LinuxGameCast Weekly 314: Garden Hose Challenge

Steam opens the Windows! Humble gets a little Spooky, NVIDIA plays with light and GOG propositions DRM.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Proton, port off

Ronpaul.gif
They’re shipping proton, a custom version of wine with dxvk, a dx12 to vulkan layer, some steam input magic and openVR support
A curated list of games are supported by default, bit you can turn on the fire hose and try every game in your library at your own risk
Ah, so Steam was financing the development of DXVK, fascinating.
Skyrimjob one-click installs.
I’m thinking this will be a prime (autocorrected to poutine) time feature in SteamOS 3.0
The Proton build released Wednesday accidentally contained a debug build of DXVK, which impacted performance.
Ultimately all this did was remind me of why I don’t bother trying to play games /w WINE.
One thing Valve got right?
Complete lack of options.
You click play and it either works or it don’t. End of story.
Yeah, you damn well know a game will run /w X version of WINE and XYZ installed but keep in mind, you are not the intended audience.
Yes, we have consulted the wise Panzer of the lake.
Buying games that only work in “compatibility mode” still count as Heretic Purchases.
- Seems legit. Wine is wine. I get to play batman again tho!
My concern is that this is the solidification of win32 as the standard gaming app format. If the push now is to support vulkan to ease shit off the compatibility layer, we’re just going to see see a lot of major studios even straight up abandoning thoughts of linux support and simply rely on steam
- That if, if steam survives. DUn dun dunnnn
Strider hopes this’ll shut up people asking for linux ports of older games

So, what runs

Seems a bit less complete than the other one but at least it doesn’t chug as bad.
The community has started a compatibility spreadsheet, which also includes quite a few ways to work around some of the issues with the not officially whitelisted games.
- Here’s the link to the published version: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ3_odz8JzEVK80vkku-b6FsICWb45xGf4VYnzYz5cNSMVQ-5BA2WoHBGAScw96MgLj1ONA7Cx0tyGa/pubhtml
- Scrolling through it pegs one of the 12 threads of my Ryzen at 100%.
Eager beavers wanting to beat the steam curated list
I’ve tried a couple obscure games out of my library and they’ve worked so far

SteamWeavers

Guys, did I mention skyrim installs?
VALVe is really good at keeping quiet about things, it seems.

The main Event

Timestamps + the ability to go back in the broadcast.
- The whole steam works integration to dynamically create book marks for events in game seems pretty cool too
- Although for now that shit is dota 2 specific
The DOTA event (quality wise) looked good.

Short Steam

Tool to add non steam shortcuts to steam
I guess if you’re really anti-gui
What I’d like is something that’ll let me create shortcuts to emulated game in SteamOS which doesn’t require me to spend several minutes in desktop mode, chmod’ing and chown’ing stuff left and right.

Removed Games

23 games in my library have been removed from the store
7 can no longer be bought but still have a store page.
Apparently 0 for 0

Steam: Game Updates

Progression Cars

Avatar borders, though…
Are they running out of ideas?

Steam: New Games

Zombie racing

Ya still think Road Redemption looks janky?
I can smell the assets and they smell like shovelware
- This smells more like babbys first video game.
- That should be on Itch, for free.

Block pusher

“Sokoban: The RPG is a challenging puzzle game…”
- Oy! What is it, then?
- Block puzzles you gob
It’s an RPG maker game, so the mechanics are gonna be basic. I guess you just replace your grinding with sliding block puzzles

Gordons MOD

Fuck you Gordon freeman you disrespect the iron sheik. I put you in the camel clutch and make you humble bubba!
Basically some people rewrote a bunch of hl1 mods for hl2, organised and curated them and crammed it in a single mod
Available, like, whenever.

That’s Crazy

Alright, first I was miffed that they forgot to mention the Early Access was for backers only.
Good way to drum up free publicity I guess?
What genuinely irritates me is the literally unplayable (until you copy libsteam_api.so) Linux version delivered to backers.
Even then you’re FKD because of busted textures, abysmal performance and game breaking bugs.
Good job Black Riddles Studio and a double good job Fig Publishing Inc for allowing them to ship it in this state.

News:

Humble Spooky Bundle

White noise 2 and Layers of Doors for $1.
We might be playing some White Noise 2 multi in the future so ya might want to have that handy.
- Oh man, I remember the first one
- The LGC-ified version is way more fun
Some weeb BS if you beat the average.

Giga Rays

Considering they could name their price, not bad.
$499 for a 1080 crusher seems fair.
- Yes…very…fair…
- It’s a Titan Xp crusher too.
  - Yup, makes me glad I didn’t burn 1000 bucks. Only 500
$1200 for the 2080Ti without mining inflation is a statement AMD needs to counter.
There are only two reasons to consider a 20X series card.
- 1. You wants it.
- 2. You are running a 970 or below.
- 3. UHD 60 all the things?

DRM

Man, the internet went from “FK DRM” to “Oooh let’s try all my Windows games on Steam” in like, a nanosecond.
- Which is a wee funny considering a bunch of games don’t work cuz of 3rd party DRM
Say what you will about GOG and you all know I have, but the fight against DRM is one worth fighting for.
DRM hurts paying customers more than pirates, it’s easily circumvented and creates ill will toward the companies who push it.
While it’s true GOG is offering DRM free games, it’s lone appearance in the gaming section makes it seem a wee cynical

Not so prime

I didn’t have prime for the free games, dumbarses.
So now you have to have Twitch Turbo.
Why make only Prime money when you can make Prime AND Turbo money?
What’s that? Adblockers? Never heard of ’em.
Not entirely sure who’s to blame here, Amazon, Twitch or even both.
I feel like it’s Twitch going “Amazon makes all the Prime money and we don’t see any of it. We want money too!”
Amazon’s pulling a cable TV. Originally the pitch was that you wouldn’t get commercials. Now you do.
They’re perfectly happy to take more of your money to get the original experience back

Qwack 2 (RTheren)

Would be interesting to see if someone could get this up and running on Linux.
Apparently the support is there. Quake 2 players who want fancy looking quake 2 rejoice!

ShockGL

Now supports that new fangled OpenGL render.
You can also skip the splash screens, cuz you don’t need to stall on most modern systems these days
It’ll also capture your cursor now

Open source game repo

Aims to be a open source steam
Currently just installs games from flathub
Prettier Ui than lutris
- Maybe since it’s open source he can strider it into Lutris.

Java hop

Mario java maker with multiplayer.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Airships: Conquer the Skies
Webzone: Airships_Conquer_the_Skies
Devel: David Stark
Engine: Java based
|Price: £11.39 / US$14.99 /CA$17.49

Wazzat: In Airships: Conquer the Skies you’ll need to use all of your creativity and skill to design and build fearsome airships and land vehicles to give you the edge in massive aerial battles.

Venn:

Does It Launch

No issues, even gives you the option to use system Java.

Performance @ 1080

60 @ 1080 and 2160.

Graphics

Windowed mode works.
No issues /w fullscreen.
It flips the hell out when exiting fullscreen but manages to stick the landing.
Nice, crisp, hipster-pixel nonsense.

Control

Keyboard + gerbil.
Agree / w Pedro about the scattershow but at the end of the day they do indeed work.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

Performance @ 1080

60@UHD

Graphics

The resolution options are a little bit fucky

Control

The keyboard shortcuts are all over the place, but they sorta make sense
Turning on “USe System cursor” seems to fix the cursor issues for me

Pedro:

Does It Launch

Performance @ 1080

Graphics

Limited to 1080p either Fullscreen or borderless window.

Control

It tends to lose track of the mouse.
Not that it escapes the window, just that it doesn’t correctly interpret the position of the cursor

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:

Fun Score:

Venn:

I don’t completely hate this game and coming from me that’s borderline praise.
It’s a FTL lite that relies more on skill + management vs RNG.
You build sky or ground ships, give the occasional vague suggestion and shit plays out.
At least that’s why my simplistic brain-meats took away from it.
However, that’s just the surface and if you dig a little deeper there is a gang of switches to fiddle.
It’s damn near Sim Kill-ship with all the options for armour, weapons, ship management and the like.
And unlike so many games released today it has a surprisingly active online community… filled will people who will murderate you with the utmost efficiency.
Yeah, this might be a borderline spreadsheet simulator but I honestly kind of like it.
This is a 100% stuck on a desert island game.
Easy on the surface but lot’s of shite to do if you have the time to invest.
$14.99 might be a hard sell for some but if this is your thing, worth it.

Jordan:

It sorta reminds me a bit of gratuitous space battles, but you have a little control, sometimes
I spent most of my time building airships. It’s lego like nature appeals to 8 year old jordan
That said, the gameplay itself is a little bland
I can certainly say I can’t outpilot a giant squid though. TIL
Kicked the shit out of some spiders. Deadliest predators in the animal kingdom my ass

Pedro:

I like the idea of building your own ship and seeing how it fares.
But I hate real time strategy.
I wish the game played more like Gratuitous Space Battles but with the ability to craft your ships from the ground up, so to speak.
As it stands I keep losing and I can’t muster the effort to give a damn.
I do like the ship building, though.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:

Hate Mail:

Feral

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