LinuxGameCast Weekly 294: Hurt Me Daddy

Steam Machines live! Full Metal Furies comes to Linux, Rocket League enables tournaments and Feral updates their cryptic arse-radar. Then Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition faces the CAHIRQASITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

Special tanks:
Jack Bryant (increased pledge)

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

RIP Hardware
https://overclock3d.net/news/systems/valve_removes_their_steam_machine_section_from_steam/1

Considering Links have been on fire sale this comes as no surprise.
VALVe killed the Steam machines about three days after they announced them.
However…

Tits, calm them
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/

So, to paraphrase Pierre Loup-Garou
- “Everybody relax. First Vulkan, then the bitches”
- Street Fighter V is going to be epic!
But here we have it. Steam machines are dead, steamOS is what valve is going to support and deliver stuff on.\
People, start spooling up the booga booga drive. We have Worm Sign! Or at least mention of “initiatives in the pipe”.
They were never removed from the store.
A quick check would have noped all the hype and concern.
At the end of the day VALVe is working on shite that we can’t even begin to fathom.
- Granted, it could be exceptionally useless / stupid shite.
They’re not gone but they’re certainly not going anywhere either.

Mounted
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1657763209739490075

By the numbers
https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260

PUBG skews the entire year’s worth of numbers.
$20 games lead, if their name isn’t PUBG.
293 million players SteamSpy could track.

Heathen checker
http://lgc.lysioneer.nl/

Some of the games it lists as not supporting Linux do.
There’s a submit a correction button for just that instance.
On initial inspection of the URI, I was half convinced this would rate your heatheness on a scale of 1-4 chairs

Rocket Tournaments
http://steamcommunity.com/games/252950/announcements/detail/1672399365484081031

…so it begins.
They’re actually mentioning SteamOS fixes!
- Granted, the two they mention also affected Mac, but that’s certainly welcome.
Introduced High CPU usage and slowness in the menu for some people.

Rocket WWEague®
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=252950

I was hoping for some dedicated PVP shit
Or at least a suplex city map

Führer Further Beseiged
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=346010

They added a ctf mode to single player
LAN supposed.is super nice in the era of of online only mp

Welcome to Albion
https://steamcommunity.com/games/596970/announcements/detail/1653259610100101329

I thought it was Albion the MMO, finally come to Steam…

Unworthy
http://store.steampowered.com/app/613190/Unworthy/

Grimdark Metroidvania where you roll around instead of jump
Don’t have word on a release date or price
The look, I likes it but i’ve been Slain by pretty + shite gameplay more than once.
It’s Limbo meets Salt & Sanctuary, from the description.

Biggest multiplayer challenge ever seen
http://store.steampowered.com/app/805850/Get_Wrecked/

I for one approve of mounting artillery on VW Busses
OMG this thing has a hard stutter every two seconds no matter what.
No graphic options minus High and Low.
Unity matchmaking system of random.
Babbys first Unity game.
Whatever did happen to Scraps since they shit on Linux from on High?

Build and… sell?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/387820/Build_a_Game_Universe/

So….a store within a store?
- Pretty much!

Full Furry
https://plus.google.com/+flibitijibibo/posts/2Udv4oYkCgY

Played a little bit of this recently with roommate.
Hipster Pixel Castle Crashers
Heeey! Another game from Cellar Door Games.
Rogue Legacy was a long time ago!

News:

Linux Game Jam 2018
https://itch.io/jam/linux-game-jam-2018

Brick Stimulator + Chuck Tingle audio book soundtrack.
I used to look forward to game jams to see the awesome new stuff developers would come up with or how they’d work around the theme to deliver a short, but damn interesting experience.
Nowadays you don’t see a whole lot of that.
The slight bending of the theme is still present but it’s used mostly as an excuse for the dev to make whatever they wanted, with only a slight nod towards the theme.

FNA 18.04
https://github.com/FNA-XNA/FNA/releases/tag/18.04

Actually giving people an idea why their FNA game won’t work with the Linux is a pretty handy tool not just for developers!

Dolphins need love 2
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/04/02/dolphin-progress-report-february-and-march-2018/

The android controller addition is actually a neat little idea
Lots of neat stuff, but Ctrl-F linux finds nothing
- Which is a good thing IMO. Linux is now humdrum to these folks
Per-game .ini settings on Android without having to either fire up another app to change it or plugging it in to your PC is a big plus!
Proper OSD scaling if you have a stupidly high res phone/tablet.

RIP MAC gaming
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17191986/apple-intel-cpu-processor-design-competition

If these new chips are going to be beefy arm processors, even with their decent x86 emulation, yeah, you’re basically asking devs to support an entirely new architecture.
That’s a big ask. But people accepted metal, up until they figured out how to vulkanize it
- Maybe it’ll finally be the catalyst that makes ARM laptops a more accepted thing
- We’ve seen apple make some strange decisions in the past that later catalyzed into stuff we take for granted now (Touchscreen phones, flash, etc)
MS took a ARM Dorito built from a mobile phone and shoved it into a lappy formfactor.
Apple will at least build some custom kit.
I have no doubt Apple will make the OS and hardware work together.
It’s the third party support I don’t really see.
If people couldn’t be assed with even the modicum amount of support for Windows RT or anything else on ARM, outside of Android and iOS, I don’t know how this will fly in 2020.
Maybe ARM will have overtaken x86 by then and I’m just talking bollocks from the past.

Feral radar making sense?
http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/upcoming/

Clicked on the moving dots and they actually showed games.
Well, some. Apparently that skank Robert Johnson isn’t dead yet
Life is strange is now coming out before ROTT?
- ROTT announced Tuesday, 13th February, 2018
- LIS announced Wednesday, 14th March, 2018
June 21st is still a long way away, apparently!

CHAIRQASITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition
Webzone: Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition
Devel: Bioware/Beamdog
Engine: Aurora
Price: 19.99 USD

Wazzat: Return to the Forgotten Realms in this bestselling Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Combines all the content of Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition with all-new enhanced features. Includes 100+ hours of award-winning adventures and the tools to create your own!

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys.

Makes with the working

Venn-

New, fkn, rule: If I have to touch a *.ini in 2018 automatic -2 Chairs.
If molesting said *.ini file does not sort the issue -1 Chair.
Your menus don’t work, Brad.
I have tried windowed, fullscreen, borderless, 1080p, 720p, 2160p.
Cursor is out of alignment and straight-up nopes when trying to create a character.
Got it to work with 2160p fullscreen borderless MINUS UI scaling.
- 27 minutes of constant futzing only to get in an unplayable state.
- Yes, 27 minutes and I have yet to play the game.
Hangs on cloud sync when you force-close because you kinda have to force-close when the menus don’t FKN work.
Started on the wrong DAC but after all the other bullsh*t it hardly seem worth mentioning.
And before any of you playing the home game say a FSM damned word; everything I pointed out reads like a preflight checklist from the Steam review page.

Jordan-

Fix the mouse thing by doing setting Enable HardwareMouse=1
Oh yes, thar be out of the box issues. Bad Beamdog!
Also crashes when trying to load games from the Shadow bonus campaign
…Yeah, this is not a final product that should have made it to production
When Lutris gives you a better out of the box experience then your for $20 steam game, rethink the choices you made.

Pedro-

Fullscreen doesn’t work on Linux.
You can work around it by enabling borderless maximised in the .ini file.
Cloudsaves cause launch issues.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

Venn-

Jordan-

Just like 2003 Used to make

Pedro-

Considering the game came out in 2002 (2003 on Linux) it looks very blocky.
Its one saving grace are the awesome community mods which improved graphics a lot.
That and the improved engine is being tailored specifically to allow mods both old and new to work.
The big aesthetic yes for me is the Jeremy Soule audio.
The Hordes of the Underdark campaign, besides being the best in my opinion, also had the best music.
Can’t give it a full score since they still haven’t made anti-aliasing work and the Depth of Field crap they implemented makes everything look blurry.

Total-

Control

Venn-

Jordan-

TOEE still remains the high point of D&D PC game controls.
NWN’s are serviceable

Pedro-

You can have the typical skycam, overhead follow camera or “free” camera.
Heavy air quotes around the free bit since it’s still locked to your character.
You can play the whole game with just the mouse but they will let you control most of everything with the keyboard.
Mouse is only necessary when dealing with what, in 2018, can only be described as an old ass looking UI.
Though you can mod that too.

Total-

FUN

Venn-

Jordan-

The second I hit the character creation screen, I had a big ol’ flashback to sitting at my desk, a dozen 3.5 source books splayed out in front of me trying to pick out feats and prestige classes
Man, I really don’t miss playing D&D from that era\
It’s neverwinter nights. It’s a perfectly fun RPG based in a semi-familiar fantasy world
But for whatever reason, playing it again didn’t really pull me in the same way that kotor did
You actually get a good amount of game for your money. You get all of the expansions, plus a bunch of additional content from the platinum edition. Kingmaker was actually a pretty fun side campaign (which is what I replayed for this review)
The technical issues though. Hot damn
Strider straight up did a better job of this with Lutris than Beamdog did. Sure it lacks the nice online bits that steam does, cloud saves just don’t work.

Pedro-

Neverwinter Nights is my all time favorite Linux game.
I’m hoping the Enhanced Edition will live up to its name but it’s hard to ignore the technical issues at play, here.
From defaulting to that broken ass scaling system, to failing at fullscreen and anti-aliasing, horrible depth of field, and general brokenness in even something like the Steam Cloud saves.
I have no doubt in my mind Beamdog will fix their shit.
But boy does it make it hard to recommend this version.
The thing I like so much about Neverwinter Nights is the multiplayer.
Having spent several years of my life playing in quite a few servers, I’m glad Beamdog fixed the server browser and made it even easier to join your friends through Steam.
But, those single player campaigns are very much there and they’re charging £3 for the premium modules.
Oh and £2 for a freakin’ portrait pack! >.>