LinuxGameCast Weekly 265 – Vunder Boys!

Steam enables high-DPI for Overlay! Raja Koduri Goes on Sabbatical, Eathan talks about porting Wonderboy 3, and Tooth and Tail comes to Linux. Then spaceBOUND faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Morning zoo radio thinly disguised as a Linux gaming podcast.


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

15MIL
https://steamdb.info/app/753/graphs/

  • For the first time evar Steam hit the 15mil concurrent user mark.
  • PC gaming is dead…
  • And this ladies and gents is why we will never see HL-3.
  • Hundreds of thousands of Linux users to ignore!

DPI
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/2532569135587984631

  • Now, how about a high dpi setting for the interface?
  • I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about with the overlay cause that business is still wicked-small.
  • Reduced CPU usage and battery impact when Steam is running in the background
    • If you go back to or are using the stable client you can actually tell the difference.
  • Now fix the overlay freezing games!
  • I tried groking the steam input section. As far as I can tell, using the SDK you can set up multiple layered input that all apply at once.

GOOD!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/6zi756/valve_has_officially_given_up_on_fixing_the_check/

  • You know, I’ve never actually hit that button.
    • Remember the early days when it would piss and moan about outdated drivers?
  • I’m not even sure it works on linux. Maybe someone can send us some haet mail.
    • Given how graphics drivers work under linux, I’m not even sure that’s feasible
  • On Linux that has never worked, so I can’t really say I’m going to miss it.

Tooth and Tail
http://store.steampowered.com/app/286000/Tooth_and_Tail/

  • Rodent based RTS
  • Considering it’s all mice, do you think the developers are expecting you to cheese your way through some levels?
  • This game has a tonne of hype around it and I honestly don’t see why.
  • There’s definitely a bunch of people foaming at the mouth over this.

Hungry DLC
http://steamcommunity.com/games/322330/announcements/detail/1450579235044588011

  • One new content pack for the single player game and more updates to the shipwrecked DLC
    • Hamlet. I get it. Because of all the dead people.
  • The multiplayer game gets some new timed modes. The first one is going to be called the forge
  • Their intention is to introduce these riffs for a limited time to see if people like them. Ostensibly if they prove popular enough they’ll add them to the main game
  • 6 player hell shenanigans might be fun for a stream or aftershow

News:

To hot for AMD
https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Technologies-Group-Raja-Koduri-Goes-Sabbatical

  • Taking off three months or “taking off” so Lisa can come in and clean some house.
  • You could get away with releasing a stinker GPU when the CPU division was a damn joke.
  • Fortunately that is no longer the case with RYZEN and let’s face it, Vega is one stinky stinker.
    • And it stinks of molten silicon.
  • 210W for the Vega 56 which competes with the 1070, which in turn has a TDP of 150W.
  • Vega 64, the liquid cooled one which competes with the 1080 on Linux, has a TDP of 350W!
  • For reference, the 1080 has a TDP of 180W.
  • Vega is a load of wank… stupidly expensive, boiling hot wank!
  • There was a company in France who wanted to heat water during the heat waste of of servers. These seem perfect for that project.
  • Shame the Vega cards aren’t that great for compute

Why?
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-ti-pascal-rumor/

  • If it makes the 1070 cheaper i’m all for it.
  • Outside of that I don’t see the point.
    • Squeezing money out of people who can’t quite afford a 1080
  • The original MSRP for the 1070 was $350, the 1080 started at $599.
  • Nowadays the 1070 shot up to WTF!!1!OMG,BITCOINZ! level pricing, and the 1080 is actually down to $499 MSRP if you’re lucky enough to find one.
  • So, making the 1070Ti fit between the 350-500 MSRP is just a sound business decision.
  • Especially considering what the competition is doing.

XNA2FNA FTW
https://twitter.com/0x0ade/status/907745108010946560
https://github.com/0x0ade/DuckGame-Linux

  • It means ethan’s doing damn good work. Someone with minimal linux experience was able to get a build going and was relatively feature complete

Wonderport 3
http://boilingsteam.com/behind-the-scenes-porting-wonderboy-3-to-linux/

  • SDL, getting shite done.
  • Apparently GOG has some issues adding Linux support to existing games on their store
  • The openGL issues Omar describe is what makes me happy about how developers are taking to vulkan
    • If you’re stuck writing openGL code, I’m sorry for you son

What’s Nuvie
http://nuvie.sourceforge.net/

  • When you need your Ultima 6, Martian Dreams and Savage Empire fix in 2017.
  • Martian Dreams (1991) is available gratis from GOG.
  • I for one couldn’t really care less about those specific games, but I’ll always throw my support behind SDL based engine reimplementations.
  • Slowly but surely all of the ultima games will be playable natively under linux.
  • Except 9. Because fuck that game

CHAIRQUISITION:
CHAIR– Nooope

CHAIRCHAIR– Not sure if want

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR– Check it out

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: spaceBOUND
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/653190/spaceBOUND/
Devel: Gravity Whale Games
Engine: LiteEngine2D
Price: £7.99/US$9.99/Ca$10.99

Wazzat: spaceBOUND is a brutally challenging puzzle-platformer, set in a zero-gravity environment. Stranded and bound by their oxygen tether, two astronauts must work together to make it out alive. Go in alone, or team up and face the unknown.

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys


Makes with the working

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Can’t make it to anything stupid and it runs @ 2160 without issue.

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • You can make it crash by starting the game with two controllers plugged in and then unplugging one

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Shiny / Sounds

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Funky ass-chiptunes

P-CHAIRCHAIR

  • I’m not impressed.
  • The aesthetics here are bare and completely forgettable.
  • I couldn’t tell you anything about the visuals other than they’re your standard batch of hipster pixel bullshit.
  • The chiptunes didn’t have the same impact that the ones in Songbringer did.
  • In fact, the moment I realized how annoying they sounded to me, I went to the options menu and nuked them.

Total-CHAIRCHAIR


Control

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • It’s a rage platformer so of course the controls are intentionally shite.
  • A full twin-stick assault of nope.
  • You control each critter with the precision of a fart.
  • Anything I would complain about was intentionally built into the game.

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • This game does the retrobooster low grav movement thing
  • Each analog stick controls one of the dudes
  • It’s hell

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • I guess I do have to give them credit of setting the game around the floaty ass controls they have.
  • You’re in 0-grav so movement is expected to be floaty.
  • The problem is they combined that same floaty movement with the mechanics of one of those precision rage “platformers”.
  • But more on that later.
  • Floaty controls are still floaty, though.

Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


FUN

V-CHAIR

  • Super Meat Boyeee in spaaaaaace.
  • And much like team meat spaceBOUND does fk and or all for me.
  • I’m immune to rage games.
  • It’s not that I particularly hate them it’s just that a video game is not going to make me lose my shite.

J-CHAIR

  • Precision rage games literally do nothing for me
  • I’m one of those in people who will totally get mad at a game and smash some stuff. So I gotta do my best to not snap
  • I can appreciate that this sort of game resonates with some people, but I’m not and will never be one of them
  • Multiplayer doesn’t help that much either. It just makes you mad at your partner

P-CHAIR

  • No, I didn’t have fun with this game…
  • In fact, I got so mad playing it I became physically ill and had to have a lie down.
  • I hate rage games which are hard for hardness sake.
  • I have over 140 hours in Dark Souls.
  • Trust me when I say, I can tell when a game is being cynically hard for the sake of the very small number of completely insufferable people who like to brag about how good they are at videogames.
  • I can hear your “Look who talking” spiel coming already, but I’ll only be seen as being good at video games when compared to Venn or Jordan.
  • Back to spaceBOUND:
  • The controls are floaty and you’re being asked to do some precision bullshit in terms of both movement and timing.
  • That’s missing cynical, ventures past taking the piss and falls right into sickeningly vile territory.
  • Dear spaceBOUND, go away.

Total-CHAIR


Final –CHAIRCHAIR


Hate Mail:

Vega
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?nu2LelA

  • If AMD can bring down the TDP of Vega to an acceptable level, maybe.
  • Right now, Vega is not a good option for Linux in the sense that it just matches the 1080 in terms of performance while using twice the power.
  • On a laptop, that means a lot of heat and a very short battery life.
  • If you want to buy one right now:
  • The Dell XPS 13 with Iris Pro graphics.
  • The Entroware Kratos.

MOAR Vega
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?IodJ9rt

  • If wishes were fishes, we’d all be drowning in sashimi
  • Better linux support could have put them in a competitive space for enterprise graphics, but they didn’t capitalize on this either
  • Hell, despite creating the foundational technology, they didn’t have competitive vulkan support until well after Nvidia and even Intel had released their offerings
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