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Games: Godot, Steam, and More
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Godot Engine ☛ Dev snapshot: Godot 4.5 beta 1
Godot 4.5 has entered beta and is now feature-complete!
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Automating my Car shooter game with MCTS
This project began as a casual college game I developed in my second year, using Pygame. The idea was simple. You’re driving a car, and your job is to survive enemy attacks, collect energy to stay alive, and shoot down as many opponents as you can. The more you destroy, the higher your score.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Alienware's 'Performance Boost' Hurts Gaming on Linux
You buy gaming computers for their performance, so it certainly sucks when a "performance boosting" feature actually harms performance. This seems to be exactly what's happening for Linux users trying to use Alienware's G-Mode feature.
A feature on select Alienware laptops, known as "G-Mode" or "Game Shift," designed to enhance gaming performance with a single key press, is being removed from the Linux kernel. Developers have found that on certain models running Linux, the feature paradoxically leads to worse performance than the standard "performance" profile. The reversal of this feature was merged this week as part of the x86 platform driver fixes. The code is being reverted ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release and is also slated to be back-ported to a Linux 6.15 point release. This will effectively disable the G-Mode functionality that was just introduced for the Alienware m16 R1 in the open-source driver.
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PC Gamer ☛ Steam turbo-charges its performance overlay, shows you how many real and framegen frames you're getting and, oh, Proton is enabled on Linux by default now
You know what gamers love? Information. Not me. Personally, I think whatever goes on in the black confines of my PC tower is none of my business—fans spin up, fans spin down, sometimes something beeps. It's a strange and arcane world I have no truck with, but I'm an outlier. Most folks out there want to know how many frames they're getting, what kind of load their GPU and CPU are under, and just what the hell is eating up all that RAM (it's Chrome).
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XDA ☛ Steam's latest beta build makes gaming on Linux a breeze by enabling Proton for all titles by default
For the longest time, gaming on Linux felt like it pretty much ended with Super Tux Cart. If you wanted to try out the newest games on Steam, you'd have to have a Windows setup somewhere to play them on. You were stuck unless the game developers were kind enough to make a Linux version.
Today, things have changed. There's a handy compatibility layer called Proton that allows Linux systems to run games developed for Windows with zero effort from the developers themselves. Of course, if they want to make a Linux-native version, they can, but they don't have to.
Right now, if you boot up Steam on Linux, you need to manually enable the Proton layer and select which version you want to use. Presumably, this is because Proton is still being tested, and Valve wanted the feature to be opt-in while it works out the bugs. However, the latest Steam beta build seems to have removed the toggle, meaning that Steam games will boot up with Proton by default if needed.