Playback.dem

The Playback.dem for July is here! This one was a bit light compared to the game-release filled month of June - but there’s still important things to address.

Gaming News

Game Releases

You can grab Marathon 2 on Steam and for free if you’re itching to replay Bungie’s classic shooter. All in thanks to the Aleph One Developers in the Marathon community for maintaining these old games. A showcase example of how the community can successfully take ownership of a game and ensure it stays authentic, while being more accessible.

In May they also put the first Marathon on Steam, so if you don’t have that yet, make sure you register it with your account.

Another thing worth mentioning is the port of Fortress Forever, the OG port of Team Fortress to Valve’s Source Engine to Source SDK Base 2013. Fellow frag-net.com IRC members mv and bt told us all about it! This fixes a lot of bugs and technical problems that are difficult to work around in older versions of the engine. Plus you get a Linux port for free, for the very first time. We’ll probably be organizing an event for this in the near future. Check out the 2013 branch of Fortress Forever on Steam.

Last, but not least, we wanted to highlight a very promising looking mod that will appeal to all the fans of the movie Alien (and Aliens), titled Solitary Echoes. They have a new announcement, with an approximate release window and some super sweet, kickass screenshots and video clips that’ll make you want to reinstall Half-Life if it’s somehow not present on your hard disk. CHECK IT OUT NOW!!!

DXVK 2.4 with built-in Direct 3D 8 Support

Soon to be no-doubt integrated with Steam’s Proton compatibility tool, the new release of DXVK integrates D8VK by AlpyneDreams into mainline DXVK. So now more games made in the early 2000s that rely on Direct3D 8 should run much better, out of the box, on Linux and of course: Steam Deck.

Piranha Bytes ‘embraced’ to death

Embracer Group, which spent a lot of money on things they could not afford, has decided to cut their losses by shutting down legendary German developer Piranha Bytes. Björn (whose likeness will be familar to all the Gothic players, no doubt) and Jenny Pankratz will go on to found a new studio named Pithead Studio. We wish them the best!

Hardware News

Have AMD? Want to run programs utilizing CUDA? That one last big feature exclusive to NVIDIA? You can now run CUDA programs, as-is, on AMD chipset based GPUs thanks to SCALE by Spectral Compute. Most gamers probably don’t care about this, but it’s worth mentioning that after this was released, NVIDIA announced about two days later that NVIDIA has finally decided to open up their driver stack on Linux entirely. Ironic, that’s about it.

This was a long time in the making, surely - but also long overdue. In case you need us to explain why, the AMD/Radeon people worked out years ago that the community will happily contribute to the code and help make superior drivers - and the stack in Mesa for Radeon cards has thus been excellent. Just look at Steam Deck. ’Nuff said!

And for you Archivists

Earlier this month the .plan Archive went online. Fellow frag-net.com IRC user erysdren together with id software’s Sponge collaborated on collecting over 8000 .plan files (so far). Check it out to learn about 90s game developer their thoughts, hopes and dreams. A great research base, which we will consult often.

All in All

After last month, which had events such as Summer Games Fest and various video streams by companies in the industry, this one seems a bit light at times. We’ll see you at the end of August for more.