The Sunday odds and ends Linux and gaming section

Blimey, where did Saturday go? It's Sunday already? Yes it is. A time for rest, relaxation and plenty of gaming. Time to go over a few random bits of news!

Starting off with a little update on a crowdfunding project, the retro adventure game Alwa's Legacy has 10 days left. So far, they're doing okay. Against their SEK 250k (about £20,195) goal, they're well on their way to get funding.

The sandbox survival game Vintage Story recently had a massive update with The Game Challenge Update v1.11. It now allows you to properly customize your game, there's some great looking visual updates, much smarter AI mobs, updated world generation to include beaches and loads more. A fascinating sounding game, which looks a lot like Minecraft in style but it has vastly different gameplay experience. You can find out more in the release announcement here, which has links to the major changes.

NVIDIA recently released the stable 440.36 Linux driver, quite a small one adding in support for the newly released GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER and a little bug-fix. NVIDIA also keep adding to the GPU documentation on GitHub.

Intel finally announced more details on their upcoming "Xe" dedicated GPU line and so far there's nothing seeming to be aimed at PC gaming. Their "general purpose" GPU code-named Ponte Vecchio is being focused first on HPC/AI, that's not say they're now not doing a gaming GPU but it's not what they're announcing yet.

War Thunder recently started enabling Easy Anti-Cheat to work alongside other solutions. This likely means anyone using Steam Play will need to switch back to the native Linux version. So far though, during my own testing of the native version it hasn't caused any issues in multiple hours of play.

The awesome free and open source 3D creation suite, Blender, had another update lately. Not a massive feature update like Blender 2.8, with 2.81 including thousands of bug fixes but it did come with some feature improvements too like an overhaul of the sculpting workflow, some experimental NVIDIA RTX support (supported on Linux too!) and so on.

Valve continue to update their older titles, with Portal 2 getting some gamepad improvements recently while also expanding local coop support for it. Nice to see older titles still getting attention! Portal 2 is absolutely fantastic too.

Psyonix have now confirmed the big update to Rocket League that will remove loot boxes is going live on December 4. This will bring in their interesting Blueprint system, an Item Shop, give everyone the Supersonic Fury, Revenge of the Battle-Cars, and Chaos Run DLC Packs free, Rocket Pass 5 and the start of Competitive Season 13.

Paradox Interactive have said that the Federations expansion for Stellaris (and so the next big free update too), will be releasing in "early 2020". Sad that it's not ready for this year, but it sounds like they're really trying to improve Stellaris. Paradox also said they've assigned some team members, who have a sole focus on improving the performance and the AI so that sounds great.

Sales Reminders:

• Humble Store Fall Sale
• Devolver Digital Publisher Sale on Humble Store
• Steam Remote Play Together Sale
• Daedalic Publisher Sale on GOG

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Once again I shall return Monday for another full week of news (plenty already planned and waiting), unless something big/interesting pops up before the end of today. Hope everyone had an enjoyable weekend.