LinuxGameCast Weekly 254 – Learning Kids

L.G.C. Actual is under attack! Dragon’s Lair comes to Linux, Rocket League visits Earth C-137, and the Smach Z hits a massive snag. Then Cossacks 3 faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

Sale!
http://www.shacknews.com/article/100475/steam-refund-requests-hit-more-than-300000-a-day-after-summer-sale-launch

Do more people try before they buy when it’s cheaper or is something elks going on here?
Or is this buying the week before and returning it for the sale price?
- If steam refunds actually work like that, they deserve to lose the money
- That’s exactly how they work.

Client batteries
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1344737648617996026

Non-Steam controllers now can display battery statistics. It’ll also buzz the controller that needs juice
They also added some enhancements to the mouse-joystick mode, so if you like fiddling around with calibration settings; valve’s got your back
D-Input controllers can now be rebound as they used to be originally.

Tracking 2.0
https://skarredghost.com/2017/06/07/need-know-steamvr-tracking-2-0-will-foundation-vive-2/

This article needs an editor. There are a bunch of typos and grammatical failures
We talked about this a few weeks ago when Valve announced the new Motion tracker ASICS they were recommending developers get their mits on
- This guy draws a lot of the same conclusions we did
Apparently the stations will be backwards compatible though, so when the vive 2.0 drops, you just need to buy a new headset. Which likely won’t be sold separately!

Wub
https://www.rocketleague.com/news/rick-and-morty-are-coming-to-rocket-league/

WHAR REST OF SEASON 3
- End of July.
Also, what about a rick’s spaceship DLC? That’d actually make you money
It’s free.
It’s not the usual Psyonix MO, when they just give shit away!

Yook patch
http://steamcommunity.com/games/360830/announcements/detail/1330100338770483916

At least it’s still being worked on unlike Mighty Blunder 9.
Unfortunately, Team17 refuses to send us 3 keys.

Hawt (screen)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/508660/Triple_X_Tycoon/

First time i’ve seen hipster-pixel nudity on Steam.
It’s a neat idea. You can be a porn producer or a dildo producer. Or both!

OG QTE
http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/Dragons_Lair/

Apparently there are controller issues with the linux version
Steam controllers work, keyboard and mouse might not

…wow
http://store.steampowered.com/app/657630/Fidget_Spinner/

Next-level GOTY stuff right here.
I…I just don’t
As if it wasn’t already a bad concept for a game, it’s also very clearly a terrible mobile port!

News:

384.47 (beta)
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1016125/unix-graphics-announcements-and-news/-linux-solaris-and-freebsd-driver-384-47-beta-/

Added support for “Max Q Design”
- What dat? Apparently it’s a version of the 1080-60 that’s designed for super thin laptops
- The driver itself probably has some additional power and thermal tuning as well
- The laptops themselves are in the $2000-4000 range, and the spec are decent, but goddamn that price
Speaking of laptops, they’ve fixed a kernel panic issue with PRIME displays
They’ve also corrected an selinux file label for their kernel modules

New UT
https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/blog/release-notes-june-28

Hey, you no longer have to dig around in their forums to find the link.
Aaaaaaand it’s 10GB.
Still an unplayable chuggy mess now with the added benefit of jacked-up textures.
Textures on certain weapon models just don’t load.
If you want Vulkan, you’ll have to build it from sauce!

Still kicking
https://liliputing.com/2017/06/smach-z-handheld-gaming-pc-hits-another-big-snag.html

If your hardware partner nopes you might, just might have problems.
I’m still surprised they’re trying at this point. LET IT DIE

(lib-)Retro Dolphins
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/new-core-dolphin-windowslinux-alpha-release/

More libretro support for emulators!
This time, our latest favorite project which Nintendo hates, the Dolphin emulator gets its own libretro core!
There are some steps involved with getting it to work, but they do call it an Alpha.
Besides the hoops you need to jump through to get it working, there is still a sizeable list of stuff left to implement.
Hopefully Libretro and the Dolphin guys play nice.
It would suck to have to fork and maintain two different versions of dolphin, considering dolphin is constantly under development.

Humblenet 1.0 Release (from Jonah J)
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/introducing-humblenet-a-cross-platform-networking-library-that-works-in-the-browser/

A C based peer2peer networking API that funnels UDP requests over a websocket
The idea is to enable cross platform communication with the browser
Given that some companies *cough*feral*cough* can’t get OS network interop working, this could be a godsend

Micro Machines YORG
http://www.ya2.it/release-0-6-is-your-summer-gift/

It, launches.
Using the Panda Express.
That camera is horrible!
The controls go from slight suggestion to OMG I’M SPINNING IN CIRCLES, in a matter of tenths of seconds.

Electron Game Engine (from Orn)
https://sparklinlabs.itch.io/superpowers

It’s not electron, specifically, but since it makes games in HTML5 you could easily run them in an electron wrap.
And to be fair, they have a little gallery with some sample games and they all work, so that’s good.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Cossacks 3 (BETA)
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/333420/Cossacks_3/
Devel: GSC Game World
Engine: In-House “Lightweight” Engine
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99

Wazzat: Cossacks 3 is a rare combination of war, economy, army developing, building and upgrading that couldn’t be found in any game for the last 15 years. This deep RTS gameplay will return old fans in the golden ages of the genre and give newcomers a unique experience.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys

Makes with the working

V-

Yall got anymore of them, threads?
You guessed it, it maxes out two threads at 100% so you best have plenty of gigajules.
This would not be a problem if it didn’t turn into a chug-fest when panning the map.
Or cause your units to become unresponsive for a full 30 seconds.
Oh, did I mention that it fails to capture the gerbil input?
But none of that matters since this motherf*cker locks up every 30 minutes.

J-

Gotta set selinux to permissive for this fucker to run. Or allow executable heap memory

P-

One thing to remember going forward, this is still in Beta.
That said, Beta shouldn’t mean the game freezes every 30 minutes and you lose all your progress since the last autosave.
You also can’t set resolution. That’s a big one!
Like Venn already mentioned, even though the game gives you an option to lock the cursor to the window, it doesn’t work.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

I think the game looks a bit of alright.
It’s definitely better than anything from the Total War series.
Really has a bright fantasy vibe and that’s important when your primary objective is slaughtering people.
On that topic, I would have liked a little bit of gore or at least a gib option.
Hell, I even liked the background music.
I most definitely had that point where I stopped and just had a listen.
Well done, that.
It does make with the beeps and boops while moving units and attacking but that can be largely ignored.

J-

There’s a bit of graphical whiplash here. The backgrounds look all spritey and almost hand drawn
The units are weird little unity looking action figures
Either way, the scale that this game operates means you don’t get a good chance to look too close
The background music is there, but it’s kinda repetitive and boring

P-

The graphics don’t look too bad if you bring everything up to 11.
If you do, though, the performance tanks! So that’s bad.
I also didn’t hate the background music, up until the game froze and that was the only thing apparently still working.

Total-

Control

V-

Using the arrow keys caused my arm-organ to go numb, that was new.

J-

Standard RTS fare with a twist!
- The hotkeys are fucking everywhere and nonintuitive!

P-

No rebindable controls, in 2017, means you get 2 chairs dinged right out of the box.

Total-

FUN

V-

I managed to finish the tutorials and start the first real campaign.
This is where the random freezing got real, son.
Nothing like taking 20 min and building up your business for a siege only to have the game freeze.
Yeah, up until that point I was really liking how the game was progressing.
Letting me get slaughtered to death and learn from my mistakes was most welcome.
How, fkn, ever, I spent 20min managing the construction of a FK tonne of cannons from three smiths and soon as I noped the first fort, you guessed it, it froze.
I quit right then and there with no small amount of grr.
Not so much about the crash but the fact that (up to that point) I was rather enjoying myself.

J-

I didn’t get any of the freezes that these guys got. If you don’t count the random autosave stalling your game
Honestly, this seems like just another 0-AD style RTS. I don’t have anything against them, but they don’t do anything for me
There’s some economics and espionage, but for this most part this is a combat driven RTS
Once you got me micromanaging units on a large combat scale, you lost me.

P-

As much as RTS games bore me to tears, there have been exceptions over the years.
The first one I really enjoyed was the RTSiest of RTS games, Age of Empires 2.
And Cossacks 3, for those 30 minutes it let me play it at a time, it managed to capture that same style of play and I honestly didn’t hate it.
Which makes it all the worse when it did freeze and the frustration kicked in.
I don’t play games to be frustrated, which is why I’m probably not going to continue playing Hyper Light Drifter, on stream. But that’s not what we’re here for.
Cossacks 3, keeping in mind that it is a Beta, doesn’t hold up to even its incomplete status.
Because it’s not incomplete, it’s broken.

Total-

Final –

Hate Mail:

Path
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?ujwXlCZ