Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Eclipse Phase paper role-playing game, new games out for Linux, Vulkan Developer Day, and more.

Open gaming roundup for January 16 – 22, 2015

Pick of the Week: Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase is a pen and paper role-playing game from Posthuman Studios. For those not familiar with pen and paper role-playing games, Eclipse Phase is similar to the more well known Dungeons & Dragons. Players share stories and explore a fictional world by creating characters and rolling dice to resolve challenges while one person, the gamemaster, provides structure and guides the overarching narrative. However, unlike the traditional fantasy setting of Dungeons and Dragons, Eclipse Phase features a hard science fiction setting with transhumanism as the key thematic element. In the future portrayed in Eclipse Phase, the mind and body have become completely separate things that make it possible to create backups and forks of characters, like switching bodies to better suit the mission at hand.

The Eclipse Phase rule books are all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Because of this, it’s okay—even encouraged—to share the rule books with others, making it easier to introduce new players to the game. In fact, Rob Boyle, one of the game’s designers, has the PDF editions of all the books available for download on his personal blog. While Rob Boyle does share the game freely, he encourages people who like the game to purchase copies if they “want to see the game thrive.”

Hat Tip to fellow Community Moderator Joshua Allen Holm for contributing this pick of the week!

Valves 100 Gbps bandwidth expansion

Linux Game News writes that Steam has added 100Gbps of extra bandwidth to its online marketplace to support the monthly 450 to 500 petabytes of data gamers download. Steam has seen a traffic increase of 75% every year.

Vulkan Developers Day

Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, blogs about NVIDIA’s first Vulkan Developer Day that happened on January 19 this year. The event attracted dozens of top graphics developers to its Silicon Valley headquarters. “The developers day brought key engineers from NVIDIA’s development partners together with NVIDIA driver experts.” The developer day sessions were recorded and will be made available on the NVIDIA developer portal.

Vulkan is the new generation, open-standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs.

New games out for Linux

Dinocide non-linear platformer

Linux Game News: “The retro-inspired world of Dinocide is a journey to find your partner who has been kidnapped by an evil and mysterious dinosaur god.” Dinocide is available on Steam for Linux as of January 21.

Dinocide is a classic NES inspired old-school single-player platformer in a prehistoric fantasy world. Dinocide tries to capture the drive and fun of that era and recreate it in a modern way!

 

The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human

New on Steam this week is The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human. Gaming on Linux wrote a preview on the game already. More details are available on the official website.

Explore the ruins of the human race and discover the thriving wildlife that blossomed after our extinction in this underwater action/adventure. Encounter monstrous creatures and let curiosity guide you through an inevitable voyage of extinction.