Wine 8.0 has reached the release candidate stages. RC1 upgraded VKD3D to 1.6, provided an improved joystick control panel, and fixed 52 bugs. Now RC2 has arrived, and with it are 50 bug fixes. Note that from here on out Wine 8.0 is in a feature freeze; only bugs will get fixed from here on out. There’s quite a few gaming-related fixes in RC2: there should no longer be a crash when bringing up the Steam overlay with a PE build of VKD3D with D3D12 support gamepad buttons should now work properly and no longer be delayed Unreal Tournament 99 mouse clicks in main menu should now continue to work after first click Warframe should no longer crash when loading before menu with WineD3D Kholat (GOG version) should now run Silent Hill 2 should no longer get the -installshield extraction error while installing performance degradation fixes for World of Warcraft and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men demo construction set extender mod for ESO should no longer crash Resident Evil 7 should now properly render in DX11 mode Chicken Tournament should no longer crash on start Serious Sam 2 should no longer crash with OpenGL renderer Some other fixes have made it in as well; see the full patch notes on WineHQ.

The first day of winter also marks a new update to Proton Experimental. Small one, but a good one. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt now apparently works – I’m assuming this is in reference to the recent DX12 upgrade that had been broken for so many people. Support for steering wheels has been improved, but in what way, the patch notes don’t mention. You might be able to take a look at the commit history to get a hint.

Turns out one of my followers on Mastodon is a developer for Ubuntu/Canonical. I had the pleasure of interviewing what he does for Ubuntu – he’s one of the kernel developers (Livepatch – he’ll explain what that is). It’s a pretty interesting interview, as he explains the controversy behind Snaps, why Ubuntu moved on from Unity to GNOME a few years ago, what’s going on with the Mir display server, and what we can look forward to in regards to the gaming aspect on Ubuntu.

Sonic Adventure 2 – the cult classic. Fans have gotten together to make the game moddable. From an extended Chao World, to the ability to play as Super Sonic or Super Shadow, to revamped cutscenes, it’s amazing to see what the modding community has been able to accomplish to make a great game even greater. But for today’s guide, we’ll be focusing on giving the game a modern HD look. Not only are the character models replaced with more modern-looking ones, but the mod also contains a sound redesign.

When browsing controller profiles on the Deck, you can now search for them with today’s (or yesterday’s?) Deck client update (on beta and preview branches). Your library should now properly load if you have Family View enabled. More buttons have been added to the list of inputs “that skip the BPM/Deck start up animations.” A regression was fixed regarding Yaw and Roll combined sliders. Negative contribution from either one is now respected.

A bit of sad news. NVIDIA is apparently shutting down its GameStream service sometime in February next year. Despite all the crap I give to NVIDIA, their GameStream service is excellent. It arguably has the best streaming quality with the least amount of latency, and even though the company essentially locks the service behind GeForce Experience, the community has come up with open-source alternatives – such as Sunshine – to get the host to run outside of Windows and NVIDIA GPUs.

So JSAUX had been concocting an idea after another company stole their idea of having an RGB dock. Well, today they’ve unveiled what exactly they’ve been working on – the ModCase. It’s a modular case that seems to be similar to what the Project Killswitch and the DeckMate were offering – the ability to customize what you want to accessorize on your Steam Deck. Your browser does not support the video tag.

Immortals: Fenyx Rising came to Steam a few days ago. However, it has evidently faced quite a few issues for both Steam Desk and Linux desktop users. Namely, the occasional pop-up of the Ubisoft Connect overlay, the keyboard and mouse configuration being applied by default when using a gamepad, garbled audio, and black line flickering on the grass rendering. Fortunately, GE-Proton is here to once again save the day. Well, at least, partly.

Steam Deck The Verge did an interesting interview with Pierre-Loup Griffais and Lawrence Yang regarding Steam Deck 2, Steam Controller 2, and their thoughts on the 6800U Crisis Core remake works great Tuesday’s client update (beta) fixes OSK on game exit and adds support for the Armor-X Pro attachment Wednesday’s client update (beta) adds better UI scaling at higher resolutions and adds Xbox Elite/Switch Pro layout preview pages Thursday’s client update (beta) fixes gamepad focus issue on the Steam store, adds minor fixes to login UI layout SteamOS 3.

The Verge recently conducted an interview with Valve’s Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais – arguably the two most vocal employees about the company’s handheld device that is the Steam Deck. I wanted to mention it because there was an interesting tidbit regarding AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U APU, which is currently shipping in devices like the AOKZOE and the OneXPlayer Mini handhelds. As I had alluded to in my Aya Neo 2 post, the 6800U is using Zen 3, RDNA 2 680M graphics, eight cores, and can clock up to 4.