Rusted Warfare is sitting in quite a sweet spot for me. It's a grand-scale 2D RTS, that's like an indie low-res Supreme Commander and it's great. Something I originally discovered on Android while messing around on an old tablet going back a great many years now. It has full cross-platform support for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and soon iOS too. Kicking down all kinds of barriers for people to play together.

A major 1.14 update just came out with tons of new features, bug fixes, new units and so on. One of the big additions is the new Modular Spider, a huge mobile walking base of operations. It has six slots where you can built turrets and modules. It's a starting unit and cannot be built normally, so you would use it instead of the command centre building. It's also pretty damn awesome. Take a look at some footage:

Watch video on YouTube.com

On top of this huge new mobile unit there's also new defensive turrets you can build, special upgrades for money extractors like faster credit generation but less health, an AA Beam Gunship unit, a Heavy Anti-Air Mech, a new server system is up, there's new maps, spectator support, a new borderless fullscreen option, lower memory use so you can cram in more mods and more.

Modding is a huge part of Rusted Warfare and with this release, modding support was greatfully expanded too with lots of new options. The developer mentioned that the new systems that the Modular Spider uses are available to modders too, as it was originally made to be an example of what you can do. Full change log here - it's long.

Find Rusted Warfare on Steam , if you love competitive real-time strategy games you won't be sorry. It's an absolute gem. You don't have to take just my word for it either, on Steam it has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" user rating.

To play the classic city-builder Caesar III on modern platforms there is the FOSS game engine Julius, however there's also a more advanced version called Augustus that had a major new release.

Much like Julius, you need the game data files for Caesar III with this being a free and open source game engine only. It differs from Julius in quite a lot of ways too, and it's actually a fork of it so another developer took the Julius and built upon it to make something different. The idea with Augustus is to enhance Julius for Caesar III with customized gameplay, UI enhancements and much more (rather than sticking to being accurate to the original). Some of the additions include roadblocks, zoom controls, market special orders, a global labour pool, increased game limits and more.

Augustus 2.0.0 and 2.0.1 went up this week, and along with lots of bug fixes there's quite a lot of new features and overall enhancements to the game. Some highlights of this major update include:

• Allow indefinite play of campaign mission: after extending your mandate for a few years, the player will be asked again to accept the promotion or extend the regency.
• Soldiers on Forts now require food. Food is supplied through a new building, Supply post. A supply post sends a walker to collect food from granaries. Lack of food causes morale penalties and slows down recruitment. Multiple types of food provide a morale bonus. Only one Supply post can be built on a map.
• Added support for building rotation, add rotate building options. Works for gatehouses, Warehouses, Forts and hippodrome, as well as new Paths.
• Added support for loading outside images, to be used for new content.
• Added console, along with some cheats.
• Added new permissions to Roadblocks: labor seekers, tax collectors.
• Added a number of new aesthetics buildings (gardens, statues, etc.) for more visual variety, desirability effect is the same as statues of respective sizes.
• Added monuments: buildings that take resources and special buildings to complete and grant bonuses to your town when complete.
• Monuments added: Five Grand Temples; one to each of the gods, a Pantheon dedicated to all the gods and a Lighthouse.
• Added new buildings used in monument construction: the Work camp and Engineer’s Guild.
• Added building upgrades for Grand Temples and the Pantheon. Select and pay for one of two upgrades that empower priests in your city.

There's lots more to it big and small but those are some bits that really jumped out at me. Augustus really is advancing the original Caesar III and then some.

You do need the original game assets, which you can grab easily with a DRM-free copy of Caesar III on GOG.com or Steam . Gran a copy of Augustus itself on GitHub .

Another fresh Steam Client Beta went up on November 13 , improving support of Steam's own Steam Input handling with the newer controllers from the next generation consoles.

The Beta notes that the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller now has initial support with Steam, however there's a few advanced features (trackpad / gyro) that are not currently supported. Additionally, the Xbox Series X controller should no longer show up as 2 separate controllers.

Nice to see Valve getting in early on that. They're not the only ones doing so either, as SDL 2 the cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware also recently added in support for both the PlayStation 5 DualSense ( commit ) and Xbox Series X too ( commit ). Both of which were added in by Sam Lantinga from Valve.

Additionally, if you were seeing lots of blank windows when starting Steam on Linux that should now be fixed.

To try out the Steam Client Beta at any time, you can opt in / out by going Steam -> Settings and then see this:

Enjoy your fancy Razer hardware on Linux? You should probably check out OpenRazer, which is a nice big collection of drivers for Linux. A project that's been going for a long time now, with no sign of it stopping and it just keeps on improving.

Another example of the open source community bridging the official support gap for users. Just recently OpenRazer 2.9.0 was released, adding in support for plenty of additional devices including these:

• Razer Atheris
• Razer Basilisk X HyperSpeed
• Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2020)
• Razer Blade 15 Base (Early 2020)
• Razer Blade Stealth (Early 2020)
• Razer Cynosa Lite
• Razer Cynosa V2
• Razer DeathAdder 2000
• Razer Kraken Kitty Edition
• Razer Kraken Ultimate
• Razer Viper Mini

Pictured - the Polychromatic UI you can use with OpenRazer.

There's also several overall improvements that came with this latest release of OpenRazer including read support for idle_time and low_battery_threshold, it's now possible to configure the battery notification frequency, razercore & razermousemat drivers were combined into the razeraccessory driver, Razer Viper & Viper Ultimate devices have been cleaned up and support more effects now, screensaver monitor now supports Xfce and the fake driver support has been improved. Additionally a few bug fixes also made it in.

I've personally been using it for some time, along with the Polychromatic UI pictured above which works without any issues with my own DeathAdder Chroma.

You can find out more about it on GitHub and their website .

The hackers working away on the Wine compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps on Linux tagged a new development release with Wine 5.21.

In terms of new highlighted features, here's what they said is new:

• GDI32 library converted to PE.
• More fixes for windowless RichEdit.
• A number of timezone updates.

Small when just looking at that, but as always that only shows off one side of it. They also noted 24 bugs fixed across the likes of: Fallout 76, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Mu Online, Path of Exile, League of Legends, GOG Galaxy and more.

One other fix tagged as of this release was also quite interesting, with developer Georg Lehmann implementing support for VK_EXT_debug_marker. This newly hooked up extension support with Wine should hopefully allow people working on it to do a little extra debugging, with the likes of DXVK and Wine.

You can find the Wine 5.21 release announcement here .

Additionally, Wine Staging 5.21 is also now available which is the area where lots of extra patches are available across various areas but not yet ready to be pulled into Wine proper.

Supporting newer and more advanced Windows games like Control and Death Stranding, the Direct3D 12 to Vulkan layer vkd3d-proton has a 2.0 release. This is the Valve-sponsored fork of the original vkd3d project from the Wine team, with this having a pure focus on working with the Proton compatibility layer for Steam Play .

Today a new release of vkd3d-proton went up tagged by DXVK creator Philip Rebohle, who mentioned that it should now work with these titles along with having D3D12 Feature Level 12.0 and Shader Model 6.0 (DXIL) support:

• Control
• Death Stranding
• Devil May Cry 5
• Ghostrunner
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Metro Exodus
• Monster Hunter World
• Resident Evil 2 / 3

Find the release announcement here .

You're going to need the most up to date drivers possible to use it fully. For AMD that means Mesa's RADV driver, which according to the readme the current recommendation is for drivers right from the current Git development. For NVIDIA you want at least driver version 455.26.01.

Frictional Games have released Amnesia: Rebirth 1.1 which is a very important upgrade for Linux fans as it fixes up some major problems.

At the release, sadly the game was something of a mess for Linux with floating objects and at times everything vanishing. Thankfully, it seems the Linux graphical issues have been fully solved and you should now be able to play through. Nicely timed here by Frictional for Halloween.

Here's the 1.1 release highlights:

• You can now skip memories by holding down the left mouse button, or right trigger on a gamepad.
• Linux graphics glitch fixed.
• Various blockers fixed.
• Various bug fixes.

It's not quite perfected though, and their next update will be focusing on more Linux fixes like full-screen issues on some desktops and the game acting oddly when you go to quit. On top of that full mod support is coming as they're "almost there" but it needs more testing.

We've livestreamed the first part on our Twitch Channel , and if you missed it you can find the first full episode on our YouTube Channel . Obvious spoilers if you click the link. Episode 2 of our play-through will go live on Twitch on Saturday October 31.

From what we've played so far, it's pretty incredible. A seriously intense atmosphere, that like previous Frictional horrors relies a lot on your immersion and psychological horror rather than constant jump scares. Amnesia: Rebirth likes to play with your mind. There's some impressive jump scares too though.

You can buy Amnesia: Rebirth from GOG and Steam .

Still can't believe my eyes as I try out games with 3dSen PC, with it converting classic NES games into 3D and it just feels like magic.

Currently in Early Access, this amazing emulator is truly like no other. In real-time it converts your favourites into full 3D with a properly adjustable camera. In action it's pretty incredible to see and far more than a fun gimmick, it really does make games look and feel different.

Due to how it works, game support is limited as each needs to be setup so that 3dSen PC can understand what it needs although the list is growing. As of the latest release the developer has hooked up official profiles for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Solomon's Key and Fire 'n Ice.

Here's a quick look at Castlevania II: Simon's Quest in 3D using 3dSen PC just to demonstrate:

Watch video on YouTube.com

It's not perfect of course and accuracy can be improved further, along with stuttering issues at times when new scenes are loaded in but it's not finished and will no doubt improve during Early Access.

You can find 3dSen PC on Steam . Additionally, you can attempt to make your own 3D profiles using the free 3dSen Maker standalone companion app on itch.io .

Sponsored by Red Hat, the Fedora Linux distribution has today released Fedora 33 which brings in numerous improvements for desktop users.

For desktop users, Fedora Workstation is what you're looking for if you want what they claim is a "just works" Linux experience. Fedora 33 pulls in GNOME 3.38 'Orbis' which by itself is a pretty big upgrade, see our previous overview on that here . They're also now using the BTRFS filesystem as the default, which is again quite a major change that includes lots of advanced features for those who want it but for desktop users it shouldn't be a noticeable change. The Fedora team mention that the switch to BTRFS is laying the foundation to build upon in future releases.

Pictured - a fresh test install of Fedora 33.

This release also brings in an animated background (based on the time of day) by default which is pretty slick looking. As part of Fedora's "First" mission they try to include all the latest and greatest software and with Fedora 33 you get the likes of Python 3.9, Ruby on Rails 6.0, and Perl 5.32 as default. In their KDE edition, they've also enabled the EarlyOOM service by default to improve the user experience in low-memory situations.

If you make use of the Wine compatibility layer, this release should also now use the Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer DXVK as the default instead of wined3d which should give much better performance in Windows games run through it. As after we covered the proposal , it was approved . Fedora 33 ships with Wine 5.20 and DXVK 1.7.2.

You can see the release announcement here , release notes here and download from here .