Yep, I can confirm it's working fine now.

New snapshot of the platform games collection

We have not announced these snapshots lately, but they probably do deserve a bit of focus. Especially as it is a great occasion to drop the name of many games, and that might be a good way for our readers to notice their favourite games are getting some love.

So today we released a new snapshot of the platform games collection, the first one since late November 2025. This is not a collection getting a lot of activity (I am terrible at platform games, and try to stay as far away as possible from them) so the list of updated games is quite short: From this list, Guacamelee is a new one (new for ./play.it, it is actually the 2023 build of a 2013 game). I would like to write a bit more about it… But it is a metroidvania, and that genre happens to be my worst nightmare made game. It is supposed to be a really good indie game, I am letting you be the judge of that.

Then we have Celeste that got support for a new itch.io build, thanks to Locynaeh, who is making their first contribution to this platform games collection.

All other games in that list got maintenance updates, mostly fixing bugs, updating workarounds, and, as much as possible, dropping shipped libraries. Especially the dreaded Steam ones.

Finally this snapshot is applying the Anti-Capitalist Software License on (almost) all game scripts. As our way to remind capitalism that it is past time for it to fuck itself into its grave. This is costing us our "Free/Libre/Open-Source" label, but seeing the current state of the open-source movement, should we really care?

git is dead, long live got!

You might remember from our previous news post, about ./play.it 2.35.2 first release candidate, that we dropped our static analysis tool (ShellCheck) due to it being polluted by generative AI. Well, this time we had to drop a tool much more central to our development process: git!

Yes, that is right, the brain of git developers turned into pudding at the contact of generative AI, and that tool can no longer be trusted. It is time to throw away the fifteen years we spent developing expertise with git, and replace it with something that is hopefully going to stay away from the AI collective craze.

Our choice is Game of Trees (got), an OpenBSD tool that is compatible with git repositories but is not (and this is important) a git fork. Of course it leads to a lot of things to learn and unlearn, and releasing the above platform games collection snapshot took much longer than usual. Actually it is not even fully done yet, as we still need to update our APT repository (apt.dotslashplay.it), and that first requires converting the underlying tooling and habits to got too.

In the last years, it means most tools used for daily ./play.it development have been polluted by AI and needed to be replaced: Hopefully our remaining tools, GNU Make and shUnit2, are safe for now.

On the sysadmin side of things we had to replace a lot of stuff too: Just imagine all the great things we could have done with ./play.it if we did not have to waste time replacing both our tooling and our habits, throwing away a decade of experience in the process… And this is not done yet, even only on the git front we still need to replace at least cgit and gitolite.

Please do everything you can to rush the final crash of generative AI, so we can once again focus on fun stuff. And if you still have some time and energy left after that, bringing an end to capitalism would be great too.

Second release candidate of ./play.it 2.35.2 bugfix update

A couple extra bugs have been found since the previous release candidate, so the testing period is extended with some extra fixes: The release of this update is most probably going to be followed with an unexpected feature update, ./play.it 2.36.0, to get rid of more of the AI crap polluting the whole free/libre ecosystem.

We need to take some time to think about impacted game engines too, as for example ScummVM and Ren’Py already turned into AI slop. Suggestions on how to handle these game engines would be welcome.

./play.it 2.35.2 bugfix release

./play.it 2.35.2 is ready for a release, so by the time you read these lines it is probably available already. It includes the following fixes and improvements: We are still going to look for bugs, but at the same time the work already began on something unexpected: an extra ./play.it 2.36.0 "feature" release. That is actually not going to be about any kind of new features. Instead this one is going to be part of our decontamination effort, cutting our ties with AI-polluted software. More details follow below…

Decontamination efforts

Generative AI is pushed by so much marketing and politics that it is now becoming a core part of free/libre software. This is something we are not going to stand idly looking at, ./play.it is not only going to take part in the Resistance, it is actually going to spearhead it!

The first step, already underway, is obviously to get rid of all our polluted dependencies. That includes stuff ./play.it directly rely on (like ImageMagick, to replace with GraphicsMagick), game engines our games depends on (like Ren’Py, ScummVM or DevilutionX, all polluted), and obviously the tools we use during development (vim replaced with vis, git replaced with got, tmux replaced with screen, etc.).

Yes, you read that correctly: we are going to get rid of polluted game engines! And for these, there is usually no ready-to-use alternative, so more work for us, yay… We started with Ren’Py, forking its last 2022 release (8.0.3), dropping all useless stuff (there was so much of it…), fixing its build process then its major bugs… and finally we are able to run ./play.it-packaged games with our new fork! You can find our cleaned-up Ren’Py here: http://git.dotslashplay.it/game-engines/renpy/ and its dependency pygame_sdl2 here: http://git.dotslashplay.it/game-engines/pygame_sdl2/

You might be surprised about this 2022 cutting point. After all, the first commits identified as AI-generated are from March 2026, so why not take the version right before that? Well, it is all about trust: the first commits openly identified as AI-generated are from 2026, that’s true… but how much can you trust a development team who delegated their thought process to tools provided by the libertarian far right, tools that are known to aggressively deteriorate the ability to think and actually encourage lying?

So no trust for any of these people. We chose 2022 as the limit, because it’s right at the end of 2022 that ChatGPT was publicly released for the first time. This should almost guarantee that the code we are importing had not been polluted yet.

We are not going to keep developing all the engines we are decontaminating. Instead you can expect a frozen-in-time build, fixed to build and work on current systems. These builds could then be used to work upon and start the development of a once again actively developed game engine. This last part would need to happen outside of ./play.it, we lack the good mix of time/energy/motivation/money/people/skills to handle these efforts on top of all else. But please feel free to get in touch, we are going to keep these in a good state so any fork as a clean base to start from.

GOG.com, from Nazi bar to Nazi den

If you are a regular visitor of GOG.com forums, you probably already noticed that they are very welcoming of alt-right trolls. It is well-known that the moderation is, to say it nicely, very lax when these people are involved. This leads to weekly, more specifically at the beginning of every week-end, threads pushing their favourite topics: sexism, racism, homophobia, and more generally how « the wokes » (sometimes called « the gay agenda » or « the leftist conspiracy ») have killed the whole video games industry.

This leniency from GOG.com has led to the inevitable: its transformation into a Nazi bar, where the alt-right is welcome to fester and their victims and usual targets are leaving for their own protection. And it became even worse lately, with GOG.com pivot to generative AI. Because, you probably already know it, generative AI is nowadays the most central tool of fascist ideologies.

A new low has been reached a couple days ago, with GOG.com marketing team deciding to include Nazi iconography in the subject line of an e-mail send to most of their customers. To the notable exception, because as all Nazis they are a bunch of cowards, of their German customers. Knowing full well that in Germany they could still have faced legal repercussions for that shit.

Oh, and do not think this was an accident or a coincidence. The e-mail included, all in a row: a sonnenrad, a kolovrat and the Schutzstaffel insigna. The only way to pretend this is not a Nazi dogwhistle is by being a Nazi yourself or at least a sympathiser, knowing full well that this kind of stuff is supposed to be silently noticed but publicly denied.

So, for obvious reasons, this is the end of ./play.it relationship with GOG.com. Our game scripts have already been updated to remove all URLs to GOG.com online store, that we are never going to advertise ever again. As an individual, they are no longer going to get any cent from me. And I used to be quite a big customer, slowly getting to one thousand bought games…

And this is yet another example why only DRM-free games should ever be bought: when the store can no longer be trusted, it can be left without losing any of the games you bought. My collection is safe on my hard drive, I do not rely on GOG.com’s good will to keep accessing my games. I do not need to ask them for permission to install and run them.

This is of course our last post that is getting shard on GOG.com forums. If you want to keep following our news they can always be found at http://news.dotslashplay.it/. Discussions happen, in French, at Debian-Facile (focus on Linux and free/libre software) and La Couronne de Cuivre (focus on games, modding and roleplay). For English speakers, right now our only discussion space is our IRC channel: #play.it on network irc.oftc.net. See you there soon, and please, do not give money (or visibility) to Nazis.

Hey vv221. Are you personally leaving the forums, for awhile or forever?

We don't usually see eye to eye (well except for world views, funnily enough), but it would be a shame. It might lead to that transformation of the GOG forums to a Nazi bar you were referring to, unfortunately. At least, that's what it feels like.

I am leaving personally too, I can no longer support this company. From now on, my only interaction with GOG.com is going to happen through LGOGDownloader.

But despite all the animosity there has been between us (actually, because of it), I did not want to leave before telling you how happy I was to see you on the good side off the fence during this whole mess. Allies in unexpected places (you are not the only one I changed my opinion about a lot in the last week, in a positive way) are, maybe, what I am willing to remember about this.

No matter our differences, you and I both know how to react when faced with literal Nazis.

Sadly I do not have time and energy to dedicate to that fight, especially now that I know that GOG.com, the company itself, is on the wrong side of History. I wish all of you luck and especially courage to safeguard some island of sanity in this forum.

And with that extra, unplanned, last message, it’s time I take my final leave ;)

But not without some final words: fu​ck all the little Nazi pieces of shit, their incel friends, the #Gamergate brain-dead crowd, and all other race supremacists that can be found on this forum! You’re all a bunch of cowards hiding behind dogwhistles without the guts to even acknowledge your putrid ideology. You already lost a century ago, and we are going to put you back in your place: the most rotten and shameful part of our past. You were already pathetic, pitiful excuses for human beings at the time; today you are barely a pale imitation of that.

I just wanted to thank you for your contributions and for making this place better. I hope in the near future, you come back. I understand your feelings, and I understand your reasons and I share some of your concerns, but at the moment I prefer to stay to try to make this place better. I know that sometimes we see some sickening things, or things we do not like, but there are also good things, good people and people who appreciate what you are doing.

🧌 -"Thor home...."^