Table of contents for Summer 2020 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell It’s grand that Slapimages, or whatever you call them, can bring new software to fixed-release distros. And it’s great they can be confined to limit system contamination. To the cynic though, Flatpaks are like the Windows way of downloading random binaries from the internet, and Snapcraft is akin to Apple’s App store. I’ll stick to Arch packages, if it’s all the same with you. John Knight I’m just glad people are finally taking third-party packaging seriously. I use Snaps, I use Flatpaks – both have their pros and cons. You can use both, so I use both. I would like to see AppImages get more attention. Linux normally has almost zero backwards compatibility, but AppImages can solve that. Calvin Robinson Sorry, I’ve never used Snaps. Command-life apt all…

“Given how businesses are re-evaluating the very foundations upon which they operate, it’s perhaps not surprising that there’s been a spike of interest in migrating to the Cloud recently. Two recent, very similar, conversations reminded me that when it comes to Cloud migration, it’s easy to do it badly and not even know how poorly you’re doing. Most times when we do something poorly, it’s obvious. The paint looks awful; the seam’s not level; the landing was jarring. But you can set up Cloud systems badly, and it won’t immediately show. Not until the bills come in or the data is compromised or the availability isn’t what you were expecting. If you’re on the side of the desk that wants to migrate a business function to the cloud, make sure…

“Recently, we all finally learned that the rumours had been true: Apple is going to switch to Arm-based processors of its own design in future products. This was jokingly referred to as “one of the worst-kept secrets” by some press friends of mine. Among the glitz of the demo during WWDC there was a brief demonstration of “Linux” (actually Debian) running on the “transition kit” hardware that’s being made available to certain developers. I think this will mark an industry transition toward more Arm-based devices, particularly in laptops (phones and tablets are already 95 per cent Arm based) where we can expect to see increased battery life as one of the upsides. Yet at the same time, it’s crucial that we don’t lose the ability to run free and open…

Q Printer blues In looking at the new printers from HP and Epson, I notice that none of the new printers have software drivers for Linux. The Linux Foundation Open Printing site has not been updated to include any new printers either. That suggests that one needs a Windows 10 PC with Vendor Printer Utility drivers to maintain new printers. So what’s the best way to set up a Linux PC to print files to a Windows 10 PC when both PC have their own firewall software to block external traffic? It would be helpful if Linux Format could do an article with step-by-step instructions on how to set this up. Gary Hedquist A For a print magazine I suppose it is odd that we don’t talk about printers…

In both your compiler settings and the Makefile you can choose where to look for supporting libraries. Your IDE can sometimes write this file for you. However, when you add a framework or library to your project, you have to import it yourself. You usually do this by adding them to your Makefile. In most IDEs you have all the standard libraries available by default and then you add your project properties. Eclipse brings in libraries through your project’s Properties screen, which resembles the settings interface for other common programs. A nice feature is that you can set references to other projects that are in progress. You set the compiler options for NetBeans in the same way you do in Eclipse, with a neat addition: Pre-build is separate from the…

Summer is well upon us and what better way to celebrate the warmer days and longer evenings than to grab some fresh sprigs of mint from the garden, muddle yourself up a refreshing mojito (or a nojito if you’re driving), and relax with our exclusive guide to the freshest Linux flavour around. Linux Mint 20 has hit the mirrors, and it’s one of the finest releases yet. It’s long been our go-to recommendation for people taking their first steps with Linux. Cinnamon, Mint’s homespun desktop, is ideal if you prefer a traditional home computing environment, in the style of Windows 7 (only much better, of course). For fans of Gnome 2, or for those people who are running lower-powered machines, don’t forget the Mate and Xfce editions, either. With this…

Once you’re satisfied that we were quite correct to recommend Linux Mint to you (you’re welcome), you’ll likely want to install it on your metal ASAP. But hold on there, soldier – installing a new operating system should never be done lightly. It’s never been easier to install Linux, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t go entirely to plan. So back up your important files before doing anything else. BACK UP… JUST IN CASE“It’s never been easier to install Linux, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t all go to plan. So back up your important files before doing anything else.” Doing a full OS backup is overkill, and your games and programs can all be easily downloaded again. So concentrate on personal files, like documents and photos and…

John Mertic is director of program management for the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project (www. openmainframeproject.org), an effort to bring open source knowledge, and of course Linux, to mainframe computing. Hip youngsters today may not be aware that every bank transaction and every flight booking all end up being processed on mainframe machines. But it is fact. Also, despite processing all this valuable data and often having hundreds of CPUs and thousands of gigabytes of memory, no one (that we know of) has ever hacked a mainframe. Thanks to Zowe, one of the Open Mainframe Project’s key efforts, a green-screen 3270 terminal is no longer the only way to access mainframe data. You can use SSH, cloudy REST APIs or even a JavaScript-powered desktop. And you don’t need to know…

This Raspberry Pi thing is all getting very serious. Clearly, serious people need serious standards and things don’t get more serious than OpenVX. Developed by The Khronos Group – no, it’s not a cabal of evil supervillains – this is the serious industry group that developed the seriously low-level GPU API Vulkan and the GPGPU compute OpenCL library. Its latest development is to bring OpenVX 1.3 to the Raspberry Pi. This is an open source, industry standard cross-platform library that accelerates computer vision applications. It enables developers to more easily create portable code that’s power efficient… and now it can be run on the Raspberry Pi. What’s visual computing we hear you cry! It’s all that fun stuff like gesture tracking, motion detection, video surveillance and object recognition that ties…

OUR EXPERT Jonni Bidwell is fairly contrary. His garden grows with silver bells and cockle shells and Raspberry Pis all in a row. YOU NEED Raspberry Pi (3 or higher recommended) Raspberry Pi OS Lite on an 8GB+ card Pi Cam (or any other camera you can get working) Battery or other power source (PiJuice is advised). There are all sorts of things you can do with a Pi and a camera – some of which we dare not mention, and some of which we’ve already covered. Back in LXF265, for example, we showed you how to make a Pi bodycam. We’ve also done stop-motion video (LXF249) and a neat Pi camera booth (LXF248). Way, way back in LXF195 we also made a motion-detecting camera, and we thought it’d be…

Raspberry Pis are often used for control projects, even though they run an OS. PICs represent the ultimate in this progression, in being just single chips, even though companies have built PICs into SBCs, like the Curiosity development kit. Our aim here has been to inspire you to try your hand at PIC programming, and present an overview of the process. But you’ll need much more in the way of user documentation such as the XC8 User Manual, and perhaps PIC datasheets. Check out the wealth of information at www. microchip.com. We’ve concentrated on low-end PIC chips, but the range allows you to start with chips like the PIC16F1619 and work your way up as your needs increase. To give you an idea of what lies at the top-end, PIC32MZ…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi. He’s been participating in virtual hearings during the Corona virus pandemic. Back in the 90s and most of the 2000s, Linux users frequently switched distributions, or otherwise had to perform a fresh installation to keep the system updated. One advantage of this approach was that you got to clean your drives of unnecessary muck every so often. This is in sharp contrast to most modern Linux installations, where users are either running a LTS variant, or even a rolling release distribution, neither of which necessitate frequent reinstallation of the system. The downside to this system strategy, however, is that your number of directories and files keep growing with time. This makes for a messy navigation even if you’re a master…

As your usage of Zenkit To Do grows, you’ll start to notice more views appearing underneath the Inbox – these are so-called smart lists, automatically populated according to the status of your to-do items. For example, once you start adding deadlines to to-do items, you’ll start to see time-sensitive lists such as Today or Week, enabling you to view items whose deadlines are approaching. Other smart lists include Assigned to Me – for viewing tasks you’ve been allocated as part of collaborative projects – and Starred, which you can use to list specific tasks of your choice by clicking the star button at the top of a task’s Edit pane. Items can belong to multiple smart lists, so if you’ve starred a task that’s been assigned to you that’s due…

The newest version of Proton isn’t necessarily the best. As new features are introduced, they may break compatibility that older versions allowed. Using ProtonDB, you can check which version of Proton gives the best results for each game. More advanced users should try protontricks – a winetricks wrapper script for Steam Play that enables you to easily run winetricks commands for Steam Play/ Proton games. See https:// github.com/Matoking/ protontricks. If you want to kill a Wine game stone dead in Lutris, right-click its menu entry in the main window and choose ‘Kill all wine processes’ from the drop-down box. Also worth trying is the ‘View on Lutris.net’ entry, which will give user reports on your game.…

Godot is a free (as in beer) and open source video game engine. It’s an impressive toolset provided at no cost and with liberal licencing that enables people to create their own video games without spending months first creating the engine. The idea is very similar to PyGame, a Python module we’ve used often in games programming tutorials in this magazine, in that an advanced toolset is compiled that includes most of the groundwork one would need to create a game. Things like sprites and physics are taken care of, so the programmer can get straight onto designing their video game. Godot uses an MIT or Expat licence that grants programmers the permission to use Godot for any purpose: study how the engine works; change the engine itself; and redistribute…

“Won’t people think it’s 20 years old?” management asked when they saw our Linux Mint cover. That made us pause. It’s not older than Ubuntu and that’s 15-years old. So we stuck to the facts: Linux Mint 20 is out and it’s about to turn 14-years old on 27 August 2020. It was Mint 13 that adopted the Cinnamon desktop and helped put Linux Mint on the map. The aim was to create a classic desktop, designed how users wanted a desktop to work – an entirely reasonable request. With Linux Mint 20 there’s been another shift in direction: the distro is distancing itself from Snaps. Again, the reasoning is fair. Snaps are being surreptitiously installed when you apt-get certain packages, and can’t be audited. There’s a vocal group of…

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.8. He’s said throughout the 5.8 release candidate kernels that 5.8 is a big release, yet the key standout is that there isn’t a key standout. While in the past, big releases have been marked by specific contributions – such as significant register descriptions for AMD GPUs in kernel 4.12 – 5.8 is “really all over the place”, with over 14,000 non-merge (summary) code commits and counting. The first two weeks of a kernel development cycle are referred to as the “merge window”, when disruptive changes are allowed and new features land. The latter weeks of the cycle are for stabilisation and bug fixing. New features landing in 5.8 include a tweak to how the kernel handles swappiness, security fixes and many…

Gnome and KDE do a lot more than give you a nice set of core applications. Besides the panel, desktop and menu (or other form of application launchers) there’s the not-insignificant task of managing windows, and indeed having the window manager (WM) talk to the pager/dock/anything else that needs to know which windows are where. Before we even get to that your login manager has to register your session (either with systemd’s logind or an alternative like elogind or Consolekit2), so that the system can be locked, suspended or shut down without requiring root privileges. The desktop also needs to automount removable devices, which can be done with Udiskie or Udevil. And if you don’t want to rely on NetworkManager, then you’ll need to set up your connections manually or…

An integrated development environment (IDE) brings all the tools a developer needs into one interface. There’s no single IDE that will meet everyone’s requirements, so we’re here to highlight some of the best to help guide you towards development nirvana. Basic editors are fine and require you to know how to set up a compiler. A full IDE removes much of this burden, but if you discover that some source code is missing, it’s good to know the basics so you can obtain your beautiful code to compile. Most IDEs are similar in that they have an editor and a console. Where they differ is the style of settings, how the files are presented and how to debug. In your IDE, you’ll have many settings to make your work faster…

The majority of the programs in this Roundup expand their functionality using extensions or plugins. For example, Eclipse builds all functions of value with extensions. In fact, if you’re looking for a C/C++ tool, you end up with CDT, which is Eclipse extended for C/C++. The Eclipse marketplace has almost 2,000 different solutions on its website. These cover many different languages and other tools such as code management and co-operative working. NetBeans is more focused on Java, but the available plugins support many languages and other enhancements. You can also find these plugins elsewhere as .nbm files. Note that the netbeans.org site contains plugins up to revision 11.2, while newer versions are on the netbeans.apache.org site. PyCharm has many helpful plugins for your Python programming tasks. However, for other languages…

Those of you who want to exercise your mind and body at the same time might balk at our suggestion that you take up caving. Yet, as we discovered in LXF244, when we looked at the technology of cave surveying, venturing underground can pose both a physical and a mental challenge. However, the technology used in caving doesn’t have to end with hand-held electronic surveying tools and laser scanners, coupled with open source Linux software for post-processing and map preparation. Here, we’ll look at how technology can be used in exploring caves, photographing them, monitoring the underground environment for scientific research, and even minimising the risk involved in venturing into these potentially hazardous (my dad tells me it’s perfectly safe–Ed) environments. You might be surprised to learn that our main…

The official Canonical-supported desktop flavour of Ubuntu for the Pi won’t be with us until at least version 20.10. But recently the company announced something else: Ubuntu Appliances. These make easy work of turning all those spare Raspberry Pis sitting gathering dust in your basement into useful IoT things. For example, the openHAB appliance can connect to Hive thermostats issued by British Gas, so you can monitor and tune your central heating. OpenHAB supports all manner of other bindings (both to hardware and online APIs) – check out the list at https://openhab.org/addons/bindings. There’s a Nextcloud appliance too, and thanks to glorious HATs such as Radxa’s Quad SATA (which enables you to make a four-drive RAID array) or the Pi 4’s USB 3.1 bus (which can make use of an NVMe…

For low-end chips with only a small amount of program memory, you might choose to program in assembly language instead of C. Here we’re assuming that you’ve already done some assembly coding on a different processor and, for that reason, that you only need to learn about PIC specifics. You’ll easily be able to do that as a self-learning exercise, but a few words on the peculiarities of the PIC 16 series instruction set will, hopefully, help you get up to speed. Higher-end PIC devices differ but the thing you’ll probably find surprising about PIC 16 series chips is that they don’t have any conditional branch instruction such as BRZ (BRanch if Zero). Certainly the chips have the necessary status bits – specifically zero and carry bits – but a…

Apart from providing a tree view of directories, Broot can also be used to search for files or folders. As soon as you start typing, Broot will start narrowing down results to matching files or folders. You can move between the offered results using the arrow keys. You can also use regular expressions to narrow down results. To do this, type <expression> and Broot will immediately produce matching candidates. The difference and need for the two becomes obvious when you search for a keyword such as ‘asc’. On our machine, Broot provided kaos-welcome.png as well as ascii-image.png, among others. While the latter makes sense, Broot matched each of the different letters in asc and also suggest other files and directories that featured those letters. On the other hand, when you…

By default, lists are shown with a small icon denoting the first two letters of the list name – you’ll need a Plus subscription to change this for a custom icon, but you can at least change the icon colour and background colour for free – right-click the list name and choose Settings. You can archive single tasks and entire lists – just right-click the item and choose Archive to hide them. To reveal an archived task, right-click its parental list and choose Settings> Archive; lists are restored by clicking … next to their parental folder and navigating to Archived Lists. You have until 15 November 2020 to import your Wunderlist data into Zenkit To Do – see https://export. wunderlist. com. Once downloaded, unpack the zip file, then select Import from…

SOUND EDITOR Audacity Version: 2.4.1 Web: www.audacityteam.org Shortly after Mike Bedford’s excellent hands-on Audacity tutorial in LXF264, the well-known audio application gained a significant new release (and also turned 20-years old back in May 2020). The new Audacity 2.4 is the same old Audacity that we know and love, but benefited from a range of improvements that we want to cover here. One new addition is the Time Panel that’s located below the Waveform (note that the size and placement of the panel can vary). When using Audacity keep an eye on the screen from a distance – it can be handy to make the Time Panel larger and more readable. The drop-down Waveform menu now sports a Multiview check box, which enables you to display the Spectrogram and Waveform…

ProtonDB (www.protondb.com) follows the same rating system as Wine’s database, with Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Borked (ie. broken). Silver and Bronze titles either work partially, or work with user tweaks. ProtonDB’s front page tracks Platinum and Gold titles, which are games that essentially work out of the box. If you look at the Explore section, you can see the newest games to be user rated, or explore the massive database of user reports on individual games, stating how they fared and what hardware and software they’re using. If you’re keeping track of Proton’s progress, the best thing to do is watch the harshest statistic. At the main page, there are three options: Native, Rated and Provisional – usually the first two are enabled by default. Disable Native, leaving only…

Don’t forget to comment that code! As we progress in Godot we’ll end up with multiple scenes with dozens of attached scripts, so it’s important to comment to remind ourselves what does what. Keyboard shortcuts save time and help us become more efficient developers. Take a look at the standard shortcuts by going to Editor>Editor Settings> Shortcuts. We can add our own custom shortcuts, too. Naming conventions are important for code recognition. GDScript insists on starting private functions with an underscore, for example _private_ function(). It also makes sense to begin Booleans with is, i.e. is_this_true().…

This series of building retro games in Python has so far seen us coding a lunar landing space module, a side-scrolling platformer, the famous pellet-munching, ghost-chasing Pac-Man, and in this issue we’re going to develop our own version of Pong! To many, Pong is the original arcade game. It’s certainly the first video game to become a commercial success. Released for arcades in 1972 and for the home in 1975, Pong was gained popularity worldwide and is now permanently memorialised in the Smithsonian Institute in Washingon DC. Developed and self-published by Atari, Pong is a 2D table tennis simulation with arguably the most simplistic game design imaginable, while managing to achieve an incredibly addictive gaming experience. What gameplay? Gameplay mechanics in Pong are quite simple. It’s essentially ping-pong seen from…

“Every year, Percona runs an Open Source Data Management Software survey. Here are a couple of early results I’ve cheery-picked from this year’s survey, based on responses from just over 600 people. As you’d expect, open source is winning. Last year’s results suggest that 89 per cent of companies are running more than one OS database, and the 2020 figures look likely to match, if not exceed this. The use of more than one cloud provider or ‘multi-cloud’ has grown this year from 30 to 39 per cent. This is mostly a move to protect against outages and performance issues. Ironically, we also found that downtime is now the top issue that keeps DBAs up at night. However, things aren’t so rosy with the cloud and Database as a Service…

“2020 has been, and continues to be, a redefining year for conferences. With large in-person gatherings prohibited due to the pandemic, most technical conferences have decided to either cancel or venture into online conferencing. While Halifax, Canada would have been a fantastic host city, the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) committee decided to host the event online for 2020. Using free software, the conference will happen from the comfort of everyone’s homes. Taking place over a whole week (24 to 28 August), this year’s edition will have a different feel without its invaluable hallway track conversations. However, organisers are working to replicate as much of the LPC experience as possible, with refereed talks, microconferences and BoFs continuing to be the core of the 2020 edition. This year again, the committee is…

Peter Oskolkov posted patches titled Introduce FUTEX_SWAP, which attempts to begin the process of upstreaming a Google in-house threading performance optimisation that’s been deployed widely in production for many years. The basic idea is to move from a 1:1 (kernel threading) model in which every thread has both a userspace and kernel context to an M:N (hybrid) model in which there are N userspace threads multiplexed onto M kernel contexts. The work is described in a paper and a video linked from the patch: https://lwn.net/Articles/824409. Steven Price posted patches enabling KVM guest support for Arm’s Memory Tagging Extension (MTE). The new architecture feature aims to enhance application security by assigning tags to memory locations. When a memory access is performed, the correct tag must be used. If it’s not (as…

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is skiving off), so it’s important that you include as much information as you can. If something works on one distro but not another, then tell us. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have, or suspect, a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. Consider installing hardinfo or lshw. These programs list the hardware on your machine, so send us their output. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the following commands in a root terminal and…

For this Roundup, we looked at how quickly you can get started and what your options are for testing different choices. We checked how you can install and how much of your system you need to fill with libraries to get started. To test these IDEs, we ran them with a selection of sample projects and then tried to store, configure and create our own. We installed and tried to start a project, and looked at how to configure your instance of the IDE. Many projects run from a common repository, GitHub is the biggest, and you need to stay up to date with the code using some type of version control system. The available choices are not new, so they support older control systems. We also tested how you…

In the face of it, you may think that an IDE is necessary for programming. Weigh up your decision carefully though, because if you use any of the two editors – VIM and Emacs – then you can set them up with most features that are available within your current IDE. You can even have a REPL running inside them. If you look around, you can find distributions for Emacs that cover all the needs of a programmer. There are many plugins in VIM that help you program and plan your project. You can even set VIM to compile at save. If that feels like a development step too far then consider Geany (www.geany.org). It’s a text editor, but it has many plugins that cover both languages, revision control and…

Linux Mint’s XApps suite comprises a text editor (Xed), photo viewer (Xviewer), PDF reader (Xreader), video player (Xplayer) and photo organiser (Pix). Those may sound fairly parochial, and desktops all have their own equivalents of these, so why another new batch? Because many of these either ended up being forked from older Gnome versions, or were intrinsically coupled to Gnome componentry. The XApps can be used on any desktop, and will never sacrifice traditional user interfaces. Gnome is often accused of making style over substance design decisions. It’s also all but banished status icons and AppIndicators from its desktop, even though many applications still use them. So the project now has its own XApp.StatusIcon implementation as well as applets so they can be used in different desktops. It’s up to…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford discovered PICs many years ago and felt an immediate affinity since they provided an ideal way of working on hardware and software together. With the entry-level boards in Raspberry Pi family costing less than £5, we’re fully conversant with the low cost of computing power. Yet if you’ve not encountered them before, the price of chips in the PIC microcontroller range from Microchip Technology might still be surprising. The fact is that an entry-level PIC chip can be bought for about 40p, and this drops to as little as 25p in high volumes. Needless to say, these chips don’t offer a lot of processing power – in fact many of them wouldn’t even be able to support an operating system. Yet in many embedded applications –…

Fans of the Wunderlist cloud-based task manager will by now know that Microsoft has finally pulled the plug on the venerable service, which was launched in 2011 by a German company (Wunderkinder) before being bought by Microsoft in 2015. Users were directed instead to switch to Microsoft’s own To Do application, but while it retains many of Wunderlist’s features, it’s not the same experience – plus there’s no official client for Linux (But it said it loved Linux? – Ed). Thankfully, project management specialist Zenkit has spied an opportunity and developed its own Wunderlist clone. Zenkit To Do mirrors the Wunderlist experience as closely as possible, aiming to replicate not just its look and feel, but the feature set, too. The application harnesses the Zenkit eco-system to provide a cut-down…

If you want to keep appraised of any changes made to a task or list by other users, subscribe to ensure those changes are faithfully recorded and alerts sent via the main notifications tool. To subscribe to an individual task, just right-click its title (or click the … button in its Edit pane) and choose Subscribe. To subscribe to a list, right-click it and choose Settings, then flick the Subscribe slider so it’s turned on. These notifications are delivered via the main Notifications tool (the bell icon) by default. To edit how subscription notifications are delivered, choose File>Settings>Notifications. When you do this you’ll see options for both Activities and Comments. Click one and flick the switches as required. Keeping track of which lists and items you’ve subscribed to might be…

Gaming on Linux used to be a dead-zone. Then along came Valve and its ill-fated SteamOS and BOOM! From its ashes rose Steam Play – based on its Wine-powered Proton technology – and a first-world gaming experience for Linux users that can bear a walled garden. Since its inception, Steam Play has developed a rich ecosystem of third party add-ons that we thought was finally worth exploring. For the uninitiated, Steam Play is Valve’s overall service for Linux, using the Steam software service to run both native Linux games and Windows games through Proton. Proton is a modified version of Wine developed by Valve that allows compatibility for newer DirectX games, and uses the new Vulkan graphics API for strongly increased performance. As such, before we can continue, it’s vital…

Before you hit the reset switch, there are a several things you can try to get back to your desktop. If your desktop already has xkill setup, then you should be able to press Ctrl-Alt-Esc, and the red skull and crossbones will appear. Whatever you click next will die, returning you to your desktop. If that option isn’t available then try hitting your Windows key or pressing Alt-Tab. If that gets you back to your desktop, you can open your system monitor and kill your zombie program from there, or enter xkill in a terminal. If you’re still stuck, you can kill the application with htop from a system terminal, though you’ll need to install it first. Try pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 (this terminal should be available on most systems), which should…

Looking for further support? Godot has a vibrant community available online to assist, as is the beauty of open source communities. Godot groups can be found on IRC, Discord, Matrix, Facebook, Reddit, Github, Twitter, Steam, YouTube and of course the official forums: https://godotengine.org/community. Official documentation is also at hand for fine-tuning code: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/development/compiling. If you’d rather play around with the code base of Godot than use it to make games, you can access the GitHub repository at https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs. Open Source communities are always looking for additional contributors, from developers to bug finders. There’s a role for everybody, so get don’t feel shy about getting involved – just clone the code, or submit an issue. Even if bug hunting is a little outside of your remit, there’s always HTML documentation to…

Try introducing a score limit to the game. With the addition of selection, an IF statement could be used to end the game once a player reaches a particular score count. Could we take things to the next level and create a four-player version of Pong, with a paddle on every side? It would be utter madness, but it sounds fun! Our game is a two player experience, much like the original Pong. Consider how we might implement a non-player character to take over from player B if another person isn’t available to play.…