LinuxGameCast Weekly 222 – Yelling At Clouds

Total War: WARHAMMER is coming to Linux! GameAgent closes down, Rocket League customizes training, and Valve gets fined. Then Planet Explorers faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

Subscribe:

Steam News:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Haptics
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements

This one is actually kind of neat. The DS4 has an accelerometer built in, so now they’ve added support for it.
LEANING IN TO YOUR CONTROLLER CAN DO SOMETHING NOW!

Valve fine
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/valve-facing-potential-3m-fine-for-breaking-austra/1100-6445498/

This is for valve not having a refund policy until 2014. Australian law requires you to be able to return a defective product.
That said, 3 Mil is nothing for valve. They could announce the “Fuck australia sale” and make the money back in an afternoon
Did they ever add Dollarydoos to the available currencies?
- That would require them to adjust pricing down under and that’s where they get a lot of their money from.
- That said, there are 2 different Euro pricing regions on Steam even though the coin in affected countries is worth the same.

More Hammer
http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/games/warhammertw/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/364360/

RTS and TBS?
- It does a civilization style management for the campaign and allows you to zoom in to individual skirmishes
So it’s a Warhammer skin pack for Total War, right.
- That was what DOW was to COH and it worked reasonably well
It answers my question of what the next big game on linux would be. Hopefully it’s Mad Max quality and not Deus Ex quality
- The Total War ports have fallen squarely under the not great, but playable category.
- ^
It’s definitely a Total War game, there’s already $46 worth of DLC for a $60 game.
Of course, since this is a Feral port you can forget cross-platform Multiplayer.

At the library?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/314790/?snr=1_550_552&newsId=25634

More point and clickiness
The visual style looks gorgeous if the trailers and stock art in the carousel is indicative of anything, but I’m not seeing any gameplay footage on their store page. Spoon though
Made by the same people who created the Deponia series.
They also made Blackguards, which to this day they still refuse to port to Linux.
- They’re Unity games for the love of fuck!

Bouncy bounce
https://twitter.com/RocketLeague/status/799682046167613440
https://www.rocketleaguegame.com/news/customize-your-training-soon/

That, that’s going to be hella useful.
I mean, for others… I will still end up stuck to the ceiling-organ.

Firetop controls
http://store.steampowered.com/news/externalpost/steam_community_announcements/136626237886825558

Knee-jerk reaction is turn based grid combat with a controller = yuck
I guess it’ll work, considering this game is similar in execution to hitman go.
We need to throw chairs at it at some point.
Proper Steam Controller support built in!

WARNING
http://store.steampowered.com/app/253940/

The Linux version is not a port.
It’s just a WINE wrapper.
You didn’t port a FSM damned thing.
And before anyone says something… Vangers.
What do you expect from the guys asking us to “port” Two Worlds?
- I’ll wait for the Lutris version.

A Pastafarian cleric
http://store.steampowered.com/app/361040/?snr=1_7_7_230_150_1

Greasy nerds save the world

Furry of the Guitar Gods
http://store.steampowered.com/app/418210/?snr=1_7_7_230_150_1

Bullet hell \m/
Hopefully their guitar noodling is better than Slain’s
Only local co-op though. IT could be decently fun as an online multiplayer joint

News:

New drivers
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/111596/en-us

YAY checkbox ForceCompositionPipeline button thingy!
- Was in the last version too
- Mine never showed up.
I nuked my previous XOrg.conf to test making a new one using just the GUI tool and it works!
Vendor Neutral EGL in preparation for Fedora 25 which does in fact seem to come with Wayland by default.
- We get to see if it all works on tuesday. My body is ready
They fixed a fucking annoying bug that had been plaguing me for months. Turning on the UHD monitor properly resumes the display in the nvidia driver. Before you needed to change the resolution settings.

Tearing
http://news.softpedia.com/news/open-source-amdgpu-and-radeon-linux-drivers-bring-tearfree-dri3-by-default-510302.shtml

DRI3? That thing which has been in Mesa for the past year? And the NVidia drivers long before that?! That DRI3?
TearFree is AMD’s counterpart to NVidia’s ForceFullCompositionPipeline. If anyone cares to donate a Fury (X) or an RX 480 for us to test, I can run the necessary comparison tests.
- I’m sure monstercameron would be more than happy to send us some test results
  - I’d be surprised, according to him on twitter last time he tried to use Ubuntu it kept crashing for him.guv
and there’s finally support for the SI (Southern Islands) family of AMD Radeon GPUs.
- So does this mean that RadeonSI is being deprecated in favour of AMDGPU?
- It means AMDGPU will be able to load the radeonsi module and use it for those cards unsupported by the “Pro” module.

Feral: We want up-to-date drivers!
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2016-November/004841.html

The replies so far have been positive from both Ubuntu and the folks in charge of the xorg-edgers PPA.
It would also give AMD a fighting chance, at least.
So they want Ubuntu to help them sell more games.
Why don’t you PPA all the things?
- The thing with Oibaf, padoka0 and xorg-edgers is that those mesa packages are riding on the weekly/twice a week git builds, which work fine for the most part.
- Except when they don’t and people start kicking up a fuss, and that’s what Feral wants to cover their ass on.
The other advantage is that you could have a stable version of the driver on all currently supported ubuntu versions.

Ti
http://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-ti-spotted-with-10gb-of-memory

Guess it’s time to start saving up for another 2 UHD monitors
IMA riding this 980 into the ground.
That said, we wants it.
- We all wants it
  - We needs it.

Someone pulled a Unity
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5d1dq4/fix_for_launch_failure_of_unreal_tournament/

So that’s why I couldn’t login!
Yeah, Epic’s Linux support is definitely on par with AMD’s.
Mine just worked, for once.
- The joys of living in the real world

Agent Gone
https://blog.aspyr.com/2016/11/15/game-agent-sunsetting/

Ass-Pyre had a store #TIL.
Makes sense. Running your own store is a bitch. Plus promoting it over steam/mac store/whatever gets kind of tricksy
- Yeah but you don’t lose 30% to the VALVe.
I wish it would affect us, because that would meant that ass-pyre is still pumping out linux games. Alas…
They seem really keen on promoting that walking simulator instead of porting more stuff.

Unreal
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/unreal-engine-414-now-available,33032.html

The last release to support windows XP
They’ve added vulkan support for android builds

Godot for 3.0
https://godotengine.org/article/onward-new-3d-renderer

Dunno, always thought of this as a 2D engine.
It’s unfortunate that they’re sticking with GLES 3.0 as opposed to Vulkan, but their reasoning is somewhat sound. For now.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Planet Explorers
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/237870/
Devel: Pathea Games
Engine: Unity
Price: €22.99 / US$24.99 / CDN$27.99

Wazzat: Planet Explorers is an open world sandbox adventure RPG game set on a distant planet. The game uses a new OpenCL calculated voxel system to allow players to change the terrain in any way, create new objects such as weapons, vehicles, objects, and do it anywhere.

Mandatory disclosure: They discovered some keys for us

Makes with the working

V-

Your fancied up Unity scream of nope is hella annoying.
Seriously, it full screens for fk and all reason.

J-

Don’t try to resize that startup screen
Multiplayer averaged about 35FPS on UHD
Had to change my monitor’s resolution to 1080, at which point I was averaging 97 FPS
Nope, you can switch the resolution in the stupid launch dialogue. Why does that exist again?

P-

I hadn’t seen a Unity game attempt to fullscreen into both my monitors and fail so disastrously since Unity 4.
But they’ve managed to kick it up a notch and the game proper outright ignores the resolution I set and always attempts to use both monitors if I set it to fullscreen.
Just because you made the Unity screen of nope look good doesn’t mean I don’t know it when I see it.
Every now and again the game just crashes.
- Sometimes while it’s loading, other times smack in the middle of something I was doing.
Also, the performance in multiplayer sucks big tits!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

It looks alright for an Early Access game.
Never noticed the sounds.

J-

The stock unity assets really do take away from the majesty of the world
Oh yes, it has a soundtrack
It also have a pair of croony folks singing a cheesy ass song with the name of the game in it
- That got it noped quick

P-

It’s good to see a survival game with crafting elements which doesn’t rely on some bullshit form of hipster pixel visuals.
There was a surprising amount of effort put into the background music of this game but it got muted pretty damn fast.
Also, I’m going to give it bonus points for not falling into the pretentiousness many other games do and calling it “Depth of Field” when it is, as this game calls it, Depth Blur.

Total-

Control

V-

Menu navigation is a PITA.

J-

This game doesn’t like handling multiple inputs

P-

I’d like an option to set the mouse sensitivity individually from when I’m just looking around to when I’m trying to aim a gun.
Or at least 2 different sliders, one for first person and another for 3rd person.
I’d also like an option to have dedicated button to do the little dodge roll.
Double tap is all well and good, but when the combat gets proper flustercucky more often than not my character won’t do the dodge roll and he’ll end up on his ass.

Total-

FUN

V-

The pathfinding is hilariously bad / on rails.
- I’ve had the engine (┛ಸ_ಸ)┛彡┻━┻ and respawn a NPC because stuck.
I gave 0 fks about Minecraft but this manages a solid 0.5.

J-

The only fun I really have with these sorts of games is playing with friends. And that’s just because I’m hanging out with friends
I tried the story mode for about an hour.
It’s just a weird looking 3D starbound
The story mode is a series of endless fetch quests, that I’m not really all that interested in completing
Pedro will go on about the depth of the crafting, but I couldn’t get too far into the tree. Buying blueprints is bullshit!
This game might appeal to some people, but I am not one of them.

P-

There’s one thing I like to do when throwing chairs at a game and that is comparing it to other videogames.
In my opinion doing so kills the two proverbial birds with one stone. More specifically, people who have also played those other games get a good base of comparison and they also get to formulate their own opinions from my biases.
With that little prelude out of the way:
- As Jordan mentioned on Thursday during the live-stream, the crafting is more Terraria than it is Minecraft.
- The combat is very similar to Dragon’s Dogma, which in turn was just a streamlined version of the combat in Monster Hunter.
- The “Exploration” is probably where the game falls the shortest, although even then it still has more depth than No Man’s Sky ever did.
But when you put all these elements together, and put your paintball helmets on kids because I’m going to start using broad strokes, it reminds me a lot of Legends of Aethereus.
- I’m willing to say if the developers of that piece of shit had doubled down and actually finished the game, the end result would have been very similar both aesthetically and on the surface level mechanics to what we have in Planet Explorers.
But they didn’t and so Planet Explorers is not only the superior game, it is also cheaper and still being actively maintained.
Oh and shitty performance notwithstanding, the multiplayer actually works!
It’s also nothing short of amazing how you can literally create entirely custom weapons, armor and vehicles directly in game.
There’s enough game here for you to lose the rest of your life in, assuming you’ve managed to stop playing Minecraft long enough to watch this review.
But something tells me, much like Minecraft, the moment I’m done with the Story mode I’m never touching it again. I’m already starting to have trouble justifying restarting the game when it crashes.