More classics continuing to live on?! Yes please, thanks to the power of open source and dedicated fans The Elder Scrolls: Arena has a modern game engine that continues maturing. You can download the original free for the data files, thanks to Bethesda releasing it free some time ago so it makes it quite easy to get going with OpenTESArena.

The main developer has announced a new release with OpenTESArena 0.12.0 and it comes with some big new features nicely hooked up including:

• Wandering citizens in cities and wilderness. They idle if the player's weapon is sheathed
• Puddle reflections
• Voice in cinematics (only available in CD version)
• City entrance jingle
• Music library system supporting custom MIDI filenames in data/audio/MusicDefinitions.txt
• Entity animation system redesign
• Texture manager improvements and initial work on texture instance manager for runtime-generated textures
• Fonts use less memory and are less dependent on SDL2
• Added previously-unused OverSnow music to snow weather playlist
• Fixed final boss display name (was "TODO")

Check out their release video too:

Watch video on YouTube.com

While it's another great attempt at game preservation, it's worth noting this particular project is still quite early on overall. You can find the current status on the Wiki , which shows it's still missing a lot of actual gameplay elements currently.

You can find it and all the instructions up on GitHub .

After switching to Godot Engine back in May, things seem to be going really well for the free and open source evolution sim Thrive, as they have a huge release out now.

With a lot of work that went into it, Thrive 0.5.2 brings back a proper tutorial mode so you can get to learn it properly now. This goes over movement, resource collection, how to evolve and more. Hopefully this will allow more people to actually see what it offers.

At least now you have a vague idea of what to do.

They've also done a lot more work on upgrading the UI, which has now been done for the organism editor. It's a lot clearer, more interactive and it just looks a whole lot more modern. More visual upgrades came with it too like new particle effects for things like nasty toxins and progress towards replacing placeholder models.

Another step has been taken towards it being a proper evolution sim too, as populations are no longer random. Species will actually respond to environment changes now too. Various other nice quality of life improvements are in, like being able to change options during the game and the saving menu has been upgraded to make it nicer to use and manage various save files. Other changes include an upgrade to Godot Engine 3.2.3, code and documentation improvements, and lots more smaller issues solved.

Thrive is actually starting to feel like more of a proper game now, and a promising one too. I managed to get much further thanks to the cleaner interface and small introduction, to see what life is like when you have a couple of cells. It's definitely not a copy of Spore, with their planned depth and following real-science it's quite exciting and with development moving a lot quicker now you can feel all the improvements moving it towards a good game.

You can read their release announcement here and support them on Patreon . As a reminder, it's free and open source and you can download it using their fancy launcher .

NVIDIA just quietly released another fresh update to their special developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.

After moving it over to the 455 series at the end of September, they released driver version 455.26.01 on October 9 which is a small bug-fix cleanup with these changes:

• Reduce host memory consumption for descriptor memory when VkDescriptorSetVariableDescriptorCountAllocateInfo is used
• Handle SPIR-V 1.4 non-Input/Ouput entry point variables correctly
• Fixed a blending optimization that sometimes produced an incorrect result
• Fixed SPIR-V intersection shader compilation issue when multi entry point ray tracing modules are used

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 450.80.02 released on September 30 from their "long lived" series or 455.28 released on October 7 from their "short lived" series. The difference can be a little confusing, NVIDIA explained the difference between short / long lived drivers as:

Any given release branch is either long-lived or short-lived. The difference is in how long the branch is maintained and how many releases are made from each branch. A short-lived branch typically has only one or two (non-beta) releases, while long-lived branches will have several.
[…]
When we make changes to the driver, we evaluate the oldest branch the change needs to go into. New features go into whatever the latest branch is, while bug fixes go into the older branches and are integrated through the newer branches. So using a short-lived branch doesn’t mean that you miss out on fixes, it just means that you also get the latest features.

Want to keep up with the latest Linux driver updates? You can follow our dedicated Drivers tag , all our tags have an RSS feed you can follow.

shapez.io lets you build up a huge factory with an ever-expanding map, it's open source and a massive new update was recently put up expanding how deep it goes.

The idea is inspired by the likes of Factorio but it's a much more chilled-out game. Allowing you to just zone-out, and keep expanding as it gradually adds more complexity and shapes you need to create. Especially when it starts adding on rotations, colours and more. It's a genuinely sweet idea and a rather nice take on an automation building sim, they've captured a fun niche here.

Now they've expanded the gameplay quite dramatically with the Wires update, which is so big they gave it a dedicated page and reading over what they've included was fun. What's new? Some highlights:

• A complete rebalance due to a reduction in belt speeds
• Much better performance, resulting in more precision
• More upgrade levels for belts and buildings
• New goal type: throughput, needing you to get to a certain throughput instead of delivering a specific amount
• Music and Sound controls
• You can now name your saved games
• An entirely new layer: wires which comes with signalling, displays you can wire up
• Logic circuits
• + loads more, it's a huge upgrade

To unlock the new stuff, you need to be at least level 20 during a game which is when it will give you access to the start of the wires content.

What's really great about shapez.io is that it's fully free and open source too. From the code which is up on GitHub under the GPL, to the media assets which are also open source on GitHub .

I personally purchased shapez.io around June earlier this year, and I haven't regret that for even a second. Its popularity and good user reviews are certainly well earned. Looking on Steam it has hit "Overwhelmingly Positive" from over two thousand users, so it's become one of the most highly rated open source games on Steam.

To support the development you can but it ready-made up on itch.io and Steam .

After announcing back in late August that Last Epoch would not be leaving Early Access in 2020, the team at Eleventh Hour Games have been working non-stop on more big upgrades to this action-RPG.

With another update out now, the patch notes are once again something you need a coffee to go over with. There's lots big and small, with something a lot of players will be happy about being the new customizable Loot Filters. This is a genuinely slick feature, letting players decide how they want to see their loot drops and it's all stored as text files so you can share your tweaks with others - brilliant! Lots more came with it like a complete visual overhaul to the second chapter of the story, multiple performance optimizations, new skills, new unique items and lots more .

Get a look into what's new in their latest video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

The new loot filtering system works exactly as expected. Setup whatever rules you want to see or not see item types, letting you cleanly focus on a very specific character build if you want to. Absolutely love it.

Last Epoch has so far been a very satisfying action-RPG. It hasn't a certain feel to it not matched by many other similar games, and firmly reminds me of a simpler time in my earlier gaming years playing through Diablo 2 until the sun went down so I'm not even remotely fussed about them taking more time to push it out of Early Access. They can take all the time they need.

You can buy Last Epoch on Steam .

Developer Philip Rebohle announced today the release of DXVK 1.7.2 to further improve the D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan translation layer.

Used with Wine, and part of the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, it's great to see it still moving along. This is the first release since August and while it's technically a minor release in versioning, the actual fixes included look to be quite important.

There's a "major" regression fixed for D3D9 titles that caused crashes in many games, a fix for D3D9 crashes on AMDVLK due to invalid Vulkan API usage, they've worked around some stack overflows in some 32-bit D3D9 games, a workaround is now in place for rendering issues on AMD drivers in some Unity Engine games, another workaround is added for Unicode on Windows "being garbage" and you can disable log files being created.

Additionally these games saw some fixes that should help them run better: Baldur's Gate 3, Final Fantasy XIV, Just Cause 3, Marvel's Avengers, Need for Speed Heat, PGA TOUR 2K21 and Trails in the Sky SC.

Release notes can be found here .

As a reminder: it's possible to update your Steam Play Proton install with this newer DXVK release, without waiting on a new Proton build. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.7.2. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, to refresh it you can usually just re-install Proton from the Tools menu in Steam.

Lord Hector's Demise is the name of the first major free update to Dying Light - Hellraid, the dungeon-crawling DLC for the open-world zombie smasher from Techland.

The problem with this DLC is how far the negative user reviews have gone on Steam. People seemed to have really high expectations for what's quite a small DLC overall. Perhaps this update will be the beginning of a turnaround for it. Techland said this is "just the beginning".

Watch video on YouTube.com

What's included:

• New Hellraid ranks: Shieldbearer and Thunder Lord
• Bounties
• 3 new weapons: Lightning Swan, Thunder Eagle and Shock Bearer
• 3 new, collectable notes
• The Minotaur boss has a new attack – stomp.
• While fighting the Minotaur, enemies keep spawning as long as he’s alive.
• Improved hard and nightmare mode
• Hellraid weapons have legendary levels now.
• Fixed bugs in the achievements “Well-read” and “Throw me a bone”.
• General fixes

Personally, I don't think it deserves the harsh negative rating it has. Techland confirmed they're planning to keep adding to it with regular content updates but as they said, "quality needs time" and they do want "Hellraid to become a unique experience, which will bring new challenges to Dying Light". Given how long Techland have supported Dying Light with new content and events, I'm sure they will be able to turn things around properly for it.

You can buy Dying Light on Humble Store and Steam . It's currently on a big discount on both stores.

Free and open source video recording and live streaming software OBS Studio version 26.0 is out now.

Pretty much all you need to get going with video content, OBS Studio being cross-platform and open source opened up a lot of options for Linux users when it arrived a few years ago. It's been great to see it flourish.

One of the bigger additions in this release is a new Noise Suppression filter with RNNoise. It should offer much better noise suppression than the original method. The same special tech that's used in Cadmus and NoiseTorch which really does work quite nicely. This is going to be a really great addition for people who want to do video content with OBS but have more background noises. I also quite like the new Source Toolbar above the Sources list, giving you quicker access to switch things around. This toolbar also has media controls for when you're playing other media.

Another currently Windows-only feature was added with support for a "Virtual Camera", which allows you to use the OBS output as a camera in other apps. They said support for other operating systems will be added when they're ready.

On top of new features, here's the notable Linux-specific fixes that came with OBS Studio 26.0:

• Linux: Fixed an issue where the browser source could crash when browsing files
• Linux: Fixed an issue with “always on top” sometimes not working with projectors
• Linux: Fixed an issue where cameras using V4L2 would not respond correctly to pan/tilt controls
• Linux: Fixed an issue where a user’s preferred language could not be detected correctly
• Fixed camera controls on Linux video devices not working

Plenty of other improvements came with it, full release notes here .

For Linux you can grab it as a Snap package , which comes pre-loaded with tons of useful extras. Also available as a Flatpak package on Flathub, otherwise head here for other distro downloads.

Transport Fever 2 is a much loved transport sim released with same-day Linux support in December 2019, and it's only going to keep getting better.

Gathering over seven thousand user reviews it has a Very Positive rating on Steam, so it's clear that this second edition from Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment has hit the mark. It has a lot of features, quite a lot of content and graphically it looks pretty good too.

However, it has just like the first game suffered some performance problems. They're aware, they've done a few updates to fix parts but more is needed. What's exciting here is that they announced in a post about upcoming macOS support that Linux and Windows will be getting an upgrade with Vulkan!

We don't know exactly when it will arrive though. They mentioned the macOS version for November, so presumably sometime between now and then the Linux and Windows versions will get Vulkan support. If it's an additional option and not a whole API replacement, we might look at comparing the performance difference when the update is live.

Available on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .