tobias_platen's blog
Tobias Alexandra Platen's software freedom blog
The weekend after I ♥ Free Software Day 2025 – Sunday
This is part II of the I Love Free Software Day blogpost. More specifially it is about the game Veloren which I played once three years ago, when the pandemic was still ongoing. My computer that I had at time did not have a good GPU, so I used my brothers old computer with an NVIDIA card. A few years I got into VR which is only possible in freedom thanks to the libsurvive project. To be able to play VR games I baught an AMD graphics card, before that I used my Talos II’s built-in ASpeed graphics. With the new GPU I can drive up to 4 monitors. All the games that I run on my Talos II are free software:
VRChat is popular in the Transgender 🏳️⚧️ community, but I avoid it since it is non-free. V-Sekai is one of the free software replacements. While we need binaries to run a program on a computer, we also need source code for a program to qualify as free software. I am using part of the V-Sekai code in my BeatSaber clone called BeepSaber as I want full body tracking controlling an animated VRM avatar. While I usually present masculine as an enby 🖤💜🤍💛 (I never wear a beard), my VRM avatar will be female ♀️. For me that is a way to try out genders different from my gender assigned at birth.
There is another free software VR game that I would like to play. It is called VoxelWorksQuest and its author is the same person that wrote BeepSaber. Unfortunately it is unmaintained, so I decided to replace it with with a VR port of minetest (now called luanti). Minetest is similar to Minecraft and Veloren, but it is both free software and able to run on old computers with built-in freedom respecting GPUs. Luanti is also written in a programming language called lua, which I use at work a lot. In the next few weeks I will be continuing to work on Minetest XR adding missing important features to make the game playable.
Next month I will go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage where I also expect to meet many queers 🏳️🌈. There is also a “Gaming Night” 🎮 and many interesting talks, including one about KiCad (the tool that I use for building my own hardware), BTRFS (my preferred filesystem), Banking apps (unfortunately not GNU Taler) and Passkeys (allowing passwordless login). In the meantime I will watch recorded videos from FOSDEM, starting with “Declarative and Minimalistic Computing” then moving to “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM”.