea in Fingeance is that four players work together, as it places an "emphasis on teamwork and strategy". The focus was on making it a truly fun co-op experience, where even a novice player can make a difference to the team. The developers say to imagine "Faster Than Light meets Jamestown meets Team Fortress 2" and then "add four tiny fish, a comic book style, and a veneer of seething vindictive rage".

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    Sounds like an absolute blast, and completely free to play too. The developer doesn't even take donations on their itch page. Perhaps something to blast through over the coming weekend?

    Available free on itch.io .

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      Social deduction hacking game Untrusted has left Early Access to positive reviews

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Tuesday, 11 May, 2021 - 08:59 · 1 minute

    Inspired by the Werewolf/Mafia genre and similar games, Untrusted from developer evolvedlabs has now left Early Access and it seems it has done quite well.

    "In Untrusted (or “Untrusted – Web of Cybercrime”), hackers from the fictional NETSEC group are tasked in hacking a specific server on a computer network. NETSEC members must use their skills and wits to outsmart the undercover AGENTs that will try each night to perform arrests or have other players become snitches for them."

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    Features:

    • Hacking themed game focused on social interactions.
    • Hack into computers and analyze their log to find out who is telling the truth
    • Keep your personal log and cross-reference data to find out who are the undercover agents
    • An amazing, friendly community ready to welcome you
    • Multiple winning conditions for both factions: hack or murder your way to victory.
    • 2 Factions and many neutral classes
    • 23 Unique classes
    • More than 80 unique skills
    • Unlock avatars and badges as you win
    • No bogus IP addresses! All IP addresses are from RFC 5737, for all of us IT people :3
    • Discord integration

    For a niche experience given the interface and gameplay, it's managed to gain a nice following. With a few hundred user reviews on Steam giving it a Very Positive rating and it regularly sees a few hundred players online at any one time so for a game with no marketing it's doing okay.

    Also, you can claim an exclusive GamingOnLinux avatar! See our previous article for the link, you need to be logged in on GOL to claim the redeem code.

    Check it out on itch.io and Steam . It's free to play.

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      Vircadia, the free and open source 3D virtual world is going to the web

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Tuesday, 11 May, 2021 - 08:44 · 1 minute

    Vircadia , the open source successor to the former High Fidelity VR project, a 3D virtual world for VR and desktops is now going to be coming to your web browser. The founder and project lead, Kalila Lakeworth, emailed in the very interesting news on how they've teamed up with the Linux Professional Institute to make this happen.

    They mentioned how requiring users to download it is a barrier to adoption, and so using the power of WebRTC, they plan to let the whole thing run in a browser tab. Much like you can do with full games already on services like Google Stadia, Amazon Luna and so on. They're calling this "Vircadia Web", the idea is to let people join worlds and events from any device they own - a nice goal worth supporting.

    Confused on what Vircadia actually is? They explain how it's "an engine to build virtual worlds on" and "Vircadia can help you make a personal home world that houses an art gallery, movie theater, or games for your friends. The sky is the limit.". It's open source, decentralized and so no one corp controls what to do with it. The sky is effectively the limit.

    WebXR support will be coming to allow VR on the web, but their first focus is just getting the thing running in a browser.

    Read more about their plans on their blog post .

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      0 A.D. Alpha 25 enters feature-freeze soon, get a sneak-peak of what's coming

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Monday, 10 May, 2021 - 12:25 · 1 minute

    0 A.D. Alpha 25, the very impressive free and open source RTS is closing in on the next release and it's entering a Feature Freeze soon to focus on stability. The last release back in February took a very long time, partly as some major internal upgrades were done so now they're hoping to be a bit more regular.

    In June they're proposing to enter Feature Freeze, to then focus on bug fixes. So what to expect from the upcoming 0 A.D. Alpha 25? In a blog post they noted a few new features coming:

    • Single Player Campaign Support:
      The ability for 0 A.D modders to create their own single player campaigns will be added. Alpha 25 will only include the base functionality for this with full campaigns scheduled to be added in later iterations.
    • Improved Multiplayer Responsiveness
      A technical improvement that players may ‘feel’ rather than see, this is another progressive improvement step to smoothing out multiplayer gameplay and enhancing unit pathfinding. Before commands in multiplayer were processed twice per second, now five times like in single player.
    • Ongoing Balancing Changes
      Numerous changes to balance of the game by way of micro adjustments to various civilisations, buildings, and units.

    Head over to their wiki and you will see there's quite a bit more including better animal AI behaviour, domestic animals will flee when attacked, structures can be toggled to auto-produce units, improvements to tutorial and random maps text and more.

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    I actually played a bunch of it recently and wow - it sure has come a very long way. Reminds me of the early days of Age of Empires but free and open source.

    Check it out on the official site .

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      Fate of Dynasty is a wonderful short, free and open source puzzle game out now

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Monday, 10 May, 2021 - 08:47

    Short on time and want to try something new? It's Free Game Monday™! Come check out Fate of Dynasty which is open source. Originally created for the Global Game Jam 2021, it was created over 48 hours and shows a great example of what a small team can do.

    "Fate of Dynasty is a short lore exploration puzzle game inspired by walking simulators such as Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Layers of Fear. Figure out how to perform the ritual to put an end to the tyranny of the ruling dynasty."

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    Check it out free on itch.io , Steam and the source code is under the MIT license on GitHub .

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      EXsynchronos is a wild and completely bizarre free transhumanism cyberspace metahorror

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Friday, 7 May, 2021 - 09:06 · 1 minute

    Free Game Friday! Fancy trying out something completely bizarre? EXsynchronos from developer Ravee is a true cyberspace adventure and it looks fantastic visually.

    The developer describes it as a "transhumanist action packed cyberspace metahorror" and frankly that's about as good a description as you're going to get on this one. It's a complete visual overload on the senses with puzzles, exploration, platforming and shooter elements, all wrapped in a dense atmosphere. You control a Pr0x (Process Resurrective gh0st eXistence), "one of the most advanced virtual technologies that was ever developed" possessed by a human soul.

    Prepare for lots of flashiness:

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    There's a huge and completely wild story behind it too. In fact, it's actually part of a series with this being the third (although you don't need to have played the others). Feel free to check out meloveyou and awaren3ss as the first and second episodes if you want the entire story but it's all quite disconnected.

    When you download EXsynchronos, you get an 18 page PDF full of lore and words from the developer at the end, it's truly something to read through.

    Play free on itch.io . You can donate if you like it when downloading.

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      Free Game Thursday - check out Office Point Rescue Deja Vu a new retro FPS

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Thursday, 6 May, 2021 - 09:42 · 1 minute

    Office Point Rescue Deja Vu is a brand new retro-themed first-person shooter from Magellanic Games, a bigger expanded version of the original from 2020.

    "Terrorists have invaded and taken hostages in the Emeraldalo Corporation's headquaters.  Agent Foldon is assigned to infiltrate the building, dispatch the terrorists, rescue any surviving hostages and gather intel."

    Check out our gameplay footage below to get a taste of it. The gameplay was on Easy mode, as I didn't want to spoil any surprises and difficult in the other modes. It gives you a good idea of what to expect though, thoroughly reminding me of some retro arcade shooters that took way too many coins.


    Features:

    • 11 levels spread across 2 routes.  Navigate the office building, finding secrets and rescuing survivors.
    • Utilise 4 weapons to fight back foes - pistol, shotgun, sub-machine gun and the mighty lightgun.
    • Choose from 3 tuned difficulties.
    • Save your progress.  Return to the last level you reached with all your items, guns and ammo.  No need to play through in a single sitting.
    • 2 Additional unlockable modes - Giant Head Mode and Lightgun Mode
    • Switchable graphics mode, enjoy in the original low-resolution mode or in clear, crisp high resolution.
    • Full retro midi-like soundtrack.

    Find it free on itch.io . While free, you can donate to the developer when you go to download it if you feel their work is worth supporting.

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      Classic open source simulation game OpenTTD is coming to Steam

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Friday, 5 February, 2021 - 13:31 · 1 minute

    OpenTTD, the free and open source simulation game based upon Transport Tycoon Deluxe is officially coming to Steam on April 1, and the Linux build will be available too.

    Another fine example of a brilliant open source project! Based upon Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a business simulation game in which players earn money by transporting passengers and cargo via road, rail, water, and air. It's entirely free and doesn't need the original game as it has a full graphics replacement too but it can work with the original data files if you have them. This is a fully-featured game and it's popular.

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    Just a few of the enhancements it has over the original:

    • bigger maps (up to 64 times in size)
    • stable multiplayer mode for up to 255 players in 15 companies, or as spectators
    • dedicated server mode and an in-game console for administration
    • IPv6 and IPv4 support for all communication of the client and server
    • in game downloading of AIs, NewGRFs, scenarios and heightmaps
    • new pathfinding algorithms that makes vehicles go where you want them to
    • autorail/-road build tool, improved terraforming
    • canals, shiplifts, aqueducts
    • larger, non-uniform stations and the ability to join them together
    • mammoth and multi-headed trains
    • different configurable models for acceleration of vehicles
    • clone, autoreplace and autoupdate vehicles
    • the possibility to build on slopes and coasts
    • advanced/conditional orders, share and copy orders

    The team had a few packaging troubles as getting a game up on Steam has a more involved process compared to direct downloads. Partly due to the Steam Linux Runtime being based on older libraries, which caused issues with the way the OpenTTD team automate their builds. Thankfully, after some discussion and others getting involved they found a way around it and so we can expect it on Linux at the Steam release on April 1. I've tested it myself from the Steam build and it works perfectly on Ubuntu 20.04 and Arch Linux.

    Since it will no doubt be asked: why download on Steam anyway when it's been available in Linux distributions for years? The point is extra exposure, opening it up to even more people to see it and enjoy it!

    Follow OpenTTD on Steam or download right now from the official site .

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