The December blog is out!

Bringing more classic gaming goodies with the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, D7VK 1.0 is out now for Linux.

From the GitHub page: "A Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine. It uses DXVK's D3D9 backend as well as Wine's DDraw implementation (or the windows native DDraw) and acts as a proxy between the two, providing a minimal D3D7-on-D3D9 implementation."

In the release announcement the developer mentioned how they consider it "production ready" but not everything on it is quite finished, but it's good enough to run a whole bunch of games properly.

The artwork looks great, but I can see why Escapist called it "Sarah Contra 3"

A political social stealth narrative game about lying and stealing from the ultra-wealthy? Better Than Us certainly sounds like a game for the times. Sitting somewhere between a point and click adventure and a visual novel, it has a really great style to it.

Developed by Little Bat Games, who made the BAFTA-nominated Vampire Therapist it's going to feature an all-star voice cast to keep you hooked in. Here's a little more about it

Dungeons of DUSK has been announced from New Blood Interactive. It's a retro dungeon crawler set canonically between the episodes of the classic FPS DUSK. How exactly does it fit in? According to New Blood it "starts right after the end of Episode 1 of DUSK. Literally".

It's a "proper RPG" too with skills to unlock, passive bonuses, NPCs to help you along the way and multiple different game modes to crawl through. Interestingly, they also confirmed that the inspiration behind the game was DOOM RPG, a 2005 mobile game from Fountainhead Entertainment.

We're on the road to the release of Wine 11 early next year with the first Release Candidate now available for the Windows compatibility layer. This is what Valve's Proton is originally based on, and so eventually next year we'll see Proton 11 too.

Now that this release is out, they will move onto a feature-freeze to focus on fixing up bugs.

The highlights of this Wine 11 RC 1 release include:

• Mono engine updated to version 10.4.0.
• Locale data updated to Unicode CLDR 48.
• TWAINDSM module for scanner support on 64-bit.
• Various bug fixes.

A few game fixes were noted for the likes of Oblivion, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and various others.

A lovely blast from the past of 2015, Nuclear Throne from the revived Vlambeer has update #100 out now with some major additions and improvements. Originally founded by Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, nowadays Nijman owns 100% of the company after Ismail sold their part in it back in 2024.

Going back 10 years ago, Nuclear Throne was easily one of the most popular games in its genre. To this day, it's easily still one of the best too. Valve have also now given it a re-test and they've given it the green tick of Steam Deck Verified approval. It does have a Native Linux version, but Valve set it to use Proton 10.

Oh no, it's going to pull me back in isn't it? War Thunder is finally adding infantry combat to its roster of war games in a future update. Testing is due to begin this month, being spread across stages for an eventual full roll-out during next year as the mode is still under development.

Interestingly, they're taking some elements from another game they publish called Enlisted, with you controlling a squad. They said you control a single soldier, but you have "full tactical control over the entire squad" and they will automatically follow you and assist in all combat situations.

Github workflows:

• fixup automatic building and attachment of GE-Proton release tarballs.

Proton:

• changes imported for upstream proton
• changes imported for upstream build environment
• changes imported for upstream lsteamclient
• changes imported for upstream steamvr
• FEX now builds as part of proton as per upstream changes
• wine-wayland/em-10 patches rebased
• wine-staging patches rebased
• SDL dummy controller will no longer be active when steam input is inactive (such as when wine-wayland is enabled, in which case steam input doesn't work)
• ffxvi (16) crash with wayland enabled fixed
• DLSS Scaling now available
• add PROTON_DLSS_INDICATOR to enable DLSS hud
• add PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR to show FSR4 watermark
• docs: Update Readme for scaling _UPGRADE variables:

fsr4 PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE Automatically download amdxcffx64.dll and upgrade games with FSR 3.1 to use FSR 4. Version to download can be specified by supplying it as a value, like so PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE="4.0.1", instead of 1. Downloads version 4.0.2 of the required DLL by default. This option also disables AMD Anti-Lag 2 currently due to various issues.

fsr4hud PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR Enable the FSR4 watermark at the top left portion of the screen.

fsr4rdna3 PROTON_FSR4_RDNA3_UPGRADE Identical to PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE but for RDNA3 GPUs. Enables some required compatibility options and downloads version 4.0.0 of the DLL by default.

fsr3 PROTON_FSR3_UPGRADE

dlss PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE Automatically download and use newer versions of nvngx_dlss(d|g).dll DLLs. Version to download can be specified by supplying it as a value, like so PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE="310.2", instead of 1, to download version 310.2.1.0. This option also sets DXVK_NVAPI_DRS_SETTINGS to use the latest preset. If you provide your own config for it through this environment variable, your configuration is going to be applied..

dlsshud PROTON_DLSS_INDICATOR Enable the DLSS overlay at the bottom left portion of the screen. This is exactly the same as FSR4_WATERMARK=1

xess PROTON_XESS_UPGRADE

Protonfixes:

• yet another fix for space engineers
• fix for the outer worlds 2
• ntsync disabled for SOMA
• upscaler download handler utility added
• Check if a directory is readable before attempting to map it.
• fix for Zeit 2 added
• fixes added for Death end re;Quest series from GOG
• Add fix for "They Are Billions" crash when using Russian localization
• Add fix for "Not For Broadcast" and "Not For Broadcast: Prologue"
• Fix CEF issues in Duet Night Abyss

If anyone else finds Steam’s desktop chat client a bit unreliable on Linux—sluggish UI, finicky context menus, emoji pickers that vanish when you try to click them—there’s a solid alternative worth knowing about.

You can use Steam’s web-based chat directly in your browser at:

https://steamcommunity.com/chat/

Just log in and everything works noticeably smoother: menus behave, emojis are clickable, and the interface feels much more responsive. The only catch is you’ll need to keep a browser tab open for it.

Hope this helps anyone else looking for a more stable Steam chat experience.

I'm on Linux Mint 22.2, trying to update Project Zomboid to a beta version, and when Steam gets to the 'validating' part of the update it hangs. The content_log.txt file shows the following:

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] GetCellList - failed to get AppData for WinUI

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] Load failed: /home/USERNAME/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/libraryfolders.vdf.

[2025-09-30 17:04:24] Load failed: /home/USERNAME/.steam/debian-installation/config/libraryfolders.vdf.

The 'GetCellList' error repeats a bunch so I'm assuming that's where it's hung up, but I wasn't sure if the 'load failed' messages were relevant so I included them too.

I've tried restarting Steam, my computer, and internet comments suggested deleting the files that are causing the problem, but when I temporarily moved them to the trash that didn't fix the issue (they've been restored now). Any ideas for next steps would be greatly appreciated! Please let me know if I need to be adding any more info from different log files.

FEX 2512 is out today as the newest monthly update for this software that enables running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux, including the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for being able to run Windows games on 64-bit ARM Linux devices.

The FEX project is all the more important now that Valve announced the Steam Frame VR headset powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ARM64 SoC. The Steam Frame will be using FEX for allowing x86/x86_64 games to run on this AArch64 device. Valve and the FEX project also both recently confirmed that the FEX open-source project has been sponsored by Valve as a strategic play. So expect a lot more optimization and gaming-focused work to continue for FEX with the Steam Frame now inbound.

I'm using lutris to run Guild Wars and I'd also like to run guild wars toolbox which needs to be run after guild wars has already started.

I tried running guild wars and toolbox as different lutris installs but toolbox cant see the guild wars process.

Does anyone know how this can be done?

Regardless of which compatibility layer (Proton 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, experimental) I use and if I use the native libraries or Steam's, the discovery services work, but I can't see other players in the Anomaly.

Weirdly enough, on Steam Deck it works without any issues, but obviously I want to play this on my beefy gaming PC 😥

How can I fix this?

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/32843569

Hey, back in the old days unfortunately, I used to use windows, a fit beautiful girl gave me the game. I would appreciate if there's any tricks to get game to work on linux

Hi guys! I am changing distro and am kinda settling on KDE-Neon (ubuntu based), as this was pretty reliable for me back in the day. So far it's been all great, but I'm wondering why Lutris (which came pre-configured and untouchable in a way in Nobara) won't detect additional proton installs. I'm using ProtonPlus with Lutris chosen, and I have installed for example Proton-EM. I can see ProtonPlus did download and add a folder on my user:

/home/my-user/.local/share/lutris/runners/proton/

However this doesn't seem to get Lutris to show it. I only get wine-ge-8.26, Proton-GE Latest and the system Wine. Why is Lutris not catching the Proton-EM? What should I do?

Thanks!

Ready to go POSTAL once more? This time it's in a survivor-like bullet-heaven styled setting, because obviously every developer needs to be in this genre now. Not that I am complaining, it actually reminds me of the time it felt like everyone was attempting some sort of Battle Royale.

Here you get to suit up and cause some chaos as one of 11 playable POSTAL Dudes from different timelines. Each with their own starting loadout and perks as you blast through hordes of enemies. And, because it's a survivor-like, you will get cards thrown at you to pick upgrades to evolve your POSTAL Dude during a run.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/50096730

Got a new disk and reinstalled my system (Fedora 43). Followed my own guide how to compile Opentrack with the Neuralnet tracker plugin: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

Worked fine but needs some build dependency updates meanwhile, like qt6 instead of qt5. Still amazed how good the Neuralnet tracker with ONNX runtime is.

Short demo video: https://makertube.net/w/bC93YNXQ4aE4ha5xwufPJC

In my formative years it was accepted by most that the point and click adventure game was a dead genre. Sure, a handful were still being made, but more often than not these remained nostalgic takes hearkening back to the true heyday of the genre. Most devotees would instead stick to their old favourites, even in the face of mounting incompatibility challenges. These were issues that The Wyrmkeep Entertainment Co. would attempt to solve, starting with Inherit the Earth and The Labyrinth of Time.

First released for Linux in December 2004, both games were retooled to use the Simple DirectMedia Layer, but were otherwise kept as faithful ports of the originals for good or ill. For the The Labyrinth of Time some audio improvements were made, but the only new addition was the "breadcrumbs" navigation feature that I never felt the need to use. Being built around the multimedia capabilities offered by the arrival of CD-ROM, The Labyrinth of Time from 1993 is an arthouse first and a game second.

Valve has been a big proponent of Linux gaming, and now the company is investing in Android support on Linux. It’s already possible to run Android in a Linux container through Waydroid, but Valve has developed a new fork – and it has officially named it Lepton.

Last month, news broke that Valve would soon support Android games on Steam. This was thanks to a sighting in Steam app changelogs for Walkabout Mini Golf, which added an APK file. The VR title is currently available on the Meta Quest (which runs on a custom version of Android), and may run through the Lepton compatibility layer for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR headset, which runs the company’s Linux-based operating system, SteamOS.

Now freshly Steam Deck Verified and with MicroProse Software backing it as publisher, TFC: The Fertile Crescent has a big upgrade out now. A pretty sweet real-time strategy game that's like a pixel-art version of Age of Empires, with an interesting food mechanic that will challenge even veterans of the genre.

Great to see the developer has pulled in some more support for this overlooked gem. Thanks to the new partnership update 1.3 brings translations for the game into German, French, Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Portugese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. On top of that the last bit needed (on-screen keyboard) was sorted to enable it to get Steam Deck Verified.

This might be the most exciting update for Core Keeper yet bringing in loads of new tools and a big boss battle to the mining sandbox adventure. It has Native Linux support and is Steam Deck Verified.

You'll be able to jump in when update releases on January 28th, when it also arrives on Nintendo Switch 2.

What's in it? A ridiculous amount by the sounds of it. They're not giving out exactly what, we'll have to wait for the patch notes at release day. Some of what they explained includes a whole new Beyond the Passage biome with a huge boss battle and brand new automation systems. Since there's new enemies, you also get new tools including: miniguns, mortars, grenades, remote detonators and even a flamethrower.

A bit of gaming history returns to modern platforms with the release of Exodus: The Colonization of Space now available on Steam. Originally released all the way back in 1997 for Acorn RISC OS computers (an old British company), a name I've not heard in a long time - I'm sure we had an Acorn computer in my original primary school class.

Created by then-developer Artex Software as their first commcerial game, the founders of it would go onto creating Deck13, a name more of you may be familiar with as the developers of The Surge and Lords of the Fallen. Artex have now returned too but as a publisher and Exodus: The Colonization of Space is just a little retro treat.