LinuxGameCast Weekly 319: #GAMEUI_CONTROLLER_BUTTONS_TITI

Valve counts controllers, PlayOnLinux returns from the dead, BATTLETECH 1.2.1 adds support for Linux and Jackbox Party Pack 5 gets a release date. Then RAZED faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

All this, plus your hate mail!

Special tanks to:
Mlangston: (increased pledge)
LinuxGNUru: (Paypal donation)
Terribly Mysterious Stranger: (Firewire card & cable)

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Controllas

195k Steam Users using SNES controllers.
The 360 controller being on top shouldn’t surprise anyone
- Yeah, considering xinput devices = XBOX.
The article also echoes my sentiments about the ds4, which on Linux is a lot easier to get set up
And now I’m even more tempted to get one of those Switch pro controllers but I’d probably end up not using it all that much.

SPCR for Steam

Handy because my brain-organ flat-out refuses to remember the URL.
Needs more Chrome

VR Crash

Ayyy steam vr gets some linux fixes
Now how about some games to take advantage of said fixes

Steamy compitition

Alright, securing digital sales with blockchain is kinda neat.
Being able to resell games, double so.
- That is ripe for abuse
Especially with developers creating artificial scarcity to drive up price of their stuff.

Steam: Game Updates

Sunless Skies exits Early Access

Sequel/spiritual successor comes out at the end of January
They also made a tabletop RPG for it, which I perused
- It’s pretty clearly a small scope game, inspired by apocalypse world

Rocket Cars v1.53

Bunch of Hot Wheels stuff to decorate your business with.
Hot Wheels Rivals’ is now available as a playable Arena in Casual Playlists, Tournaments, Private Matches and Offline Matches
And of course, another £4 worth of DLC cars.

Seeker and Slayer

New game+ mods to spice up replayability
Megabosses have been added to put your munchkining skills to the test
Why one would want a kill can in an isometric RPG is beyond me, but you have one now and you can configure it
As usual, a host of gameplay and AI fixes are also included

Chimply amazing

Stupid monkey update mumble grumble
3 new levels including the nuclear plant and the mainframe
A few more.fucky block types you can use to attempt to screw over your friends but actually fuck yourself
You can also customize the bejeezus out the match, adjusting scoring, block appearance rates and more

Blade Symphony

Latest update adds Linux support.
Porting to the latest Source engine allowed this.
The update also includes a gentler learning curve: being inspired by games such as Jedi Knight’s lightsaber duels and Soul Calibur.
That said, if you are trying to make this friendly to newcomers ya might want to unfuck your controller settings.
Using the Steam Contolla (on a game built /w the source Engine) no button prompts are shown and “grab” is not even mapped.

Steam: New Games

BATTLETECH

Available in Beta on Steam only. When it goes live, it will release on all supported distribution platforms.
Multiplayer has some… issues.
Thanks to Jeremy from PCper for letting me know.
Hoo boy, this is a pleasant surprise. Good job Hairbrained
This has the potential to be another time sink for me. Turned based giant robot shenanigans

Total War: Kingdoms or something

THREE KINGDOMS is coming to Linux shortly after the Windows release on March 7th, 2019 according to a Feral human.
- You know, considering feral;s turnaround time usually, that’s not too bad
It’s got to be a FSM damned awesome time to be a TOTES WAR fan and a Linux user.

Multiplayer Bomberman

It’s EXTREMELY basic but makes /w the working.
The first person perspective has me curious
Though, I can imagine the claustrophobia it will cause.

Jack V

Hope they maintain their unofficial Linux support for part 5.
Oh look, Linux support added to the preorder page.

Niffelheim

Looks nice.
- Bit of a salt and sanctuary vibe
- Online multiplayer is a nice touch
Don’t know if I’m a fan of the animation rigging.
Looks a bit ragdoll.
I liked Salt & Sanctuary a lot but this one, going from the trailer, doesn’t seem to be selling me on it.
It may also be that games like this are dime-a-dozen on Steam nowadays.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’re past the hipster pixel bullshit, but I’d like something with a bit more depth… dimensionally speaking.

We Don’t Like 4.0: Kingmaker

Like Baldur’s Gate? Hate AD&D? Here’s one for ya!
Apparently this one is pretty good though. A lot of my PF complaints come from shitty incentivised table behaviour and over demand of system mastery, but having a game to point you in the right direction and limit your options may work in PF’s favour
No online though, which is a wee sad

News:

Last SC

Now that the Steamy controlla is baked-in do we really need this tool?
- Still handy if you want to customise your controllers for non steam games
  - Or rasPis maybe?
The kernel driver supports HID functionality, but there’s really not much in the way of a config GUI.

DXVK Update

Better support for apus or machines without dedicated vram
Pipeline state caching allows for precompilation of shaders earlier during runtime, handy if you have driver updates, at the cost of CPU usage
My SteamBox is positively throbbing at the idea of seeing a Proton update.

PlayOnLinux 5.0 alpha 1

Now it looks even more like lutris
They’ve ditched bash for JS for their scripting engine
- But why, though?
Future goals are to create a flat hub style build system for wine games
RIPD, Lutris.
I like PlayOnLinux for one thing, it allows the management of wineprefixes much more easily than Lutris ever did.
Especially, for games which have a heavy mod community and dedicated mod managing applications.
Easier may not be the best term but far more intuitive.
That Lutris UI needs work, Strider.

OBSGL Inject

This is kinda/sorta what GLCencode was doing back in the day.
You’re going to trigger any and all anti cheat mechanisms within Steam.

Royale With DOOM

Sorta want to play around with this.
Might as well…
Every other engine and their dog has a battle royale game, why not one of the Doom engines?

FLOSS Skills

There’s a good sentiment in this article
- Don’t get to hung up on your told tools or framework, you’ll need to switch out pieces when.necessary
  - Got hung up on my told once, nasty business, that.
- Developing good practises is more important
Also, you will get a ton of criticism and disparaging remarks about your progenitors.
It’ll teach you to do the right thing and avoid those comments.

Over 1,000

Fuck yes hotdog storm

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: RAZED
Webzone: RAZED
Devel: Warpfish Games
Engine: Unity
Price: £9.29 / US$11.99 / CA$13.49

Wazzat: Sprint through dynamic neon levels in the quickest time possible, employing skills such as super-speed boosts, mega-jumps, drifts, stomps and strafes to bypass obstacles and uncover shortcuts to propel yourself up the online leaderboards.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys

Venn: ’ish

Does It Launch

OOTB.

Performance @ 1080

1080 @ 2160 locked at 60.
Didn’t have issues with micro stutters until I did.
The game would dip to 40frps ever 5 seconds or so even in the menu.
I was able to resolve this by changing the screen res to 1080 and back to 2160.
Alright, resolve is a strong word, minimize is more accurate.
They put some pretty over the Unity boilerplate but your options are limited to Unity boilerplate.

Graphics

Photons, all up in my face eyes.
Simplified poly graphics and pretty colours.

Control

Steam controlla, OOTB, had correct button prompts.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

yes

Performance @ 1080

It seems to force vsync whatever you do, so 1080 or UHD will give you “60”

Graphics

yes

Control

No DS4 Button prompts, but not ding worthy

Pedro:

Does It Launch

Doesn’t like to be moved to another monitor.
No windowed mode

Performance @ 1080

The FerPS are locked to 60
At 1080p it’s fine
At 3840×2160, even if the frame counter on the overlay doesn’t indicate any drops, there’s some very obvious microstutter.
To the point where it affects the maneuverability and speed of your character

Graphics

It does in fact display things on screen.

Control

Did you think I wouldn’t notice the lack of rebindable controls?
It’s <current year argument>, enough of this!

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:

Fun?

Venn:

It’s already got me talking shite to it.
Then again any game with a quick reset button is intentionally asking for said talking of shite.
That’s right kids, we’re about to talk about, you guess it, speed running games!
But first we have to address the magic talking shoes.
They were (are) bizarre enough to get a chuckle out of me, there, now you can’t claim I didn’t say something nice.
The one thing, one thing you absolutely, positively have to have in a precision speed-running game is fluid gameplay.
You seemed to have cocked that up, royally.
My RYZEN 7 / 980 combo barley notices RAZED is running so I’m not going to lay the blame there.
Then again I’m not running the recommended system which is, wait for it, Fedora.
I love RedHat, I’ve been running Fedora since Core 1.
Hell, you could call me a fan human.
But are you fucking with me? Fedora? Really?
Anyway, RAZED is a polygon run and jump joint that has you bouncing off walls and collecting diamonds while getting killed to death due to RNG physics, slippery controls and inconsistent frame-pacing.
At the end of the (take that shot) RAZED is a definite improvement on Outcry, the prototype is was based on but FK right off if you think this is a finished product.
Hey, who knows, there could be a future patch that sorts all the issues but until then, stay away.

Jordan:

I’m one of these people who gets really frustrated at games (see gilf/w fiends)
Speedrunny precision types are most certainly not my cup of tea, and this isn’t any exception
There is something wrong with your game if your drift mechanic is less effective than not using it at all
Pedro’s right about all the various little annoying inconsistencies, from acceleration, to accruement of charge
The visual style is fine, and I actually dig the soundtrack, but goddamn that gameplay can EABOD

Pedro:

At the end of the video I recorded for this review, I finally beat the third level of the 2nd “chapter”.
I threw my hands up, flipped the sky wizard the bird, and promptly hit Alt+F4.
At 65 minutes I’m done.
I’m done with the microstutters, which cause me to run off platforms all the damn time.
I’m done with the crapshoot physics, which sometimes will make you slow down to a crawl when you land and others won’t affect your speed at all.
I’m done with randomly dying because I got a femtometer too close to some random hazard.
Games like these need a sense of fluidity and consistency.
We threw chairs at Distance last week, and for all its flaws it does exactly this but in a fluid consistent way.
I don’t mind the random physics fuck ups as much in Distance because the rest of the game actually holds up.
Razed doesn’t, I’m afraid.