LinuxGameCast Weekly EP133 – Epic Kneecap

HTC accidentally confirms Half-Life 3! The first wave of Steam boxen go on sale, Epic kneecaps the Unity announcement, and Feral takes the Penguins to Isengard. Then Torchlight 2 faces our CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

Oops
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31713715

Players: Sooooo, is Half Life in development?
Gabe: Yes and no. No with a little yes and a maybe.
CherWang: Yes and it uses our VR gear.
Gabe: (Looks at Cher) whispers stfu.
Players: Omg HL3 confirmed and VR!
CherWang: HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO SELL 1.3M UNITS GABE?
- “Regarding my BBC interview with Dave Lee yesterday, I would like to apologise for any confusion caused when I referred to individual games titles,”
  - Translation: Yeah, I let HL3 slip. These FKRS are invested /w our hardware. Deal /w it #thuglife
Keep in mind that VALVes equity is estimated at 2.5B and HTC reported $22.1B in sales last April.

THAR Steam boxen!
http://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_machines

Woof. Some of the prices on those suckers….
Will I get trading cards?
- Dear lord, could you imagine if valve started putting out actual trading cards?
It’s what I feared. Many of these machines just suck and are way overpriced. Valve doesn’t have the luxury of the other console makers, who can take a loss on the console and make it up through licensing. That’s the perils of going through third party vendors though.
And again, one must consider time to market. We’re already almost two years into the current gen consoles and most people have already picked their side. Valve is going to have to promote the hell out of these FKRs if steam machines are gonna stand a chance
OTOH, the streambox is a good idea.
- $50 for something you can plug-in to your TV and just stream everything from your PC, that’s Chromecast territory.
- And if it is able to maintain 1080p60 over wireless, it’s suddenly a hell of a lot better than the current offerings.

Free-range Source
http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8145273/valve-source-2-announcement-free-developers

Completely free sauce but you must make the game available on the Steam.
That makes sense coming from Valve, considering steam is it’s biggest moneymaker
Everything is free, with some caveat or another. Stick around for the news and we’ll explain moar.

But wait, there’s more!
http://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamos_sale

Don’t pre order a gorram thing.
Torchlight II works. I was getting worried I’d have to go back to Metro 2033 Redux after I finished Hand of Fate, but not yet it seems.
Ho. Lee. Fuck. Saints row 4, Magicka 2, TL2, and Payday 2 and Arkham Knight. My jeans. So full of cream
- But I’m holding off because native ports.
- Pretty Sure Magicka 2 is FNA, and Saint’s Row is a deep Silver title
  - Also, Venn, they seem to be barely paying attention to their windows games, so lack of patches is par for the course from DS

First VR game announced
http://owlchemylabs.com/next-stop-the-future/

I’m holding out for VR Simulator
AAAAaaaAAAAaaacculus looks interetesting. Might spice up an otherwise boring game.
I wanna see Occulus surgeon simulator with grifta motion capture

They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard
https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/459/

http://store.steampowered.com/app/241930/

About time! But now I need a new pair of pants.
To Isengard?
Well, we all knew it was coming.

Tape Worms
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233840/discussions/0/610573751159842445/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/233840/

Cross platform Multiplayer is working according to the official announcement.
It’s on sale for cheap now too. Got some good nostalgia goggles for worms.
It’s basically Worms with even moar content and dedicated multiplayer clan management.
- Also, Steam Workshop support for all you creative types.
- Buddy, that’s every worms game ever

Not what I was expecting :(
http://store.steampowered.com/app/301560/

Jim Sterling said good things about this game.
- But to be perfectly honest, while watching his squirty play of it I was getting very frustrated at how the character wobbles like he’s being controlled by a drunken puppeteer using elastic bands instead of strings.
So you light a match and run around trying to solve shite before it makes /w the burning.
You could put a giant lower case T on the lawn and torch it. The ambient light would be sufficient.

Mysty Portal AKA That Slideshow Game from 2015
http://store.steampowered.com/app/329980

Seriously, those screenshots look like they were lifted right out of Portal and Myst.
Well, I guess someone has to be keeping the Myst formula alive considering how popular it was

glibc Rocket
https://twitter.com/flibitijibibo/status/573153311202914304
http://store.steampowered.com/app/288020/

Another of Flibit’s one week ports.
- Apparently he’s trying to get the time down to sixty seconds to port an XNA game
Still willing to bet it’ll have better Linux controller support than most games out there.

News:

For the price of free
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

“In going free, we’ll be issuing a pro-rated refund to current subscribers for their most recent month’s payment. And, everyone who has ever paid for a UE4 subscription will receive a $30 credit that can be spent in the Unreal Engine Marketplace.”
- Can we please move on from Unity, now? Please!?
- Pretty sure Epic is hoping that they’ll replace unity as the de-facto standard for indie game development. This’ll definitely bring people to their camp
Let’s not start sucking each others dicks just yet, gentlemen.
While this is good for us it could cause other engines to close shoop.
- I just want competition.
- Lately it is literally 2 out of 3 games that come out for Linux run on Unity.
- Yeah, this is a pretty big monkey wrench epic just threw into the development ecosystem. I’m curious to see how it ultimately plays out
- https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/FromUnity/index.html?utm_source=uelauncher&utm_medium=software&utm_campaign=learntab
  - BWAHAHAHAHAHA
They’re still taking a 5% cut from game sales, but that’s not too bad considering you have a high quality engine for free
- That’s a good thing, if you ask me. It’ll make devs consider NOT publishing their crap like they do with Unity.
- Only requirement is 5% if you earn more than $3000 per quarter.
- Ironically this could prevent some larger studios from using it.
Install guide (read it)
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux#Known_Issues
Upgrade Mono on 14.04
http://www.mono-project.com/docs/getting-started/install/linux/#debian-ubuntu-and-derivatives
apt-get install mono-devel
Needed to sudo make (don’t like this)
It’s using SDL2 OOTB!11!
It’s laughably unstable \:D/
Very first comment:
- laluis1: I have been wanting to get unreal to replace unity and now I can. I hope this is free forever.

Unity announcement
http://unity3d.com/get-unity

Its free ..unless you want to use it.
If you want the “Pro” version with Android + iOS support it will run you $225/month or $4,500.
Those scrambling noises are adorable
- I think this is a case of Epic knowing their announcement and CRUSHING it.
  - “What’s that!? People will be excited about Unity being semi free? That’s cute!” – Tim Sweeney
“Would you like to submit a report on how your game’s FerPS are horrible on our horribly unoptimized engine? Pay upwards of $75-a-month, bitch!”
Guessing Josh at Ledwerks said something along the lines of “FK it, i’m out!”

Mantle
http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2015/03/02/on-apis-and-the-future-of-mantle

Aka, our vendor lock-in stuff didn’t really take off, so here’s everything we did oh god please use it and validate us
“The cross-vendor Khronos Group has chosen the best and brightest parts of Mantle to serve as the foundation for “Vulkan,” the exciting next version of the storied OpenGL API.”
- They chose AMD’s implementation because they’d have to pay Apple a shitton of money to learn Metal’s and even then they could only ensure it worked with OpenGL 3.2

Spoooooooock!
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/khronos-unveils-vulkan-opengl-built-for-modern-systems/
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan

And use it they did!
So it’s basically Apple’s Metal implemented the same way AMD did with Mantle.
- Well, that was what GLnext was always supposed to be. They just gave it a timely name
Where’s that XKCD comic again?
- http://xkcd.com/927/
If your card supports opengl es 3.1/opengl 4.3, your card will support Vulkan. Otherwise, you best upgrade

Stick with what you know
http://www.frozenbyte.com/2015/03/trine-3-the-artifacts-of-power-announced/

“The Windows version will be the first one to be released – we’ll reveal more about other platforms later.”
- And there goes my interest.
No simultaneous release is a bummer, but I’m willing to give Frozenbyte the benefit of the doubt, considering their track record
- Also maybe send us some keys so you can watch the death of a linux gaming podcast? Should be tonnes o’ fun
Based on the trailer, it looks like they’re taking a page out of the Sonic Colours book, transitioning between 2D and 3D platforming segments. The Sonic games have a spotty track record of pulling it off. I hope these guys know what they’re doing
- Well, if you ever FKD around /w the level editor you see the whole thing is rendered in 3D.

Relics of Annorath Alpha Update 6.3
https://forum.annorath-game.com/index.php/topic,556.0.html

A pretty small update from these guys. They added an RSS feed to the launcher, fixed a few bugs and finally got rid of that bitch Martha

O meu hovercraft está cheio de enguias
http://www.irrgheist.com/hcraftsource.htm

Hadn’t seen anything on Irrlicht since Octodad (I think)

Scale:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Torchlight II
Webzone: http://www.torchlight2game.com/
Devel: Runic Games
Engine: OGRE
Price: €18.99/$19.99 (80% off until Monday the 9th)

Wazzat: Torchlight II takes you back into the quirky, fast-paced world of bloodthirsty monsters, bountiful treasures, and sinister secrets – and, once again, the fate of the world is in your hands!

Makes with the working

V-

I really don’t like not being able to run in non-fullscreen windowed mode.
Custom resolutions? Bwahahahahah!
Can’t ding them a chair since this is not a bug.

J-

P-

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Ah, OGRE. The engine whose last stable release was in 2013.
It shows.
Even with everything on 11 it looks …dated. Not bad, just plain.
Soundtrack and effect are spot on.

J-

It sounds a lot like diablo 2, which makes sense considering they used the same guy
Sometimes it sounds a little too much like diablo 2 though
The framerate is inconsistent, but it doesn’t really bother me too much

P-

Wow, the framerate is all over the place.
With everything turned up to 11:
- In the main menu it’s locked at 56 FPS
- On character creation it skyrockets to 22163
- And in-game it fluctuates between 40 and 70.
  - Disabling Bloom makes it slightly more stable around 75.
Soundtrack by the guy who made the OST for Diablo. Mr Matt Uelmen himself.
- It’s so good, in fact, that I’m going to forgive the FPS inconsistencies.

Total-

Control

V-

I love the sound of my mouse clicking 50 times a second.
click click click click click click press I click click click click click click click
Why can’t I right click on an enemy and be fkn done /w it?
I don’t like controls that make me think about the amount of damage i’m inflicting on ze gerbil.

J-

This is pretty much standard ARPG fare, but it’s damn solid
You click on the things, so you can click on moar things.
Sometimes you press keyboard buttons so you can click on more things

P-

It has the exact same issue the first one did.
If the screen fills up with too many enemies you can’t click to move in any reliable way and that’ll get you killed a lot of the time.
That aside you click on things and things react appropriately.

Total-

FUN

V-

I played 40 something minutes the first time I launched it. That’s hella rare.
I really like the game but really hate the controls.
I’m also not a fan of how quickly it becomes inventory manager 2015.
You might want to play it on hard since “normal” seemed more like casual.
After a few quests I had stockpiled so many mana/health potions that I was screaming YOLO and attacking FK all everything.
Seriously, the baddies shite items.
Multiplayer worked as expected minus having to create a separate account outside of Steam.

J-

I will admit to being something of a torchlight fanboy
It takes the best parts of the diablo series and refines them very well
I completed a quest to put the lotion in the basket and got a mask made out of human face

P-

Yeah… It’s good, it’s very good.
It’s exactly what Diablo III should’ve been hadn’t Blizzard fired most of these people.
Because yes, these are most of the same people that made Diablo I and II.

Total-

Final –
Considering this thing goes on sell more often than your mum it’s worth a buy.

Hate Mail:

Don’t Be Patchman
http://slexy.org/view/s21Xhcsdbn

Speaking of motherfuckers that can’t read.
Why would I trust you to spend kickstarter $$$ responsibly when you fail at basic reading comprehension.

Vroom Vroom
http://slexy.org/view/s25eiH3ka1

Unity exists on the C# continuum. So while the engine itself supports multiple platforms, you’re still coding in a windows-exclusive language. I’d recommend learning a language that you can use on more than one platform.
A couple good options for people who want to start game programming are pygame (Python), mozilla gladius (Javascript) and Unreal4 (See-ploos-ploos), now that it’s freesauce
I would suggest http://www.godotengine.org/ since it’s damn near user friendly.

LinuxGameCast Weekly EP133 – Epic Kneecap

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