Steam Play just got two updates with 4.2-3 and 3.16-9, some great stuff included

Valve and CodeWeavers are doing some great work for Linux gaming, with Steam Play seeing two updates in a single day.

Firstly, the older Proton series got updated to 3.16-9 which includes mostly minor changes like an updated DXVK to 1.0.2, a fix for some games failing or crashing in certain locales and fixes to minor xaudio2 and winhttp bugs.

Onto the real goodies now, as Proton 4.2-3 is also available today with some major changes included!

The first one is the inclusion of wine-mono, which they said should enable "many XNA games, Unreal Engine 3 games, game launchers, and more" to work. That's pretty big by itself, so it will be very interesting to see just how many more games become playable with Steam Play thanks to this.

Additionally, some noted titles that are now playable with this release on Linux are NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4, Evochron Mercenary, the launcher and update for Warframe is now "functional", Age of Empires II HD has fixed text input and something about "Continue maintaining Uplay functionality" which sounds good too.

Proton 4.2-3 also includes an updated DXVK to 1.0.3 and FAudio updated to 19.04-13-ge8c0855.

On top of that, while it's not clearly noted in the changelogs, Ethan Lee (creator of FNA, FAudio, Steam Play development, tons of Linux ports) mentioned in the FNA Discord (can be seen on Twitter in an image too) that Proton 4.2-3 actually uses FNA as the XNA 4.0 implementation. In their own words "This means that all Windows-only XNA games on Steam now use FNA's Windows support when run on Steam for Linux. It essentially puts the tools we've been using to hackport XNA games and drops them into the hands of every single user on Steam. When it comes to increasing the catalog size and user base, this is pretty hard to top!"

Very exciting stuff, I imagine there's going to be lots of Linux gamers excitedly testing plenty of games this weekend.

As always, you can see the changelog here.