LinuxGameCast Weekly 235 – Bear Stone

Motörhead comes to Linux! Valve sorts a 10 year old bug, The Dark Mod hits 2.05, and Distance releases their 2017 roadmap. Then HITMAN faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

Subscribe:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

They finally fixed the fucking hitboxes
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/after-10-years-this-significant-team-fortress-2-bug-has-been-fixed/

After a full decade this is probably going to cause more problems than it fixes.
- Something something XKCD 1172

Hitman
http://store.steampowered.com/app/236870/

It’s out, it’s cheap.
Stick around for the chairs.
One of the silver linings to being a linux gamer, you get all the episodic games in one big dump

Victör Vroom Vroom
http://store.steampowered.com/news/externalpost/steam_community_announcements/75836429537576398

Rip lemmy :(
Still, finally we get to see what this motorhead expansion was about. They were kind of radio silent after they announced it last year
Shame the expansion isn’t free for people who already own Vran, but these guys do really good work and therefore deserve your money.
All of the Motörhead members are in that bit of DLC in one form or another.
I for one agree with eMpTy in shatrealm where he said zombie Lemmy needs to be the final boss.
- That would be monumentally unfair from a gameplay perspective. Not even a souped up Victor Bran-flakes could stand up to the colossal might that is the Killmeister

Civ Slow
http://steamcommunity.com/app/289070/discussions/0/144512942755435118/?ctp=27#c135509124602029681

“Multithreading is supported now, but not on the rendering path. Our implementation of OGL has issues with multithreading unfortunately, and we are actively looking at alternatives.”
- I can only shout Vulkan so hard before the neighbors come a-knockin’ on my door.
I’m curious if they noticed the performance delta vs the windows version in QA. Either answer isn’t good
The big thing here is that this is not the quality we have come to expect from ass-pyre.

Launch day
http://steamcommunity.com/games/394430/announcements/detail/484538095729478398

This game hurts my brain-organ… in a good way.
The painted backgrounds are a nice touch
Can’t say I’m all that excited for another schmup, but they are promising a string of new levels in the coming weeks

Polish
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=296300

I like the separate mouse sensitivity sliders, means I can bring the general sensitivity down all the way and keep the zoomed-in/iron-sights aiming from being completely immovable.
Is the heavy weapons guy still OP as shit?

News:

NVIDIA
http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/115031/en-us

Mostly a consolidation of the previous beta drivers.
Long lived branch people rejoice! You can now get your GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS without having to set launch parameters
- They also keep that disabled now if you’re running Xinerama.

Mesa 17.0
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-announce/2017-February/000299.html

OpenGL 4.5 support for Haswell
OpenGL 4.3 and improved performance on Maxwell
Support for the Polaris 12 AMD GPUs… which aren’t out yet.
- That’s right, an AMD GPU family is supported in Mesa before it’s even out.
- AMD might actually be pulling a Summer. What is this Bizarro World?
  - If there’s decent performance to be had, then maybe

4.15
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-15-released

Time to fire up the ol’ ctrl-f linux
- Ooh! Native aarch64 support
- Some native touchscreen support
- Linux builds will now default to openGL 4.x
- They’ve added some CI features like remote application start up for linux
- Stuff will now build on ubuntu for windows. I feel a bit dirty saying that
There are a couple new vulkan features and bugfixes which should help with performance and debugging
Compile times reduced by as much as 50%!
Really glad to see improved texture streaming because that’s always been a dead giveaway that you were playing a UE4 game.

Distance in 2017
http://refract.com/post/157010899401/booting-up-2017

People are still buying the game so it might exit EA in 2017.
The ghost update is live.
Ghost cars, replay viewer, and increased online player limit.
Wait, they haven’t shipped the physical rewards?

TDM 2.05
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/news/the-dark-mod-205-is-here

They’ve introduced a modular room building system to speed up content creation
The modules themselves have skins, meaning that they’re very reusable
Will it result in better levels? Dunno, but it should make them easier to create
They’ve optimized some lighting code that should result in a performance increase
You can now go above 60FPS without speeding up the game itself. THis is still in it’s early stages though.

Vibrant
https://ponce.itch.io/vibrant

A simple little arena shooter that might be worth a look.
Hey, at least it has a demo.
There is a bit of overlap between Vibrant and Ellipsis.
Ellipsis was a pure avoid’em up while this has an extra physics twist.
You can latch on to the other neon particles and swing yourself around them to help you pick up some speed to finish the level.
And you can also shoot back, this time.
It’s 2D richochet. Of course they had to take inspiration from the best game that valve has ever produced

Little bike
http://stolk.org/tlbtc/

In case you’re a little bike curious
Something something fixie, something something strider, something something plaid
IMA give you a free protip.
Don’t bury the DL behind having to join a G+ group.
Bram Stolk, we covered a game of his a long long time ago.
6 Wheels and a Gun, was its name.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: HITMAN
Webzone: https://store.feralinteractive.com/en/mac-linux-games/hitmanseason1/
Devel: Io-Interactive Squeenix, via Feral Interactive
Engine: Glacier
Price: €49.99 / $59.99 US / $59 69.99 CAD, on sale for 50%

Wazzat: Become the master assassin in an intense spy-thriller story across a world of assassination. Travel the world from France, Italy & Morocco to Thailand, USA & Japan to take out powerful, high-profile targets.

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys

Makes with the working

V-

Hold a solid’ish 30 on medium @ 1080.
Now in all fairness the Windows build runs like shite according to the threads on Steam.
Load times are under 10sec.
Reasonable multithreading on my AMD 8150.
Running 16.04 and no system warnings.
ZOMG always on DRM!111!
One of the good things about not getting a day-1 release is Squeenix having time to backtrack (a little) on their draconian always online DRM bullsh*t.
- You can now play offline and it no longer kicks you from the current game if your connection is interrupted.

J-

Well I found a bug. Game expects an ubuntu libssl to be present in an absolute path, making it not run on any linux that doesn’t ship an insecure version of openssl
- That’s not a bug, that’s Feral saying “Fuck you if you don’t use 16.10”.
  - Yup, and they get a big ol’ fuck you right back at them
Even on that other supported OS, I still had a predictable crash when attempting to load a savegame
In intel land, it tries to hold on to about 60fps, but usually hangs around 47-55. And a bit of the choppy chops

P-

You can tell it’s a Feral port because it maxes out 1 core of my FX 8370E, while all the others are left doing 10-20% and performance is… subpar.
It’s not Deus Ex: Mankind Divided bad, but it’s not exactly good either.
The game lists 16.04 as a minimum requirement and I also get the unsupported system warning.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

At Medium it looks a notch better than the PS4 version.
Unfortunately it has roughly the same frame rate.
Each sandbox is quite large and detailed with plenty of places to explore.
Character models and animation rigging get the job done.
I was, however, a bit put off by the sound.
Not the shooty killy sound effects, no, those worked.
I’m talking about the atmosphere… or should I say lack of.
It just sounds, hollow.

J-

It’s a very good looking game
All the animations are fluid
Like what these clowns mentioned, outside the training mission, the sound design is on point
Voice acting is well done too.
The environments are huge and labyrinthine and it’s a real treat to look at.

P-

Like Venn, during the first few “training” missions, the lack of background noise was… odd.
But once you get into the proper missions, the background noise gets spot on.
They actually took care to have the background noise sound different depending on which kind of room you’re in and whether it’s sound insulated or just bare stone.
And, even though I had to keep the shadows on medium or the FerPS would tank, the game looks really good.
It’s amazing how much detail every single NPC has and the stupid amount of environmental storytelling the levels are packed with.
I have many complaints about this game but the aesthetics ain’t one.

Total-

Control

V-

I played this with the Xclone controlla since (like Tomb Raider) using the gerbil felt like cheating.
Well, I should say aiming felt like cheating.
Seriously, if you need to nope a whole room of baddies hold down LT and use the gerbil to aim and fire.
- It’s so delightfully unfair.
That said, everything worked as expected and kudos to anyone who is able to aim with the right stick.

J-

Oh hey! Proper prompts for the DS4!
And it shows the proper controlla on the controls screen
Everything is mapped semi-sensibly and nothing feels sluggish

P-

So, I can’t rebind keys to a key that’s already been bound.
Most games will either double bind actions to a key or unbind the previous action, others even ask you if you’d like to rebind that key.
In Hitman, if a key is bound you can’t bind it to another action until you’ve unbound the first action.
I don’t know whether this is lazy or just outright asinine UX design.

Total-

FUN

V-

I gave Mr. Agent 47 Pants the 2hr Pepsi challenge.
Granted, I’ve never played (or seen) a Hitman game before so I didn’t know what to expect.
However, I did see the Agent 47 movie film for theaters so I was kinda expecting some superhuman assassin badassery.
Yeah, about that.
You start out on a few training missions that teach you the basics.
You go through the first one twice followed by a final test that requires you to nope a chess master.
Done and done.
Then it’s off to a fashion show and the game starts proper.
This is where I let out an audible “FKN really” because all i’ve learned is how to be Mr. Sneaky barcode human.
Then I had my first proper combat experience, woof.
Combat in Shadow of Hordor was great, Mad Max was passable, HitMan is… bad, wait, even worse, boring.
Well, boring and uncharacteristic of a superhuman assassin.
Seriously, no combo or chain system?
Agent 47 is supposed to be able to nope a ROOM full of baddies.
FINE! I will stick to sneaking around and setting up improbable / elaborate traps.
This is kinda fun until one little mistake causes a cascading chain of nope that ends in me getting killed to death.
Until I noticed a loading screen a tip that encouraged me to Save early, Save often.
To which I reply to you, Squeenix, where’s the fun in that?
Might as well give me a rewind feature, it would save time.
Hell, retitle the game Live Die Repeat.
That said, it’s not horrible but it’s definitely negative in the challenging dimension.
If you’re looking for a FK around murder simulator go for it?

J-

This is a game that requires a lot of patience
You’re skulking around, waiting for some NPC to drop a piece of information you can use
You’re hiding in a closet, waiting for the suspicious dude to leave you alone
You’re waiting for your goddamn mark to get into place, shut the fuck up and turn around so you can execute his punk ass!
And there’s the problem. The assassination bits are great! All of the various options you have under the goals seem super cool and I want to try them all. But the waiting is what kills it
And if you wanna avoid all of that painful waiting again if you screw up, you gotta savescum.
That doesn’t really do it for me. I get that it’s part of the game’s difficulty, but it’s just pointlessly punishing IMO
And like venn said, the melee combat in this game needs work. Otherwise you get into that one two punch loop until you have that quarter second to knock the first guy out. That was fucking fun. Got me a sweet vampire cape out of it though.

P-

For a game about stealth and all the different ways you can murder someone, it’s very limited and very contextual as to how you can navigate the level and the agency you’re given as a player.
Then again, I was never that big a fan of the Hitman series so complaining about all the nitpicks and artificial limitations of this entry in the series is probably just confirmation bias rather than anything productive.
It certainly didn’t change my mind.
I tend to be a little too anal about stealth even at the best of the times, but Hitman drives that in by fucking you over at every chance it gets.
Often I’ll just end up frustrated and hitting Alt+F4 the moment an NPC spots me, because I can’t be assed to do everything again.
For a game so clearly trying to pad out its experience by letting you solve any of the assassination puzzles in many different ways, it fails miserably at keeping me even moderately interested past the first time I cock up a takedown and someone spots me.
I figured, since they’re trying to reboot the series, hence this game just being called Hitman™, maybe they had shaken up the formula enough to get me interested.
It didn’t.
Judging by how so many people seem to enjoy it, though. Maybe I’ll chalk this one up as one of those series I just don’t enjoy, regardless of how well it’s done.
Because, outside of the Linux port, this is a well done game.
But even being aware of that, all I can muster is a resounding “Meh”.

Total-

Final –

Hate Mail:

Silent
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?kK8v3bJ
https://github.com/Palm-Studios/sh3redux/issues/1

Voice
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?oiNL3bX