LinuxGameCast Weekly 251 – Fun Police

Greenlight is dead! Quake 3 Arena gets Vulkanized, Dawn of War III arrives on Linux, and we’re giving away a copy of Slain: Back from Hell. Then Motörhead: Through the Ages faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

Redlight
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595

Steam Direct fee is $100.
This fee is returned in the payment period after the game has sold $1,000.
If you release a free game / MOD you will never get it back.
- See, with the whole refund thing, you could have easily increased the asking price.
- Submitting data per game doesn’t seem all that efficient. I’m sure existing deals will be grandfathered in
“As we have been doing for the past year, there is a short process prior to release where our review team installs each game to check that it is configured correctly, matches the description provided on the store page, and doesn’t contain malicious content.”
- You do what, now?
- If you did that, there wouldn’t be issues with 0-byte downloads.
- So that’s a lie!
  - QA only applies to Windows.
  - Apparently Windows games also ship with missing executables.
We need to send the lot @ Distance an award or something.
It was in beta before Greenlight and remains after its closing.

VR
http://steamcommunity.com/games/steamvrtracking/announcements/detail/1264796421606498053

There’s a fancy new motion sensor in town
The big improvements is that it can receive data sent via laser from one or more base stations
This enables theoretical support for more than two base stations, with all the benefits this provides
These new sensors are backwards compatible, but the old stuff isn’t forward compatible. Sorry Early adopters

Another
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/06/07/valve-loses-its-fourth-writer-in-two-years-as-jay-pinkerton-leaves-the-company/

If you’re a writer and you want to write videogame stories, you probably don’t want to work for VALVe.
This confirms both HL3 and L4B3 are finished and scheduled for release in 2037.
He was one of the brains behind the Meet the X series for TF2. Also did a bunch of comics. Don’t think his shit was video game plot related

Warhammered req
http://store.steampowered.com/app/285190/Warhammer_40000_Dawn_of_War_III/

On “high” getting 35.49 Vulkan and 37.07 OpenGL.
Well, that’s the bench and we all know they are borderline useless.
In-game on “medium” I’m seeing 60/70 @ 1080.
If you wanna multiplayer, you’re gonna need four physical cores
- Curious how Bulldozer/Piledriver deals with it. Specifically the “quad-core” chips
- If you wanna multi you gonna need some other friends running Linux, son.
  - This is a feral port. That caveat is pretty obvious

Serious Vulkan
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=564310

WHAR BFE?
- In hell, being forced to watch repeat viewings of spice world. As it deserves
Still don’t see any fixes for the racist encounter
There is a vulkan sdk update
With the 1.0.49 SDK version, you probably want to use the 381 Nvidia driver since that is the driver version which supports vulkan >=1.0.42

Ballistic beta
https://twitter.com/BallisticOverK/status/871856031307096065

Code: 4qu1risb137v1
Well, you can cut everything on 11 and get between 30/70.
I was going to try then I remembered I had uninstalled it.

Leaving Linux
https://steamcommunity.com/app/585840/discussions/0/1319962683444827894/

Welp, that increased the value of my Steam account.
If most of the bugs were being reported by Linux people, even though they only account for 2% of your purchases, something tells me you’re building your game FOR Windows only and not for all platforms at once.
We have plenty of those games on Linux already, I’m not weeping over a 1hour prelude to a hypothetical game.
Protip: Pick a single distro and support it.
- Seriously
Also, use steam runtime kids. Make your life easy

Multiverse in Sept
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=34601

They’ve set the goal, but can they make it?
Multiplayer physics are all run from the server, so for large maps or multiplayer games with sufficiently complex machines you’re going to need to beef up the host
They do have a simulation mode, which lets you copy the host’s map and run a sandbox on your machine

Cows with guns
http://store.steampowered.com/app/604240/Shotgun_Farmers/

So deathmatch where missing spawns a new copy of your gun
An original-ish idea, but I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize the shooter genre

News:

Goliath Alpha 2
https://github.com/BlueGoliath/Goliath-Overclocking-Utility-FX/releases

Now /w experimental fan support… and themes!
Witten in spite JavaFX.
Does this do anything (aside from themes) that is not available in the NVIDIA control panel?
It’s a unified GUI for handling just the overclocking bits.
I’m assuming it’ll make it prettier than just inserting the values into the text boxes.
Honestly, with this FX processor I don’t see the need to overclock the GPU since it rarely goes above even 50% use.
So if anyone watching wants to poke this with a stick, I’d be very interested to hear what you think! Send us some hatemail saying how I just encouraged you to fry your GPUs.
What’d be nice is some universal overclocking utility that supports both AMD and Nvidia gpus, with a library of presets.

New GOG connect games
https://www.gog.com/connect

Another $117 worth of games for me
$201 worth of games, here.
It added 12 games.

Dolphin QT
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/06/03/dolphin-progress-report-may-2017/

They outright say D3D12 is not being actively developed, is it just on their end or do they mean the API itself?
“Removing D3D12 support also makes it easier for people to tinker with and compile Dolphin on Windows” – LOL! And here I though Dx12 was the future!!1!
- It’s never gonna be with people on windows 7 living in the past maaaaaaaaaan
In all seriousness, this is a big slap in Microsoft’s face.
The only usefulness in DX12 is to pave the way to Vulkan!
That’s the graphic API equivalent of using Internet Explorer/Edge to download Chrome or Firefox.
WxWidgets gets the axe. At this point, QT is a pretty solid choice for handling GUI elements.
There are also some updated touch controls, for people who play their dolphin games on android
- I guess you gotta be a special kind of masochist to do that

This is fine
https://rpcs3.net/blog/2017/06/04/progress-report-may-2017/

Vulkan speed boosts, Vulkan speed boosts, everywhere.
We might need to start calling the news section the Vulkan Linux update of da weeeeeek
They have a paid graphics developer on board now, leading to a bunch of improvements
Fully playable games include Catherine, Rayman Legends,Disgaea 4 (Hello darkness my old friend), and Persona 4 is getting pretty close
Patreon helped this. Go support devs doing cool shit on patreon. Speaking of which…

LLAP Q3
https://medium.com/@kennyalive/quake-3-vulkanized-245cc349fdcf

From rohit_n
- “If the programmer isolated most of the Vulkan code it could be integrated to ioq3. Since Ryan’s already did an autoupdater, maybe his next Patreon project should be this”
- Looks like the code is pretty self contained.
Notice how we’re not seeing a lot of “I made a DX12 render for game X”
- Probably because they people who want to do stuff like this also don’t want to use windows 10

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Motörhead: Through the Ages
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/462290/
Devel: Haemimont Games
Engine: Proprietary (same as Tropico 5)
Price: 11.99 / CDN 15.99

Wazzat: ‘Motörhead: Through the Ages’ is a wild tour through the mythos of the loudest band in the world! Bring the mighty Snaggletooth back to life with the help of Lemmy and Lloyd Kaufman! Harness the powers of the immortal Motörhead to defeat frightening new enemies in three demon-infested worlds intertwined with the songs of the band.

Mandatory Disclosure: They Sent us Keys

Makes with the working

V-

The menu lag is legit.
For the most part it holds 60+ on high but it has the performance drops of old.

J-

The online hiccups are still there. And with no real reason either
It gets a bit laggy when there are a bunch of enemies on screen. And this is on my box

P-

It takes almost a full second of jank for the game to show the stats when you hover over an item.
And in several of the DLC areas, especially the Orgasmatron boss fight, there’s a bit of framerate “hitching”.
I had over 30 hours of game time before this bit of DLC came out and I don’t remember it doing this.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

When VV entered Early Access in early 2015 it looked great, compared to the drek starting to flood the market.
Unfortunately in 2017 is looks mostly the same which is not so great.
It’s not fugly by any standard but this engine is definitely shows its age.
Now, graphically the DLC slaps some Motorhead posters on the walls and throws in a few Lemmy statues along with guitars, a smattering of new baddies, and some bosses from Motorhead lore.
And they are all done compantilly, however.
When the novelty of that business wears off you are still looking at VV in all its 2015 fidelity.
It sounds like VV with the added bonus-soda of Motorhead blaring in the background.
But it’s only 13 track and while that’s not bad for DLC it can get repetitive.
The only real complain for the sounds is the barkeep voiced by Lloyd Kaufman.
I read his interview in Glixel and he sounded excited to do it but I don’t think ANYONE gave him the slightest bit of direction resulting in most of his parts sounding “phoned in” even though they weren’t

J-

Same ol’ Vran Style
Normally, when you’re playing a game and you’re not into the soundtrack, you put on some other music
Through The ages has taken the liberty of doing this for you. However, one thing that does get a bit annoying is that when you change areas, the track will change.

P-

Everywhere you look there are textures fighting for the same depth coordinate.
Posters and wall textures fighting over the Z axis they’re supposed to show on are everywhere.
I’m not a game developer but I used to make areas for Neverwinter Nights. I learned how to stop Z-fighting pretty easily.
Simply move one of the offending textures 1 pixel up or down that axis and it’ll stop.
Seeing as I never noticed anything similar in Victor Vran outside of this DLC, I’m assuming Haemimont knows this too. So the who hell made these levels?
I’m also not a big fan of the Kaufmentary.
Thankfully, the soundtrack is so goddamn good I feel like, aesthetically speaking, this bit of DLC still deserves to walk away with 3 chairs.

Total-

Control

V-

It’s VV, one of the first ARPGs on Linux to shove all the business on a controller and map it logically OOTB.
My only complaint is the same as before.
The items / cards menu is wicked unresponsive to the point of forcing me to use my gerbil.

J-

Same ol’ vran, same old bad camera!
Give us a goddamn option to rotate the map! BETTER YET MAKE THE MAP ROTATE WITH THE CAMERA

P-

Total-

FUN

V-

It’s VV so you know you are going to get the Torchlight / Diablo ARPG goodness that’s going through a Goth phase.
You get weapons, you get cards, you get demonic powers and you get good…
And somewhere during all of the slaughter you learn to juggle that business so you don’t constantly get killed to death.
The Motorhead Through The Ages DLC changes exactly FK nothing about those parts of the game, and that’s good.
What it brings to the table is this, fan service.
Yeah, you get some wicked cool looking levels, a few skin-packs for existing models and attack guitars mixed in with a few (admittedly neat) demon powers.
And in all fairness you do get those 13 Motorhead tracks but lads, I’m just not feeling it.
The way they tied VV and Motorhead together is what it is… and it’s BAD.
After you get over that you have a little fun looking at statues, posters, and the new bosses all neat in their own right but after an hour or so your brain-organ puts that business on ignore and you’re just playing some new VV levels.
I’m not saying it’s bad I’m just saying that was my experience.
Also, I feel giving me the hella overpowered axe at the beginning sucked most (if any) challenge out of the DLC.
If you pick this up so you can take an interactive tour through Motorhead lore you’re probably going to have a good time.
If you are looking for much more than that, don’t bother.

J-

Why is Lloyd Kaufman still alive, but Lemmy isn’t?
Really though, an expansion should deliver a similar experience to the base game, but adds some neat stuff
This doesn’t really do that. It’s the exact same game. There are some new weapons and magic, but they’re all a bit meh.
The new levels are nice, but holy fuck they rely a ton on area denial to ramp up the difficulty, kinda like the original Vran
So, aside from a skinjob, some better sounds and a bunch of levels, if you weren’t sold on vran, this probably won’t do anything for you.
Also, am I the only one who thinks it should be called the Orgasmatrain? Orgasmatron indicates a much more intricate piece of tech

P-

I didn’t think I’d ever use the words padded, gimmicky and boring to describe anything related to Victor Vran or Motörhead… I was wrong.
Since I’m pretty sure Haemimont will be watching this review, I’ll do my best to explain.
I really like Victor Vran, it’s what the console version of DIablo III eventually became with a lot more variety.
It’s a true hack & slash game and a pretty fun one at that.
When I say the Motörhead DLC is padded, I don’t mean the sheer insane number of side objectives every single dungeon or area is loaded with. No, no! That was already case the with the base game and I’m totally okay with that.
When I say padded, I mean level design in the DLC didn’t have the same love put into it as the base game and most of the dungeons were simply thrown together and a bunch of enemies packed into random areas of the map with little to no cohesion.
It all looks like it’s there to pad out the experience in hopes of justifying the price.
With perhaps the most egregious example being how the gold reward, for defeating one of the “Rock Monument” encounters, spawns in a big ass circle around said monument and takes its sweet ass time do it. Feels like a waste of time!
Then there’s the final bossfight! I hate gimmicky boss fights so goddamn much.
I’m not the only one either, ask anyone who’s played Dark Souls which was their least favorite boss fight. My money’s on most people saying it’s the Bed of Chaos. Why? Cuz it’s the most gimmicky of all the boss fights in that game.
And the Queen of the Damned (that’s not a spoiler since she’s in the trailer) does the whole you can’t damage her until you run around the level killing lazily design Souls of Damned. And you need to do that 4 times!
Weren’t it for the fact the song Queen of Damned played on a loop throughout the whole fight, I would have said fuck it from how bored I was.
A final boss fight should never be boring.
Thankfully, outside of everything I’ve mentioned, more Victor Vran is always a good thing.