LinuxGameCast Weekly 325: The Year Of Our Noodle

UNREAL Engine defaults to Vulkan, Phoenix Point cancels their Linux port, NVIDIA fixes a bug and Steam gets hacked.

Special thanks to:
TheAdmiralJT

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Fun while it lasted

So it looks like the partner key provisioning URL had an input validation problem.
You could bypass account restrictions by setting keycount to 0
Good ol’ Artem got about 20K for finding this bug. Do you think he’ll spend it on steam games?
At least VALVe is paying the pittance they promised.

SteamDB extension updates

Updated browser extension to make Steam key activation page more useful
Add Steam install link
Add SteamDB link
On failed activation, print which package it tried to activate
You can use it to cheat and look at the secret achievements for your games

Steam: Game Updates

ArtiFAQ

Also, $19.99.
Blue black control? Red and Green? WotC’s gonna sue somebody!
I mean, it is technically possible to plagiarize yourself Richard Garfield
Finally get some word on pricing
- 2 bucks USD for 10 cards
- 5 bucks for an event invite
- All trades are done through the marketplace
Apparently there will be a few on launch gauntlets for prize drafts, drafts where you keep cards (which’ll probably cost you more money late)

Book of Proton

Listen, I get it.
That said, I don’t see Steam handing out Whitelists to just anyone… yet.
Empty said it best in discord “We can’t program and it’s linux’s fault”
Also, are you surprised that the gimped openGL implementation OSX has has a different performance profile than the one on linux?
- Who woulda thunk it!
I can tell you for a fact I’m growing disillusioned with this trend of promised Linux games being scrapped for proton instead.
- All both of em?
  - That’s 2 too many.

Lowered expectations (Hempty)

110,000 copies is nothing to sneeze at.
Dylan did Fig right.
This sort of makes sense.
POE 1 and 2, the current Divinity games, Pathfinder, etc all were successfully funded via crowdsourcing and had poor sales cuz isometric RPGs don’t have a wide appeal outside their core audience
600K sales at $50 in the age of Steam doesn’t seem likely unless you have AAA money running the marketing for you.
Now that Microsoft just scooped inxile and Obsidian, I think we should start backing up copies of the linux isometric RPG’s we’ve got

Steam: New Games

Citrouille

An arcadey game where you gotta plant flowers and grow magical ladders
Again, I get why for arcade games you want couch co-op, but seriously. Add some online multiplayer
Apparently you can get through the story mode in about 30 minutes. If you’re good
A platformer without a jump button… Heh?!

News:

4.15 Beta (Mir)

Fixed a bug that could cause WINE to crash on recent OS releases.
Fixed a bug that could cause an X server crash when exiting Vulkan applications running on X servers with UBB enabled.
- And there we have it, the crashiest of my streams thus far shouldn’t happen anymore.
Changed the minimum required Linux kernel version from 2.6.9 to 2.6.32.
- …wat?
I finally moved off the 395 Vulkan beta driver to 410.
For those of you playing the home game, there is really no difference in performance.

Unreal Vulkan

Linux now defaults to Vulkan render.
FKR builds on 18.04.
./Setup.sh
./GenerateProjectFiles.sh
make -j16 ShaderCompileWorker UnrealLightmass UnrealPak UE4Editor UE4Game
If you were wondering, I know you’re not… but I needed a place to put that.
And still no launcher!
- Or games.
Hey, you now have a gui to submit engine bugs
I almost went down the ribbit hole when playing with the editor.

Vulk

Some fixes for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, WoW and Demul
They’ve also managed to reduce CPU overhead for a few games.
Like Assassin’s Creed, if you’re not playing it in a browser
- Browser master race!

Off Point

It took them this long to realize DirectX only works on windows?
BTW the “sooo many distros” and “OpenGL hard” excuses fall squarely in the incompetent developer category.
Just be honest FFS.
You were relying on Unity to do the heavy lifting for you… and it didn’t.
At least they are offering refunds.
Wow that’s a load of wank to justify your unwillingness to support Linux.
OpenGL is hard? You’re using Unity, the only reason this would be a problem is if you’re using shader asset packs from the store… Oh wait, you are!
Test on many distributions… How many times do we have to say, just fucking pick one!
I’d was going to give you the linux specific Unity bugs, but you’re talking about the input system.
Since you’re so keen on using assets for the shaders, why the fuck aren’t you using Rewired?
That worked fine for many other Unity Linux games.
Canned excuses and attempted pathos.
It’s a shame. The game actually looked really cool
“As driver support for Linux is not as comprehensive as for Windows and Mac”
- Bwahahahaha
“We would still like to support Linux and we will re-evaluate the possibility of a Linux release in the future.”
- Read “Please buy our game anyways, we’ll totally start saying we support linux via proton when this comes to steam”

Double Complete Lupis

https://www.patreon.com/posts/0-5-0-is-coming-22603143
The tray icon now shows a list of previously played games on right click, like steam
Proton’s now considered a wine version
Donate to the lutris patreon so that Strider can afford his weed.

The last of the emulators

https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/pull/5315 (eMpTy)

The big improvement in this release is improved texture caching. The PS3 allows both processors to write to the other’s memory. THis doesn’t work too well in PC land
The emulator can now examine memory from both CPU and GPU and do some background synchronization to make sure that everything is kosher
You can now get in game on The last of Us
Performance improvements in Uncharted 2 and 3 and Soul Calibur 5 is now fully playable. Now you can play SC on linux and not get your ass banned!
More improvements for The Last of Us, that’s what I’m here for!

EasyRPG Antidote

RPGMaker 2000/03 compatibility thing which also lets you create your own games with it.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!
Webzone: Holy Potatoes A Spy Story
Devel: Daylight Studios
Engine: Unity
Price: £12.99 / US$14.99 / CA$17.99

Wazzat: Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! is a wacky spy agency sim where you manage your very own potato spy headquarters, train an elite spy team, and strategize top-secret missions while uncovering the truth behind an evil spy corporation.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys

Venn:

Does It Launch

Fullscreen and windowed.

Performance @ 1080

60 @ 1080 & 2160

Graphics

HD po-tat-o

Control

Gerbil plus bindable hotkeys.
Does not capture cursor.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

Yorp

Performance @ 1080

60 at what this game tells me is UHD

Graphics

Look at those potato men and ladies book it

Control

You click on things. Sometimes it has some trouble figuring out what you want to highlight, but that’s due to the isometric map

Pedro:

Does It Launch

It does

Performance @ 1080

It’s locked at 60 and I didn’t see the need to unlock it

Graphics

There are graphics and sounds

Control

You click things or you hit the relevant keyboard shortcut and things happen on screen

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- Is this is pokyman?
- Kinda, well, not really, wait… just got a pokeman.
- Oh what the hell, now it’s gone Sim City on me.
- At this point I’m half expecting a racing segment.
- What I’m trying to get across here is that Pok-E-Tater-City has a lot of elements going on at once.
- You hire taters, train them, and send them on non-interactive spy missions.
- Then you build shit.
- Did I miss anything?
- It’s simple enough for my dumb arse to figure out and has a gang of stats to go full-metal spreadsheet simulator on if that’s your thing.
- It’s not my thing.
- Like Pedro will mention, almost anyone can lose an hour just dicking around.
- Yall need to change Domino or Disney gonna sue somebody… and when they are done are going to send you lot a C&D.
- For $14.99 pick it up if you like pokeman not if you enjoy sitty simulations.
- P.S. Reskin this thing with ARCHER.
Jordan
- Much like that farming game, it’s just more waiting
- You have your spies, they have stats, certain challenges require certain stats to pass because math, and gadgets that’ll sometimes increase or decrease your stats
- It reminds me a little bit of the combat system from Renowned Explorers, except I think I like that one a lot better. Cuz you get to do stuff.
- This game is so damn grindy. Get buildings to grind spies to assign to missions or train up, or build gear. Increase your numbers to win
- The fake celebrity, athlete and fictional character characters are kinda cute
- And while I did find myself kinda mindlessly going with the flow, I don’t think I was really having fun. I was just repeating the same stuff over and over again. It occupied my time
Pedro
- Welp I lost 3 hours of my life to this game and I didn’t even realise it.
- It wasn’t until I looked away from the screen that I saw night time had come around.
- I won’t give it 4 chairs because later on the worry of money and having to keep the spies trained becomes very important.
- And that’s not what I’m here for.
- At least give me a chance to beat some of these missions unless I have a spy with 150 on every stat.
- Missions with anything higher than medium risk are impossible, from my experience.
- Still, any game that makes me lose track of time and I leave feeling good about that time is deserving of praise.
- I think it’d work better on a tablet or phone but medium here is down to preference, as I still very much enjoyed playing on PC.