LinuxGameCast Weekly 249 – Kernel Space Program

Dawn of War III is headed to Vulkan! Planet Nomads enters Early Access, SteamVR adds experimental Linux support, and ioquake3 gets some autoupdater goodness. Then Windward faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail!

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

Space Valve
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-22-valve-hired-the-kerbal-space-program-developers

Yip, hiring people who have already made all the monies and can nope at any moment will really spur game development… somehow.
“In the meantime, we know Valve is working on three “full” VR games.“
- Hahahahaha… aaaahhh… Goddamnit VALVe!
  - The article itself says “by games we mean experiements”
    - And by experiments they mean fucking around to see if they can make any cool shit stick to the wall
This is pretty much a case of “hey, young hip idealistic developers! Come work for us! We’ll suck the life and joy out of everything you do to fuel our empire”

Brewmaster
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/1291816880503248813/

Amdgpu-pro gets das boot
With Feral and SteamVR both opting to use RADV, it doesn’t look too good for the AMD linux driver team
- I think that may have been AMD’s intention all along.
- AMDGPU-PRO was only ever supposed to be a stop gap measure for performance in the most widely used GPUs while the open sauce drivers caught up.
- And lately, both AMD and VALVe have hired a lot of open sauce driver people.
- And let’s face it, while AMD/ATI were the sole people behind the proprietary driver, it sucked big balls!
- So offloading the driver support into the Mesa team and the community, it’s a win win situation.
They’re rebasing on Debian 8.8, have the 4.11 kernel and the latest mesa to boot
Still bugs me that steamOS needs to ship mysql though. Why?
- Video game servers. If you want to host a dedicated server on your Steam Machine, you can. And SteamOS is Linux, servers are what it does.
  - If you’re using SteamOS as a headless game server, you got problems that I can’t help you with
  - Doesn’t need to be headless…
  - Also pretty sure most of the dedicated servers valve ships don’t require a system install of mysql

LinuxVR
http://steamcommunity.com/games/250820/announcements/detail/1256914311376778619

With some luck Empty can get faced FKD by his toaster… then see if his Vive now works.
Also a request for any of you out there who have managed to get VR working on the Linux.
- Especially any dual booting heathens with a radeon card. Curious how that Open Sauce vulkan driver handles the VRs
Send us some hate mail and tell the tale.
You can go to a creepy VR circus. No Carneys Though

It’s out
https://store.feralinteractive.com/en/mac-linux-games/shogun2twcollection/

It launches and runs somewhere between 22/45 on ultra @1080.
13GB DL.
If you’re curious to know how good this one is, might want to poke Che Dean on G+.
I don’t think I could subject myself to another one of these
- So guess what we’re throwing chairs at next week!

2.8 GB Vran update
http://steamcommunity.com/games/345180/announcements/detail/1273802809976509646

Fixed performance regression with newer NVIDIA drivers
- You can now enable AA and push the shadow details up to Ultra without the FerPS dipping down to the low 40s.
One bug it still has is that, regardless of your screen blanking settings, whenever the game exits it will always set it to shutdown after 10 minutes.
I had to rename the executable and create an .sh script that launches it to workaround this issue.
- Of course, this will all get noped whenever there’s an update to the game.

Because
http://store.steampowered.com/app/493880/Victor_Vran_Fractured_Worlds/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/462290/Victor_Vran_Mtorhead_Through_The_Ages/

WHAR pricing information?
- You’ll get it around June 6th.
Mr Bran Flakes goes full diablo with some procedurally generated dungeons

Nongünz
http://store.steampowered.com/app/633130/Nongnz/

The trailer cutting back and forth between the pretty good animation and the crappy pixel art really encapsulates that sensation from the early days of gaming
- I remember a similar thing happening with the trailer for Breath of Fire IV
The devs really seem to want you to take the dive on this game. Apparently there’s some ill defined idle mechanic. It could work, I’d just like to have some idea what the game is about
Platformer Nuclear Throne?

Early Nomads
http://store.steampowered.com/app/504050/Planet_Nomads/

That’s one hell of an ask for a Open Empty World game.
Really, you can do all the things in +/- 2 hours.
One Man’s Sky?
- Minus the travelling to different worlds
At least this one doesn’t even pretend to have Multiplayer.
- Not yet, anyway.
Hot damn, they’ve dun listed Suse as a their testing system. It’s a bold movie
- I’m sure Foxy and Mir are ecstatic
If this can differentiate itself from Planet Explorers, aside from just looking prettier, they may have something
They also need a super cheesy menu song of their own

Take three
http://store.steampowered.com/app/308600/Geneshift/

Formerly Greedy Car Thieves then Subvein / Mutant Faction.
Mutant Faction was Greenlit BTW.
Why Early Access:
Geneshift is ready to go. But I don’t want to finish just yet – there’s so much cool stuff we can add!
- That’s not screaming cash grab at all. No sir!
It CAN run at 60+ fps. If you believe

News:

Pad
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/aimpad-r5-analog-switch-keyboard,33289.html

They confirmed Linux support on the PCper live stream.
So the big thing here is that you can actually track intensity of keypresses? Could be interesting for precision platformers and racing games. Superfluous for everything else?
On the PCperp stream dude said they expected it to add an additional $30 to a keyboard.

Vulkan of War III
https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/766/

Alright, now I’m interested in this game.
That said, no cross-platform multiplayer.
- Par for the course for most feral games
I wonder how janky the vulkan implementation is going to be
Compared to the janky OpenGL implementation in Dawn of War 2, I think it’ll be fine.

Unreal 4.16
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-16-released

Nice jab at DX12.
Native custom hardware cursors are now supported on Linux.
Fixed various issues with Vulkan RHI on Linux.
Vulkan now compiles in Linux.
Whitelisted SteamVR plugin for Linux

Game On
https://www.humblebundle.com/gameon-bundle

Bunch of old Linux games.
10 bucks for borderlands TPS isn’t too shabby
This is another one of those you should get only if you’re just looking to complete your collection.
Grim Fandango is a must play game, in my opinion.
And it was the one and only game where I didn’t absolutely loathe the brazilian portuguese dub.

18 extras
https://www.humblebundle.com/humble-indie-bundle-18

A Story About my Uncle and Neon Drive got added
Icky was originally porting Uncle a few years back but never finished because daughter.

AutoQauke
https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-ioquake3-11368285
https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/pull/290

This will make a lot of people all the happy.
This is something the IOquake3 guys were asking for. We covered it many moons ago
It’s only partially complete though. There’s no binary signing and it’s only statically linked to libcurl on mac and linux

GRiD Your Vulkan
http://news.softpedia.com/news/grid-autosport-racing-game-for-android-to-come-with-vulkan-boost-under-the-hood-516068.shtml

No word on a vulkan renderer for the linux version just yet, but once Feral does the android port, they’ve already got all the shader code done.
So start holding your breath kids
I won’t hold my breath, mostly because since DiRT Rally came out GRiD Autosquirt got booted off my Yol0 RAID.
Given we’re seeing the rash of feral support for Vulkan in and around the time Metal support is coming out, I’m theorizing that they forked out the cash for that Metal 2 Vulkan software Molten

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Windward
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/326410/Windward/
Devel: Tasharen Entertainment Inc.
Engine: Unity
Price: 9.99 / CDN 10.99

Wazzat: Windward is an action-filled multiplayer sandbox game that puts you in control of a ship sailing the high seas of a large procedurally-generated world.

Makes with the working

V-

Everything works OOTB, no complaints.
Solid 60 @ 1080

J-

P-

Behold! 8 cores on my FX 8370E and the moment you get into a multiplayer match and there are like 10 people on screen shooting and exploding, it caps 1 core at 100%
And causes a severe performance issue.
You can lower and increase the graphics all you want, even on Ultra at 1080p the GTX 1080 only ever uses around 20% of the GPU.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Even on Ultra @ 1080p /w 28” of goodness this thing is a jag-fest.
Sweet mothering of FK will the backround music cause you to zone the hell out / put you to sleep.

J-

Put on Swashbuckle’s excellent album “Crewed By the Damned”. It’s better than the soundtrack here
Visually, it looks alright. I don’t really see how a game like this could improve in a visual fidelity sense

P-

For a game which only takes up 120-ish MB of disk space, it looks alright.
It even gives you an option to disable the shiny reflections on the water to save your bitrate.
It isn’t until you start paying attention that you see there are only 2 or 3 different buildings in towns and 5 different town “motifs”. There are 3 kinds of trees and they just get palette swapped.
Still, when it comes to visuals, it doesn’t look awful.
And the background music is perfect.
As far as simple naval exploration style music goes, Windward nails it.

Total-

Control

V-

J-

Wasd tank controls
The movement is very slow, which makes sense given the fact that you’re sailing a ship, but still. Kind of contributes to the fun segment

P-

You can remap all the buttons except movement, but it comes with WASD, directional arrows and mouse navigation enabled by default.
So it doesn’t really get dinged a chair for that.
Steam controller also works out of the box, and the game does an alright job of switching between controller and keyboard prompts when you switch, too.
The game also does a very good of making every ship feel different, including the airships and Zeppelins.

Total-

FUN

V-

Fetch quest, the game.
Combat consists of sailing around in circles.
The tutorial (if you can call it that) is damn near useless.
There is a massive gap between where the game starts (boring) and where Pedro is at (looks kinda fun)

J-

To quote the IGN review for Pokemon Alpha Sapphire: “Too much Water”
Pedro will go into the things that he enjoys about the game, and from that perspective, I can kind of see it
It’s pretty low stress, repetitive and boring
It’s just not the right kind of boring for me.
You pretty much saw that during the stream. Waiting to capture the village points in the combat thing was just so boring, I stopped doing it. It was more fun to just gang up and blow up the infinitely spawning pirate ships
Maybe there’s some more engaging stuff later on, but I can’t be arsed to get to that point

P-

This is my zen game.
This the game I play when I just want to sail around doing menial stuff with nice ambient music playing.
Windward is my No Man’s Sky.
Just like No Man’s Sky, there isn’t a lot else to do once you’ve played a few hours, bought all the ships and upgraded your equipment.
The advantage Windward has over No Man’s Sky, is that it actually does have Multiplayer.
You can join one of the official servers, you can host your own server, you can play co-op, you can do PVP, and you can even do epic RAIDs to try and kill a dragon.
- Yes, thar be dragons!
The fact I’ve sunk 51 hours into such a simple and small game should tell you everything you need to know.
I really like Windward.
If I had to pick something for them to improve, it’d be the change from the top down isometric camera to a 3rd person style. And maybe allow you to exit the ship and explore the towns on foot.
But at that point I’d be asking for them to make a better Curse of the Raven’s Cry.