Lutris 0.4.0 has just shipped and marks the beginning of a new development cycle for the project. The main goal of this release was to bring the project to Python 3 which is becoming the default version for most current Linux distributions. This update allows us to take advantage of some of the new features of the language and ensures us to have a supported code base for the years to come (although, Python 2 won't be deprecated before 2020).

We also have some features with this release and 3 new runners make their debut in Lutris. First we have Adventure Game Studio which is an Open Source game engine for point and click games. Then there is an Web runner based on Electron which will completely replace the Browser runner in future versions. The Electron runner was made possible thanks to our awesome new team member djazz !

And last but not least, we are now shipping the long awaited libretro / Retroarch runner! Libretro and Lutris were always meant to be together and now they are finally united! With the presence of libretro cores, we can now get rid of several runners that didn't fit our quality standards or were buggy: Mednafen, Dgen, Mupen64plus and PCSX-R are all going to be removed in future versions of Lutris to be entirely replaced with their libretro equivalent. Note that we provide 3 options for Playstation emulation with libretro: First one is the PCSX Rearmed core which can work without a BIOS for most games, then we also offer 2 versions of Mednafen PSX (which will require BIOS files to play any games). The first standard Mednafen PSX core is the standard Playstation emulation that was already available in the Mednafen emulator. The second one, Mednafen PSX HW, is an early stage effort from the Libretro team to bring many improvements to Playstation games (Read more about it on their blog ). While still a bit glitchy and unoptimized, the results are already amazing! We'll soon post some videos of this emulator in action.

Aside from the new runners, the existing Vice and Zdoom runners have received some fixes and updates and should provide a bunch better experience now.

The Lutris client itself has also received some new features. A lot of people asked us how to set custom banners and icons without having to navigate some hidden folder. This is now possible from within the game properties! Also regarding icons and banners, fetching those from our server should be approximately 16 times faster now, thanks to some Python 3 feature.

Two new system options have also made their appearance: The ability to select a monitor for SDL1 games (helpful for the games that span across 2 monitors when started) and an option to switch to an US keyboard layout while running a game, handy when a game doesn't support rebinding controls and has been designed for US keyboards only.

Also starting today, Lutris has now a Patreon page which you can use to support the project. There are a lot of upcoming features for this development cycle with a special focus on support for more gaming stores. Our next goal is to bring full GOG integration to the client, basically replacing any need for the long awaited GOG Galaxy, even bringing more features since it would allow running most Windows and DOS games as well. How fast these features get implemented mainly depends on the amount of support we will receive from Patreon. More donation means more time spent developing the platform. There are a lot of upcoming features and we'd like to bring them out there as fast as possible :)