Interview with Clément Mona

I wanted to try someting different and a friend of mine showed me Krita in 2017. I loved how intuitive Krita is, I handled the program very fast, more over my Wacom tablet worked perfectly on it, and that was not the case with oher applications at this time. I love how fast I can paint with Krita. Also, the brush customisation is very nice and complete.

LibreOffice: Rania Amina and Google Summer of Code

• Community Member Monday: Rania Amina

  The first reason is, because Ahmad Haris (he’s my boss in the office) “sudo’d” me to apply for membership :-) But to be honest, I was indeed very interested in becoming a member since the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in Surabaya about two years ago. By becoming a member, I think I can do things related to contributing to LibreOffice better than before. Being a member is a responsibility, in my opinion. Because it means I have to do my best from time to time for the LibreOffice community, both in Indonesia and outside. LibreOffice will get better if the community ecosystem is also good. Well, one of the tasks of members (in my mind) is to ensure that these communities can actively give feedback to LibreOffice, so that they can grow and develop better.

• Collabora mentors students at GSoC 2020

  Google Summer of Code is an amazing, international program encouraging the participation of university students in open source software development. It enables students to independently gain practical experience on concrete projects and matches them with experienced developers. This year a record number of almost 2000 students are taking part in the sponsored projects. Collabora is always delighted to support GSoC projects: some of our experienced developers are mentoring the students: guiding them in the code, encouraging them, and supporting the growth of their skills.

Games Leftovers

• Formula E Driver Disqualified After Cheating in Virtual Race

  Formula E driver Daniel Abt was disqualified after finishing third in a virtual race after it turned out he had been cheating by using a stand-in driver.

  Like most sports, Formula E events had been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the organization turned to virtual races using some of its drivers. Saturday’s Formula E “Race At Home Challenge” supported UNICEF and brought in drivers from around the world for the cause.

• Free and open source FPS 'Tomatenquark' releases on Steam

  Derived from the classic Cube 2: Sauerbraten game, Tomatenquark aims to reinvigorate it and bring it to a new audience with it now live on Steam. While the game as it is right now should be fully functional, it doesn't have a lot of built in content yet. It's in Early Access and they plan to keep it that way until they extend it further. Mentioning more Steam integration, campaign content, more language support and taking on feedback from the community.

• One Dreamer: Prologue is now supported on Linux

  One Dreamer: Prologue, a narrative-driven story about indie game developers is now supported on Linux. Telling the story of a failed VR game developer who inadvertently inspired two young kids to follow in his footsteps, One Dreamer: Prologue is a beautiful pixel-art puzzle adventure. After a short testing period which we highlighted recently, on May 19 the developer hooked up official Linux support on Steam so it must have gone well.

• ScummVM officially testing Ultima IV, Ultima VI, and Ultima VIII

  Want to play some classic RPGs? ScummVM is helping to keep many classics alive and multiple Ultima titles should now work nicely in it. On May 21 the team blogged that Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar has been added, based on work from the xu4 project. With the ability to play as the original or as an Enhanced edition with VGA graphics. The ScummVM integration gives it some extras like multiple saves, keybind configuration and more. They also announced Ultima VI was added, based on the Nuvie project. Again this has an Enhanced mode, although it works differently, giving you things like a full-screen map and other features. They said due to a "miscommunication", the Nuvie project may also continue as a standalone project.

• Travel through hell to find demon girls in Helltaker, now on Linux

  Helltaker, a game about someone on a quest through hell to gather a bunch of demon girls is now available on Linux. It's a small free game and it's somehow become really popular. With an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating from over eight thousand users—there's definitely something to it.

• Treasure Tech is a seriously fun new classic DOOM conversion

  Treasure Tech is another fantastic DOOM conversion mod inspired by the Wario Land franchise and it's out now. I will admit this mod is something hilarious. From the super-cheesy retro intro, to the ridiculous weapons. I couldn't hold in my laughter the first time I used the starter pistol! Seeing those classic Doom enemies go flying into the wall. Absolute pure joy.

• Winter Falling aims to blend elements of FTL with Total War

  FTL and Total War? Two very different games and one developer is attempting to take parts of both to create Winter Falling. From the same developer who made Mars Power Industries Deluxe, which I quite liked. The undead are coming - only you can stop them. Travel across the crumbling empire. Gather support. Make enemies. Lead troops in tense tactical battles, just you and your brain against the dying world... Make maps in the map editor, challenge friends! The gameplay involves you going through nodes across a map, engaging in real-time battles against hordes of the undead. You recruit different unit types, position your forces and then attempt to hold them off while using a few tricks up your sleeve like lighting trenches on fire while you cower behind them for safety.

• FOSS sprite editor Pixelorama has a big new release

  Pixelorama is an increasingly advanced free and open source sprite editor, and just recently it had a massive new release with plenty of new goodies. With Pixelorama 0.7 they added in layer locking, cel linking, a cel-based timeline, you can export animations to gif, a UI overhaul, shortcut bindings for tools, a pixel-perfect mode, layer rotation, a new zoom tool and the lisr goes on. It's quickly becoming quite fully featured!

• ABS vs THE BLOOD QUEEN successfully funded and coming to Linux

  ABS vs THE BLOOD QUEEN, a 2D side-scrolling adventure set in the Killer Queen universe has managed to get successfully funded on Kickstarter. Mentioned here on GOL at the start of May, BumbleBear Games are bringing their popular true arcade machine game to new audiences with a PC release and it will be supporting Linux. Against their Kickstarter goal of $33K, the campaign ended on May 22 blasting past it with $47,373.