LinuxGameCast Weekly 344: Way Twacing

Google announces Project Stadia! Steam gets a facelift, The Culling calls it quits, and Vulkan powered PS4 emulators. Then The Savior’s Gang faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special thanks to:
Joel


Timestamps:
03:40
Steam’s new look
06:55 New Valve Employee
09:29 Steam Client Beta glibc 2.19
10:40 Culling Culled
14:01 V Rings Of Saturn
16:25 Game Store Wars
19:58 Epic Online Services
23:30 Rami Ismail On Valve
30:39 Shameless Self Promotion
34:41 RTX For All
37:34 Quake 2 RTX
40:17 Atari VCS Ryzen
42:20 Google Project Stadia
50:03 RPCS Progress Report
52:54 Vulkan PS4 Emulator
55:46 Linux VR Standards
58:12 Glitch Game Free Assets
01:01:21 CHAIRQASITION
01:14:50 Hate Mail


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro


Steam: News

Steam’s new look

  • Does it launch games?
  • Because that’s all I look for in a game launcher.
  • It’s new, therefore I hate it
  • Events seem like they could be interesting, but I also don’t like being spammed by various services. We’ll see if they can strike a balance between informative and annoying
  • I like how they say you can create a collection and it’ll allow you to sort your games.
  • I have, in the past, attempted to create the very same collection 3 times.
  • Just the one for games I have finished.
  • All three of those past times, Steam nuked my custom collection.
  • Has that been fixed now? Will you let me have a custom collection without Thanos’ing it from existence?

 

New Valve employee

 

Glib Steam requirements

  • So Ubuntu 14.04?
  • If you’re running anything newer than a 5 year old distro LTS, you’re good!
  • Considering devs are still listing the almost 7 year old 12.04 as a requirement, i think it’ll be a good thing to force them to update their shit to something a little more “recent”

Steam: Game Updates

The Culling culled

  • It never really worked properly on my end.
  • Still, a better love story than CRAZY JUSTICE.
  • Ah the two edged sword of in-app purchases
    • That’s why you have to go after kids #nocontext
  • With the amount of money and time they spent on the Culling 2 only to kill it and refocus on the first one due to backlash, yeah…
  • I can see how demoralizing that could be.

Steam: New Games

VVVVVVVV

  • The game’s actually called delta-V, but i guess valve doesn’t like latin characters in their URIs
  • Essentially you’re playing the role of the Canterbury from the Expanse
  • Gameplay similar to retrobooster. You gotta account for gravity and momentum when flying your ship
  • Deutsche Systemvoraussetzungen
  • 2D asteroid mining type-o-situation.
  • You’d think that we’d see more of these kinds of games go full 3D in current days, because of how much simpler engines like Unity have made the whole process.

Epic Watch

This Clown

  • Is it just me or does that photo of tim make him look like a dollar store Linus?
  • Replace devs with greed.

 

Epic online services

  • I have no doubt Epic will give developers the tools to support Linux.
    • Tools in varying states of completion, if history is any indicator
  • If the Epic launcher actually ends up supporting Linux my hate-boner is going to be moderately confused.
  • Since they’re so keen on showering devs with money to be excwoosive, why not do the same to promote a multiple platforms?
  • Taking the AMD approach of giving everyone the tools to do stuff, but not incentivizing their use hasn’t proven so successful in the past.

 

Sucks to be Valve

  • I wanted to be grumpy at the guy but points, he has them.
  • I wouldn’t say they were “out-businessed”.
  • Epic just threw a bunch of money at the problem
  • Rami’s perspective on the indie scene is pretty unparalleled though, and he’s right about a lot of indie devs getting screwed over by algorithmic sorting
  • However, if the number of games on the epic store grows, they’re going to very rapidly start running into the same problems.
  • You can only compete by saying “We’re not the other guy” for so long
    • Sweeny said today that they will not allow any low effort BS / shock games on the store.
  • Better for the developers, or publishers?
  • At the end of the day there is most definitely a part of me that rather enjoys watching Valve being all “WTF!?? We have do something!??”
  • It is an interesting time, or it would be if Epic hadn’t been treating Linux like a third-class citizen the whole time.
  • Because as far as Linux is concerned, all we’re getting is the shaft.
  • Even games which would have at least been an option with Proton are now basically stuck behind a store front which doesn’t even work properly in WINE.

News:

RTX For All

  • You think ray tracing runs like dog sh*t on a 2060?
  • Come get you some of this.
  • Allowing the use of the extra CUDA cores in the 10 series for ray tracing is a good idea.
  • Thing is their job was not to trace rays, so this while neat will be more a curio rather than a feature.

 

Nvidia Quake 2 RTX

  • I mentioned a while so that this would be a good reference project for people looking to add ray tracing to their games, and nvidia agrees
  • I wonder if it’ll go above 45fps now?
    • Also SLI support, if you hate money and wanna see if horizontal scaling will drastically improve performance
  • I like how NVidia went: “Oh… everyone is far more excited about Quake 2 with RTX than the current gen AAA games. Fuck it! Let’s make a showcase out of it.”

 

ATARI AMD Update

  • Thanks for letting us know that the VCS is still in the “idea” phase.
  • OK google, remind me in december to check if this isn’t vapourware
  • 14nm Ryzen APU… Soooo it’s a 2400G or a 2200G or even an Athlon 2*0GE.
  • Considering its use case, they could probably get away with those teeny tiny Athlons.
  • 35W dual core with a Vega 3, and a price of less than half the Intel processor which could give you that GPU acceleration.

 

Google Stadia

  • No info on price, how to yoink games, databit requirements etc.
  • This is an announcement, not a launch.
  • Ethan’s reply to folks saying that will be good for linux cuz it’s running Linux + Vulkan on the back end is pretty apt
    • The stadia version won’t ever be released.
    • The publishers won’t be interested in producing a compatible port
  • RIP game MODS.
  • If you have caps this service is DOA.
    • Or live in a rural area.
    • Or any of the other urban areas that are poorly serviced.
    • Or in Canada
  • Windows users, take a good hard look at your gaming future.
  • With Google throwing money at the Linux ecosystem for gaming, while I agree there will most definitely not be any direct Linux ports, outside Stadia, as a result of this, I do hope those tools and that ecosystem will foster more native Linux game development.

 

RPCS Progress Report

  • 38 more games that are now playable, 71 which at least get you in game, and an ever dwindling count of games which only start or get you to the intro.
  • Audio buffering to get rid of crackly underruns. Very important, especially in slower systems or systems running pulseaudio.
  • More progress made on the On-Screen Keyboard implementation and interpretation.
  • Some games were freezing while attempting to display the OSK due to the Qt tools not picking up some of the output it was pushing.
  • And a whole gang of improvements and fixes have also been added.
  • The Last of Us still only gets In-Game status.

 

Vulkan powered PS4 emulator

  • I guess the architectural difference is distinct enough from PC that they need QEMU to step in.
  • I’m going to have to bug Dave and Nathan about dumping their PS4 BIOS’es then.

 

Linux VR Standard

  • The ‘X’ makes it sound cool
  • Standardization like this is an absolute necessity if VR/AR/XR/ZR is to become a sustainable thing
    • Valve is trying to improve developer tools, but if folks don’t want to buy into that ecosystem,
  • Collabora already has an OSS project to implement this standard called monado

 

10,000 free assets

  • Glitch is dead, and we can all now poke through it’s carcass
  • It’s always sad when a game that had a lot of effort put into it fails to succeed commercially and has to die.
  • It’s a nice touch that the devs decided to release everything into the public domain
  • More free assets for starting devs to use for small projects and game jams, the better
  • I wish AAA developers did this when they kill off games and then proceed to not do anything with the franchise, ever.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: The_Saviors_Gang
Devel: Catness Game Studios
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Price: £3.99 / US$4.99 / CA$5.69

Wazzat: A self-proclaimed Savior must travel through numerous ancestral locations guiding his worshipers to reach the promised land. The numerous dangers that these locations present will make it very difficult for all that worshipers to survive.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • Yip.

Performance @ 1080

  • 60’ish @ 2160.

Graphics

  • It looks like a mobile game

Control

  • Works with son of Xclone


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • yorp

Performance @ 1080

  • Jesus is certainly no match for the 1080TI

Graphics

  • Yeah, you have a choice of 3840×2160 or 0x0. I took the former
  • Pedro’s right about changing the resolution

Control

  • Yeah they work, but we’ll get to that in a minute

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It launches

Performance @ 1080

  • It holds 60 at UHD

Graphics

  • Changing resolution was completely b0rk3d for me.
  • Had to go to ~/.config/Epic/TheSaviorsGang/Saved/Config/LinuxNoEditor/GameUserSettings.ini to change it to 1080p
  • You have to change both the Res X & Y values and the LastConfirmedRes X & Y.

Control

  • Out of the box with the DualShock 4.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • It looks like a mobile game, plays like a mobile game.
    • I bring that up since I put about as much time as I would have, well, a mobile game.
    • It’s hella simple!
    • Click (or drag) and dodge obstacles and shite.
    • It’s something you can pick up in short spurts and put down just as quickly.
    • It’s rather fky when you have to move blocks and it’s not the charming kind of fky.
    • On top of that you have an honest attempt at humour going on via SMS on the right side of the screen.
    • I didn’t hate it and for $5 it’s something to have around.
  • Jordan
    • God sucks indeed
    • This is a game who’s two methods of inputs are deficient in very different, and yet somehow complementary ways
    • Box pushing. The controller doesn’t seem to want to do it. The mouse can do it fine, but mouse control is all weird and floaty
    • The thesis of this game seems to be that religious people ultimately are just followers with blinders on, unwilling to look out to see if there might be a buzz saw in their path
    • I gotta admit, the writing made me chuckle a bit
    • The game itself boils down to waiting and juking
    • Some obstacles are better than others
  • Pedro
    • The real difficulty in The Savior’s Gang is in balancing the careful avoidance of obstacles with the time limit.
    • It’s a mobile game that wouldn’t go amiss being played on a tablet or phone, based solely on the accelerometer for movement.
    • The camera, whenever there’s an obstruction between it and the center of the pack, likes to zoom in past the obstruction and often lets you have a really close look at the feet of “your followers”.
    • I struggle to enjoy mobile games at the best of times.
    • Playing them on PC doesn’t really help.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Friendship

Gooya

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