Free, open source and a lot of fun to get mixing, FamiStudio is a wonderful application for making some retro tunes and there's a new release available. The feature list has grown quite a lot over the last year, along with gaining Linux builds to make it as cross-platform as possible.

What's new in FamiStudio 2.3.0? Here's the highlights:

• MP3 export
• Video export
• Song merge functionality
• Duty cycle effect track support (equivalent of Vxx in FamiTracker)
• Special paste improvements (repeat, effects, etc.)
• Special delete
• Copy patterns to different channels in sequencer
• Option to display note labels in piano roll
• FamiTracker tempo improvements (delayed notes, cuts, fixes).
• Added support for Cxx (Halt) FamiTracker effect.
• Option to export each channel to a seperate WAV/MP3 file.
• Small DPCM improvements (Drag & drop, bit reverse option)
• Small tempo improvements
• Sound engine code size reduction

Want to see it properly in action? You can see their updated full tutorial below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Something we mentioned before that's worth repeating: with it being open source, they do take contributions but they also expect things to work across all three platforms they support being Linux, macOS and Windows. Wonderful to see feature-parity being required, would be nice if more projects were like this.

Want to try it yourself? Find it on GitHub and the official site .

Epic Games latest acquisition is RAD Game Tools , one a great many game developers will be familiar with. As confirmed on the official Epic Games news post , the plan is to integrate RAD tooling into Unreal Engine.

RAD tooling is used by close to 25,000 games, according to the post, making it massively popular. Probably the most well-known of their tools by gamers is Bink Video and you might have seen a logo of it across some of your favourite games going back to the 90's.

As graphics in game development and beyond become more photorealistic and powerful, developers need best-in-class compression software that can manage increased data requirements without compromising quality. Members of the RAD team will partner closely with Epic’s rendering, animation, insights, and audio teams, integrating key tech and improvements across Unreal Engine and beyond. RAD and Epic combining forces will allow even more developers access to tools that make their games load and download faster, and offer their players a better, higher quality video and gaming experience.

Epic Games

The good news is that Epic will not be locking it down to their systems. As the post explains, RAD will continue supporting and selling licenses for their products across all industries and those that don't use Unreal Engine.

So now Epic Games own Psyonix (Rocket League), Quixel (Megascans), SuperAwesome (kids digital media ecosystem), Hyprsense (facial motion capture), Easy Anti-Cheat and no doubt that list will grow.

Godot Engine is probably the most promising free and open source game engine around, and they clearly had a very productive 2020 with big plans for 2021.

Just before the year was up, and as we took our holiday break, developer Fabio Alessandrelli wrote up about the ongoing and impressive progress on the Web Editor and the HTML5 export. The progress on it has been somewhat mind-blowing with it now having GDNative supported with HTML5 exports from Godot, and the web editor itself has now hit what they say is the Beta stage and you can try it out at this new temporary address .

For the web editor, they're looking to keep it up to date and in sync with the latest work on Godot 3.2.4.

Pictured - me testing out the Godot Engine Web Editor

The Godot Engine team have made huge progress elsewhere too. While work continues on the current stable branch, with Godot 3.2.4 due out properly sometime soon that brings in some big stuff like 2D batching for GLES3 for better performance, a greatly improved FBX importer, a configurable amount of lights per object and so on the work also continues on Godot 4 with Vulkan API support too.

So much is going on they created a thoroughly impressive showcase video of Godot's 2020. Have a look below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Ethan Lee , the developer responsible for the XNA reimplementation FNA along with around 50 game ports to Linux and macOS has announced they're stopping future macOS ports with a big update to a bunch of existing games.

Don't know who they are? You've probably played plenty of games either ported by them or running on tech created / maintained by them including: Streets of Rage 4, Superliminal, FEZ, Transistor, Rogue Legacy, Salt and Sanctuary, Owlboy and loads more .

Writing on their IcculusFinger profile page, Lee wrote a few paragraphs about a little history before diving into the current state of Apple products mentioning "I've put it off for as long as I could, but after looking at Apple's trajectory vs. my own infrastructure for Mac support, it's looking like 2021 is the year that I have to say goodbye to the Mac as a primary target.".

The good news for Linux fans? According to Lee, "New games, however, will primarily be Linux (and Windows, if applicable) only.". It also seems quite interesting that console releases have been opening up the gates for Linux ports according to Lee too. This is also backwards to what we often see with Linux support removed (hi Rocket League), so it feels a little odd.

As for existing ports? Lee went ahead and updated over 30 of them with the latest tech for both macOS and Linux, so they should all continue running smoothly.

Hopefully Ethan Lee will have many more Linux ports planned for 2021 and beyond.

I also found the bit about drivers interesting, with how they can grab a RenderDoc capture and post it to the Linux Mesa driver issue tracker when they have a driver problem and sometimes get a response and a fix in the same day - shows how awesome open source can be, compared with Apple "reporting bugs to Apple when you're not rich is like pulling teeth with boxing gloves".

On top of all that? The latest releases of FNA , FNA3D and FAudio are out now.

SDL 2 is the magnificent bit of cross-platform development open source tech that gives developers access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. Not something normal users will touch, as it's part of the magic behind the scenes to get everything doing with it does on Linux and multiple other platforms.

This is used across many games and game engines including Steam, lots of Valve games like Portal and Half-Life, tons of indie games like Dead Cells, Baba is You, Bastion, Amnesia, FTL and the list goes on.

With the SDL 2.0.14 release out now it adds in support for the new PS5 DualSense and Xbox Series X controllers, there's a bunch of new functions just for game controllers for developers to be able to get additional information like if it has an LED or a particular sensor and more. There's also a whole new API for developers to create virtual joysticks.

Various other fixes, improvements and new API features too. Here's what's specific to Linux in SDL 2.0.14:

• Added the hint SDL_HINT_AUDIO_DEVICE_APP_NAME to specify the name that shows up in PulseAudio for your application
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_AUDIO_DEVICE_STREAM_NAME to specify the name that shows up in PulseAudio associated with your audio stream
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_LINUX_JOYSTICK_DEADZONES to control whether HID defined dead zones should be respected on Linux
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_THREAD_PRIORITY_POLICY to specify the thread scheduler policy
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_THREAD_FORCE_REALTIME_TIME_CRITICAL to allow time critical threads to use a realtime scheduling policy

See the full list of changes here . More info on SDL on the official site .

As another promising free and open source game engine written in Rust, Bevy continues maturing and there's a brand new release up for you to try out with lots of advancements.

What actually is it? The developer says quite clearly that it's a "refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust" with a data-driven custom Entity Component System, a 2D and 3D rendering system, support for all major systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux plus mobile), hot reloading to get instant feedback, a custom built-in UI system and more. It's looking really smart.

Going over the vast changelog of everything that's new and improved in Bevy 0.4, here's some highlights:

• A WebGL2 rendering backend, meaning games built with Bevy can now run in the browser. They also now have a showcase of their examples running in the web.
• Live shader reloading so you can update changes to shaders at runtime.
• GLTF loader improvements that now supports the Camera.
• Dynamic Linking for improved compile times.
• Huge rendering optimizations.
• 3D textures support.
• A new built-in Logging and Profiling system.
• HiDPI support

See more on the Bevy website .

Want to see a game being built with Bevy? The version 0.4 update post mentioned a game called colonize , it's an in-development Dwarf Fortress / Rimworld-like game in the early stages - and it's also free and open source. Worth keeping an eye on or joining in perhaps if you're looking for a new Rust game dev project

The Raspberry Pi sure is a versatile device and thanks to GameMaker Studio 2 from YoYo Games , it might even end up as more of a gaming unit with newly added support for exported games.

In the version 2.3.1.542 release of GameMaker Studio 2 that went live on December 16 ( details ), it mentioned in the release notes how it now supports "Ubuntu ARMv7" as an output type for their editor. We discovered this thanks to the developer of Shield Cat mentioning on their Patreon post how they've been updating their game to hit higher performance on the Raspberry Pi.

Curious about more details on this, we reached out to YoYo Games to clarify some details of this new feature. Their CTO, Russell Kay, mentioned this in reply to why they started supporting Linux ARM devices:

We are big fans of the Raspberry Pi and have been looking to support the device in a cost effective way with the release of the OpenGL driver and the higher power (CPU and GPU). It became viable for us to release and support the Raspberry Pi target, since it was generic we expanded it to include devices that support the armeabihf architecture, assuming the device has the correct libraries that we require, but our primary target is the Raspberry Pi running raspbian.

With that all now in place they said this in reply to future upgrades to their Linux support in GameMaker Studio 2:

We will improve our Linux offering over future versions, but we are not able to announce specific changes at this stage.

Game Maker Studio powers some really popular games, and it continues to be a very popular game engine for indie developers. Released titles like Hyper Light Drifter, Minit, The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED], The Swords of Ditto, Stoneshard, Nuclear Throne and a great many more were all built with it.

Will be fun to see if many developers decide to put out more Linux builds of their games when using GMS2, both on the desktop and for the fantastic Raspberry Pi device family.

Through 2020 it seems the free and open source game engine Godot Engine has gone from strength to strength, and they've managed to hire another developer.

Not long after announcing a new hire thanks to funding from Facebook , developer Camille Mohr-Daurat has now been hired thanks to a "generous donation" to work part-time over six months to improve Godot's 2D and 3D physics systems. They said their main goal is to modernise the whole thing - no doubt something that will excite a number of developers using Godot.

Mohr-Daurat has listed a few interesting goals to get started including sorting out a physics test framework, an audit of existing issues and sorting through pull requests from others, implement a bunch of new features like soft bodies and buoyancy, optimise and more.

See the announcement here .

All sounds pretty great and wonderful to see Godot end 2020 on another high note. Hopefully through 2021 we will see more developers take a look at using Godot Engine as it grows more feature-filled and powerful. The cross-platform support it offers is excellent. If you're working with Godot and plan to have whatever it is supported on Linux, do feel free to mention it in the comments.

Unity Technologies who work on the Unity game engine have announced that they have acquired the networking library MLAPI, along with the creator joining Unity.

In the post Unity's Brandi House mentioned how they're trying to expand the Unity ecosystem with a "first-party multiplayer networking solution for GameObjects that is easy to set up and extend, scales to meet the needs of high-performance titles, and is seamlessly integrated into the Unity ecosystem" and after considering many they ultimately decided to pull in MLAPI along with its creator, Albin Corén .

The good news is that it remains open source and will be developed in the open as expected, and they will not be changing the license which is currently as MIT. So now we have another open source solution for networking, fully backed by a big company - nice.

Unity said they will be expanding it in these areas, in addition to working on documentation and samples:

• Remote procedure calls (RPCs): Currently MLAPI has two RPC systems, “convenience RPCs” and “performance RPCs.” The convenience RPCs incur a performance overhead that performance RPCs address, but they are not straightforward to use. We are investigating options to replace both with a system that is performant, is easy to use, and has clean usage patterns.
• Snapshot generation: MLAPI’s current design poses challenges for incorporating features like delta compression or client-side prediction. To overcome this roadblock, we’re working on separating snapshot generation from packet-sending systems.
• Network relevance model: Sending the right data to each player enables developers to minimize their bandwidth costs and maximize players gameplay experiences. We’ll change MLAPI so new methods can be used to increase performance, lower the likelihood of cheating, and lower operating costs by lowering the amount of data sent.

See the announcement here and find the code on GitHub .