LinuxGameCast Weekly EP159 – Five Dudes

Intel demos Vulkan! Obsidian hates Linux, Arma 3 gets a beta, and VALVe updates the Big Picture. All this, plus your hate mail.

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Special thanks to our patreons

  • Andrew S
  • Mr. Stroker

Steam News:

Colour Key: Venn Jordan Pedro

We are the 0.92
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

  • It’s almost like we had two AAA titles released this month.
  • I’m gonna hold off on sayin’ anything further about these numbers until the Steam Machines come out.
    • Or until Valve stops using flash in their goddamn survey results page.
  • Ultimately, and I shudder to say this, but Pedro is right on this one.   These numbers will forever be crap until we start seeing steam machine hardware out in the wild.   Hopefully,  enough big games will be on board to support that launch

We missed this last week
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/steam-machines-wont-have-a-suspend-function/

  • 8/12 second boot time …THE HORROR!11!!
    • Still boot faster than the XBOne
    • The Xbone and PS4 both take 20+ seconds.
  • It’s also a slap across the face of the Debian developers who still haven’t gotten their shit together and fixed that bug.
    • Actually, that one falls squarely on the kernel folks
  • I quit swinging my uptime E-peen around after buying a SSD.
  • Eh, it’s still a feature that people seem to care about.
  • Not all steam machines will have a solid state drive
  • Additionally, power consumption can be a real issue.

Steam Client Beta Update
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements/detail/52144327686735794
http://i.imgur.com/5Tirk35.jpg

  • New UI
  • Ability to not see YOLO drives.
  • I’m glad I reverted before trying to figure out why it was bitching about them not being mounted as executable.
  • I like it!
  • It looks much more streamlined and it’s still perfectly manageable while sitting across the room and looking at it on a 46” 1080p TV.

..so it begins
http://powerupgaming.co.uk/2015/09/02/scammers-use-fake-steam-greenlight-game-dynostopia-to-distribute-malware/

  • Honestly?  I’m surprised it took this long
  • This only affected Winbros.
  • And, since VALVe is still VALVe, prevention only comes AFTER the fact.

Experimental ARMA
http://steamcommunity.com/games/arma3/announcements/detail/118571886468000767
http://store.steampowered.com/app/107410/

  • Ever notice how Feral and Ass-Pyre are listed as publishers on games they work on.
  • VP, not so much.
  • The real kicker is wanting Windows users to test this “experimental” build if they have Linux.
  • You want people who primarily run Windows to QA a Linux build …brilliant!
  • They expect people to buy the game on the off-chance the “ports” will be maintained.
    • “They are available as a complementary service to anyone who owns Arma 3 for Windows.
      • There was that other game, Sunless Sea, that did that too.
      • Buy the Windows version, “test” the Linux port that may or may not come out.
    • Remember what we said about Unity doing that?
    • This is worse, because you actually have to pay up front
    • Congratulations! These guys are worse than Unity.
  • Dear Bohemia Interactive, eat a bag of nails!
  • Doop doop, Company lazily using EON to fire off a shitty SteamOS version.   Neeeeeeeeeeeeeexxxxxxxxxxt
  • This is not a beta test.
  • This is a ‘let’s see if we can get away /w this’ test.

Two person team
http://store.steampowered.com/app/369070/?snr=1_7_7_230_150_1

  • Plus one of the old Celtic Frost dudes on soundtrack.  Can’t go wrong with a bit of that
  • Looks like it could be a fun old-school beat’em’up.
  • Long as it scales well.
  • I don’t want another pixilated mess like that Sonic clone.
  • It looks like Altered Beast for the Genesis/Mega Drive
    • You know, the #1 worst game of all time for that console?
      • You are dead to me.

Gold Satellites
http://store.steampowered.com/app/268870/

  • These folks sent us some keys billions of years ago, so expect them to face the chairquisition spoon.
  • It’s similar to Fallout Tactics, with its real time combat and squad management thing.
  • It borrows the cyber-punkiness from Shadowrun/Deus Ex.

News:

NVidia 355.11
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/90393

  • Basically a merger of all the previous betas and full EGL compatibility – read Vulkan is coming yo!
  • And, after AMD kicked NVidia’s ass to the curb and back in the early DX12 benchmarks, NVidia has apparently decided to beat AMD at their old game.
    • I’m an idiot. EGL!=GLES
  • Added experimental full OpenGL support to EGL.
    • Full Mir support incoming
  • Everyone will now be on their new Build system as well.   Oh those poor package maintainers

Vulkan™ on Intel®
https://youtu.be/llOHf4eeSzc?t=57

  • Again, similar to what we saw on the powerVR board
  • Looks like our suspicions were confirmed.
  • As exciting is this is, remember that we won’t see any of this cool shit in the wild until at least midway through next year   
  • Dat CPU usage drop …jaw-organ, floor.
  • B-b-but mah Win10 DX12 #YOLOSAWGDORITO!11!
  • It’s cross-platform Brad. DX12 only works on teh windows and the Xbone
  • This will bring the business to Linux/Android/PS4 …and business will be good.

Exploding head-organs
https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/aWzbUSTd7zU

  • Incredibly oversimplified
  • Yes, the execution path is so much shorter, but we are trusting developers to actually write good quality and optimized code
    • That’s assuming developers are coding a damn thing.
    • Because Unity makes it so anyone can release a game made out of assets without having to code a damn thing.
    • So unless the engine editors make it so these so called “developers” can export a Vulkan build, it won’t make a damn difference.
  • As we’ve seen, this is easier said than done.

Unreal
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released

  • It’s a pretty big update
  • There is a long-ass list of linux fixes for the editor
  • One cool thing is they added linux arm support so you can actually build your UE4 game for an ARM distribution of linux.   That’s pretty fucking boss
  • DX12 Support was also added, which prompts the inevitable question: WHAR VULKAN
  • “Switched to using SDL key codes instead of raw keyboard scan codes. This fixes various improperly mapped keys and removes US QWERTY assumption in general.”
    • Doin’ it right!       

Speculate spec-u-late
https://twitter.com/feralgames/status/639092608682328064
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3f21ct/ferals_403_forbidden_list/

  • Carmageddon: Reincarnation?
  • I mean, if it ran like ass nobody would be shocked.

Pillars of penguins
http://www.pcgamer.com/obsidian-on-whats-next-for-pillars-of-eternity-we-own-something-now/

  • Thanks for that Brad! I was getting a bit soft on the Obsidian hate parade.
  • So, they’re whining cuz they had some logistical issues. How that relates to Linux specifically is anyone’s guess, cuz fuck all if they told us.
  • Oh and let’s not forget the bit they whine about bugs.
  • Fucking Obsidian and their bugs.
  • It’s not like KOTOR 2, NWN2, Dungeon Siege 3 and Fallout New Vegas launched outright broken or anything, right?!
  • “But Unity in Linux is t3h hard.”
    • We don’t want our developers learning new things!
  • Well then, there’s the door!
  • Oh Obsidian, you so silly
  • “rennecke went through a surprisingly long list of issues that, even for a veteran studio like Obsidian, proved to make Linux a less and less desirable platform to create games for.”
  • Such as?    The only valid excuse you have these days is OpenGL.
  • The fact of the matter is that Linux users are fairly loyal when it comes to treating them well
  • PoE ran great under linux, so good on you for that, but don’t go throwing away all that good will.   It’s just a bad business decision.\
  • How much work went into the MAC port?
  • What were the MAC sales? Who knows!
  • From a webzone that thinks PC =’s Windows …and they wanna keep it that way.
  • I’m not saying don’t hate on Pillars, just keep in mind this is from a site that tends to only report negative Linux news.

Hate Mail:

Craft
http://slexy.org/view/s20erULHQs

  • They did that already.  It’s called minetest.    And it performs much better than minecraft

Kung
http://slexy.org/view/s20zI8dZUg

Hate
http://slexy.org/view/s28Hrs4zYR

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