As quite easily one of the best games this year, art of rally is a really fun top-down racer and it's going to be expanding quite a bit with the next update.

Funselektor Labs have confirmed the Heritage update is due out on December 14 which will bring with it 8 new cars to drive across group 2 ("le gorde, la regina"), group 3 ("la hepta, the pebble v1, the pebble v2, the zetto") and group 4 ("la super montaine, la longana").

That's not all, you will also now have Ghost Cards so you can see and race against your local ghost. A great feature, and one I personally find makes coming back to any kind of solo racer much more enticing. There's also going to be support for livery mods available from the Race Department website. You will be able to create them from templates provided, then exported as a png to add to the game.

On top of that the menu menu polaroids feature will now show off your photos from the fantastic built-in photo mode, they're improving jump landings to be a bit less bouncy, the ability to view previous daily / weekly leaderboards and there's even more to come throughout 2021 including cards, songs, features and new locations.

art of rally is simply awesome, you can read my previous thoughts on it here .

You can buy art of rally for Linux from GOG and Steam .

Level Designer Toolkit (LDtk), which was originally known as 'LEd' has a huge new release out and the developer mentioned it's now ready for production. It's a modern, free and open source 2D level editor for indie developer with a strong focus on being as user-friendly as possible and it's being built by Sébastien Bénard, who was the former lead developer on Dead Cells.

LDtk 0.6 rips off the Beta label and brings with it some huge features like a World Map, allowing you to organize levels in the project into different themes like a vast 2D map, a large grid system and also either horizontally or vertically.

Pictured - testing out the World Map feature.

Apart from the World Map feature and no longer being considered a Beta, here's the other major changes in this release:

• New splash screen : to reduce screen flickering and dirty window flashes on startup, a new splash screen was added, among other minor changes. The app window should now feel a little more "stable".
• Smooth zooming/panning : automatic zooming and panning (eg. when pressing F key) are now animated and smoother.
• New rule editor window : this UI component really needed some love, so it now features a more streamlined interface and a much better integrated help.
• User settings are now stored in AppData OS folder to prevent from losing them on each future update. Unfortunately, this will only apply starting from this version, so settings will be reset one last time :) Sorry!
• "File path" field : this new field type allow you to refer to an external file directly from an Entity instance (many thanks to Yanrishatum !)
• Many under-the-hood optimizations to support the new World map feature.

Since last checking on it the experience has been massively improved. With the top-down sample included now too, it shows just how powerful it can be as a level editor to help create all sorts of games.

Truly wonderful to see so many great free and open source applications like this appearing over the last year or two, especially when they're cross-platform like LDtk. For Linux, the developer is targeting Ubuntu but the download is an AppImage and should work across any Linux distribution.

Find LDtk on the website or GitHub .

Cube 2: Sauerbraten lives again it seems! The classic free and open source first-person shooter, which combines old school gameplay with in-game map editing returns. For newer players: this is not another game based on old open source id Software tech though, as the engine supporting it is original and open source under the ZLIB license.

Going by their release history the 2020_11_29 edition is the first since early 2013. That is a long time for fans to wait for a new release. Pretty amazing to see it come back in such a huge way too, as this is not a small release. Oh no, it's a big one. Bringing with it tons of new maps (nearly 200!), it also has plenty of technical changes too.

It now uses the modern SDL 2, masses of bug fixes due to the time since the last release, chat names are now team coloured, there's optional HUDs for score / game clock and an ammobar, there's health bars for teammates, support for JPEG screenshots, lots of new textures and skyboxes, a revamped and more intelligent spawn system, various new server and user options you can tweak, improved water quality and the list goes on.

Pictured - Cube 2 with the newly included Genesis map.

If you've been after a free and fast first-person shooter to play with friends, Cube 2: Sauerbraten looks to be a really good choice. It performs ridiculously well and can run on some really low-end devices, and most importantly it's quite fun to run around in even with bots. Looking over the server list earlier, there's plenty of people playing it and with so many maps to choose from and multiple modes you're not going to get bored in a hurry.

You can grab it from the official site .

Have a love of graphs? You will like the latest release of the Linux gaming overlay and benchmark tool MangoHud, as it's giving you even more details and control.

MangoHud is a a Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and quite a lot more. It's quickly become the go-to for displaying and monitoring almost anything you need for Linux gaming and the 0.6.0 / 0.6.1 release that just went out has expanded what it can do even further.

One of the major new features is the ability to reorder the HUD so you can have it in whatever order you like. So if you want the FPS and frame timing info first before your system readout, you can do that.

Pictured - Black Ice with MangoHud and some new options and custom ordering.

There's also a lot more graph options. You can add multiple graphs now to show things like GPU / CPU load, GPU / CPU temperature, RAM and VRAM use and more. The FPS limiting feature can now take multiple values, so you could have a hotkey to switch between values and there's also various bug fixes with it now working with more OpenGL games like Black Ice, Total War: MEDIEVAL II, Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition and Mount & Blade: Warband.

Absolutely fantastic work, a great piece of FOSS tech.

Want to try it? Find MangoHud up on GitHub .

Need help managing your GOG games on Linux since GOG Galaxy is not supported? Minigalaxy is an option that focuses entirely on GOG and it has a new release out. While there's also Lutris which had a big upgrade recently too, it's quite a lot more complicated compared with Minigalaxy.

The idea behind it is simple: to just get you up and running on Linux with your GOG games. It doesn't really need to be any more complicated and for that - it works really well.

The 1.0 release brings with it some absolutely essential features including the ability to see games needing an update and to be able to update them in the app, DLC can be installed and updated now too, the installed filter will now show games that are downloading and the rest is general improvements and bug fixes. The app itself has also now been translated into Simplified Chinese and Spanish along with other translations being updated.

Want to try it out? Find it on GitHub .

Egosoft are continuing to expand their absolutely massive space simulator X4: Foundations, with a Beta now available for the free 4.0 update that will release properly early in 2021.

It's an absolutely massive update both in terms of features and technical overhauls, so they're quite right to say that it's the "biggest free update so far" and shows just how committed they are as a studio to make X4 the best in the series.

This update will bring in at least one major graphical upgrade with volumetric fog, although they said there will be several other wide-ranging visual improvements. The way they've implemented it sounds great too, and it sure does look good with soft layers of fog throughout space that will interact with light directly too. When you think about fog, it's not exactly sounding exciting but for a space game it really can liven things up.

Egosoft are also saying they've invested a "considerable" amount of time to make fleet combat better with "improved steering behavior and several important AI script changes". This will include a new order called a "Coordinate Attack", which seems to let you have an admiral "subsequently give movement, escort and attack orders to all the subordinate ship groups, to coordinate positioning, formations and attacks against the enemy fleet" which sounds like a lot of fun.

They also gave a quick demo of the improved fleet control:

Watch video on YouTube.com

There's also going to be a Transaction Log for detailed breakdown of income and outgoings, a new message system for important communications from NPCs, an expanded Encyclopedia, NPC factions can claim abandoned ships, lots of AI improvements to various areas and a whole lot more. If you want to see the full changelog you can find it here - fair warning though, it's a really long list. The Beta for Linux is likely only available on Steam.

For the full game right now you can buy it on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

They're also working on the upcoming X4: Cradle of Humanity expansion to release in Q1 2021, which is supposed to be releasing around the same time as the 4.0 free update. This expansion sees the X series return to Earth and it will "significantly" increase the size of the universe you have to explore along with new factions and plenty of other content.

Godot Engine continues seeing upgrades to the current 3.x series while the work is ongoing to bring Vulkan support the upcoming Godot 4.0. The second Beta of Godot Engine 3.2.4 is out now.

This has quickly become the most advanced and fully featured free and open source game engine around, and their work on it continues to be seriously impressive.

Here's what's coming to Godot 3.2.4:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (remember that we added it for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).
• Rewritten and greatly improved FBX importer (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• Improved Web editor prototype and AudioWorklet support for multithreaded HTML5 builds (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• New option to snapping 2D transforms to whole coordinates , helps prevent jitter on pixel art camera motions (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• Configurable amount of lights per object , now defaulting to 32 instead of 8 (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).

The lighters per object change is a great one, something I've seen a few developers gripe about and try to get around. Speaking on Twitter about the old limit, Godot's lead developer Juan Linietsky mentioned how "stupid" they felt about not having made it customizable originally and that while it's not optimal having it as an option is better, especially given the power of most computers now.

Read more over on the Godot 3.2.4 Beta 2 release announcement .

If you're looking for some Godot tutorials you should check out GDQuest , and they have a number of examples open source and up on GitHub like their recent Tactical RPG movement release pictured in testing below.

Are you working with Godot? Feel free to let us know what you're doing with it in the comments.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a true classic for many reasons, and it continues living on with the OpenMW free and open source game engine. It's been a while since the 0.46 release of OpenMW back in June 2020 but plenty of work has been going on since.

In a new blog post they did a round-up of work done during September-October and it all sounds pretty awesome. Here's a quick run over what's been going on:

• A modern 3rd-person camera view is coming, along with optional first-person head bobbing and a smooth movement feature to make animations look better.
• OpenMW is going to get Async Physics, which moved the game's physics from the main thread to one or more other threads, making OpenMW even better at using multiple cores.
• Work has continued on supporting groundcover with better performance, which adds grass and all sorts.
• The LZ4 format is now supported by OpenMW, which is used in later Bethesda games like Skyrim Special Edition. Supporting that game is a long way off, right now it might just help modders.
• Levelled items in untouched containers are now randomly generated from their respective lists when the game is loaded, mimicking the original engine.
• Automatic builds for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android on GitLab for every merge request that is opened.
• Work is ongoing to support the COLLADA 3D model format to work in OpenMW's rendering engine (OpenSceneGraph)

Amazing to see how much effort goes into open source game engine reimplementations. It's a very complicated job but one appreciated by thousands of players, as it keeps games alive on modern platforms and enables them to run better.

See more and download OpenMW from the official site . As you do need the Morrowind data files to play it, you do need a copy. You can pick up a copy of Morrowind easily from GOG.com .

If you didn't see it, here's the trailer for the last release of OpenMW:

Watch video on YouTube.com

It seems NVIDIA are no longer reserving the two extra digits in their Linux driver versioning for their special Betas, as a new stable driver is out today as 455.45.01 .

Quite a small driver that's just a few bug fixes but nice to see NVIDIA do updates both big and small. Here's what they say has changed in this version:

• Fixed a bug in a Vulkan blending optimization that could produce incorrect results. Some of the Vulkan titles affected by this bug were:
  • Life is Strange 2
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan swapchain creation to fail for full-screen windows when a G-SYNC monitor is connected.

This is part of their "Short Lived" branch, and should be safe for everyone to upgrade to if you're sticking to that. They also have their "Long Lived" branch currently on version 450.80.02 that was released back in September.

Since the difference isn't obvious, here's our usual reminder on what the changes are between their stable driver branches on Linux as explained by NVIDIA:

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.