Tags: Steam, Strategy, Early Access, Valve, Update

Valve have announced that Dota Underlords, their auto-battle strategy game will get the first proper Season by the end of February, which means it will leave Early Access.

However, they still have a lot coming. There's at least one more update coming before this, with one more Underlord coming as well. The bigger stuff sounds like it's coming with the Season 1 update to end Early Access with their official Battlepass, City Crawl game mode, Hero / Item rotation and UI updates.

Underlords has continued to lose players over the last few months, although still quite popular with it regularly getting over ten thousand players the drop has been quite dramatic even over the last two months. Across December it was hitting over sixteen thousand regularly, now it's getting close to being below twelve thousand and shows no sign of slowing.

The playerbase might become a bit more stable when the full update is out, since they've been changing the gameplay quite drastically in the last few updates, it's hard to stay connected to it right now even if you do enjoy it. Personally, I'm keen to see what City Crawl actually is. It seems to be some sort of single-player adventure campaign, so that by itself could be a lot of fun. Once it's confirmed, we will let you know.

They also released a small update yesterday, full notes on it here . You can find Dota Underlords free on Steam .

Tags: Open Source, Game Engine, Update

GDevelop is a wonderful up-and-coming free and open source game engine, allowing you to create games using visual event-based programming as opposed to typing everything out line-by-line.

A fantastic type of tool for prototyping, getting a younger generation interested in making games, and for those who think they don't have enough time to learn another full programming language it can be a bit of fun. GDevelop's progress has been amazing too, with another release landing yesterday.

GDevelop 5.0.0-beta84 adds in a bunch of new effects you can use including "Black and White, Noise, CRT, Godray, Tilt shift, Advanced bloom, Kawase blur, Zoom blur, Displacement, Color Map" and more. These special effects can be added to your game with minimal fuss too, and the result is pretty awesome.

As an example of them, here's a few shots using the included Platformer example project. Click the image to see the gallery:

That's really basic, but you get the idea. All objects can be placed on different layers, with different shader effects in place. Like the below shot, I added a CRT styled effect to the main screen while giving the character model Chromatic Aberration.

There's also a new BBText object, which allows you to add in rich text formatted with BBCode, as seen in the "You're cursed! Oh no!" text in the above shot. The Piskel spite editor included also gained some enhancements like a palette transfer tool and a colour index shift brush. For those of you wanting to see demos of it, to help get started, this release also comes with new example projects to open and tinker with, along with another game tutorial.

See more on the official site and GitHub .

Tags: Wine, Vulkan, Update

For use with Wine and Steam Play Proton, D9VK is the awesome project based on DXVK which translates Direct3D9 to Vulkan for better performance. A big new release just went out.

Codenamed Croakacola, D9VK 0.40 is a big one. D9VK can now use more than 4GB VRAM on 32-bit applications/games, with it being noted to help modded Skyrim/Oblivion and obviously more too. There's also now async presentation across all vendors, some "query flushing" improvements, performance fixes for Risen and Legend of the Heroes: Trails of the Sky, bloom rendering fixes for SpinTyres/Mudrunner and other misc updates.

A new option was also added "d3d9.dialogBoxMode", which you can enable to stop D9VK taking exclusive fullscreen which can help with some nuisance behaviour in games.

Plenty of other bug fixes too that help with Max Payne 2, The Sims 2, Silent Hunter 3, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Crysis, Need for Speed: Carbon, Risen and probably more.

Great stuff from Ashton as always, good to see D9VK continue to mature for playing older Windows games on Linux through Wine and Proton. It's always fantastic when you don't have to give up older favourites when using Linux and have them perform well.

See the full release notes here .

Tags: Steam Play, Wine, New Release, Update

A brand new update to Steam Play Proton has arrived ahead of the weekend with Proton 4.11-10, giving out of the box play for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

For Halo, you will need the Steam Beta Client if you're on an older distribution, plus online matchmaking still won't work due to Easy Anti-Cheat not supporting Steam Play Proton. However, single-player does work fine and you should be able to play with friends outside of matchmaking. I've tested this myself, and it does work first time without issues signing into Live:

Also added in this release of Proton is a claim of major mouse handling improvements. They said this improved the experience in Fallout 4, Furi, and Metal Gear Solid V. On the subject of input there's also force feedback improvements, an Xbox controller performance regression, and fixes for multiple games having problems with controller mapping like Telltale games with Xbox controllers and Cuphead and ICEY when using PlayStation 4 controllers over Bluetooth.

There's a new integer scaling mode available, which they said will "give sharp pixels when upscaling". You can enable it with the "WINE_FULLSCREEN_INTEGER_SCALING=1" environment variable.

Apart from that there's a fix for Metal Gear Solid V hanging on launch, Trine 4 should no longer be locked to 30 FPS and a frequent IL-2 Sturmovik crash should be solved. They also updated D9VK, FAudio and pulled in some misc DXVK bugfixes.

See the changelog here . To get the update, your Steam client should download it automatically. If not, ensure you have Proton 4.11 installed in the Tools menu.