LinuxGameCast Weekly 326: Emu Soldiers

Steam adds new games to Proton, Croteam splits Fusion, NVIDIA attempts to Wayland and SuperTuxKart gets online multiplayer. Then South Park: The Stick of Truth faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro


Steam: News

VR Take 3

  • I’ve been following this for some time and the internet has done what the internet does.
  • Looks legit when you add the controller references.
  • 20 bucks says the half life VR game is just a simulation of Gordon at Black mesa in the cafeteria line
  • This could be a couple of things.
    • 1. HTC didn’t want to take the risk of manufacturing the VIVE 1.5.
    • 2. 20 GOTO 10.
  • More than likely these are dev kits.
    • VALVe have in the past provided dev kits to developers, so it wouldn’t be a shocker if that’s what these are.
  • Yeah, VR is the future…
  • Following that HTC buyout spook, it makes sense that Valve would invest in making their own hardware
  • They were bragging on their new website about their hardware engineering people, and I guess they have a product to put them to work on
  • VR’s a lot like tablets. Microsoft championed them as the future of computing, and then apple made a mint on it years later once they worked out the kinks. Maybe that’ll be VR too. Or just a more expensive virtualboy

 

More whitelist

  • Flatout 2
    • Here’s the kicker: does it run better than gog’s version?
  • South Park
    • Ohoho.
    • Looks like someone’s gotta renew that gift now.
  • Dark Souls 3 Also made it to the whitelist
    • I think I need to take some days off!
    • Tuesday Souls incoming.
  • Yeah, looks like SOT and DSIII were the two big ones getting the whitelist this go round.
  • I’m still waiting for Noir Automatic Tomato to go on stupid sale.

Steam: Game Updates

 

Striking updates

  • Can we please get button prompts for something less Shocking.
  • Lots of fiddly balance stuff to ensure that the fighters are all playable
  • I feel this is going to become fairly labour intensive as they increase their roster of fighters
    • I feel like if you’re going through Early Access, this is what that should be for
    • Fine tuning and refining.
  • This can very well become the defacto fighting game on Linux, mostly since it doesn’t really seem to have any competition.

 

Shells

  • New Unity, who dis.
  • Less crashes and performance fixes.
  • Tanks for the update.

 

SS4 prep

  • It’s finally stand-alone.
  • SS4 development will no longer make code unstable..
  • Appid 564310
  • Had to track that down since it nopes to desktop when selecting graphics options.
  • I had that same issue.
  • It’s weird though, the game itself runs fine on whatever the hell it’s set to
  • Oh, is that what that 7GB patch was?

Steam: New Games

Wiggle wiggle

  • …wait for it.
  • I mean, as a fan of slapping butts I can see the appeal
  • It’s a butt slapping game, you get what you pay for
  • Part of me kinda hopes this goes in to some frog fractions type shit
  • If you really want to see what happens when you pull down the panties, you can just head on over to the Screenshots section of the Steam community hub for the game.

News:

NVIDIA hearts Wayland

  • Well, if you use Kwin.
  • I like how the very next reply is someone asking if NVidia plans to support this like they have done in the past, with a year going by in between bugs being addressed.
  • Erik’s hacked together a proof of concept to make sure that nvidia didn’t waste bunch of time and money developing an EGL implementation that nobody uses
  • KWin/KWayland is based on GBM buffer sharing (and subsequent Pipewire).
  • It does warm my non-existent heart a little when a company introduces a vendor specific solution and the FLOSS community politely tells them to get fkd.

 

No Way

  • They have some emulator specific fixes as usual
  • The big thing is they’ve upgraded to a version of GTK+ that has support for the waylands.

 

MS Shade

  • Cross-compiling HLSL to Vulkan..
  • Might as well!
  • Vulkan already had HLSL runtime capabilities.
  • This just makes sure future games built with it will work better on DXVK/Proton
  • I mean, it really just exists because Microsoft wants to stem the potential hemorrhage of developers ditching windows
    • Do what now?
      • Yeah, I could have articulated better.
      • Having a facility for cross compiling to other platforms is a feature other OSes have had for years.
      • M$ is coming to realize this is important.
    • Isn’t that why they bought Github?
      • Github has nothing to do with making people use windows.
        • Have fun formatting this.
          • On the webzobe notes.
      • No but it has to do with Microsoft wanting to keep developers as close as possible
      • Doesn’t get much closer than buying the platform, or kidnapping their children
  • I still say they’d get better results from just porting DX12/11 to Linux.
  • That’d just be fucky.
  • What would be turbo-fucky is MS admitting DX12 has a very limited use case.

 

Stuper Multi Cert

  • It works, I think.
  • You will have to build it fro sauce.
  • Plenty of empty servers.
  • It certainly works
  • Super tux rocket league kart is a wee screwy though.
  • It even handled the Aussie curveball unlike several other online games.

 

FlatDOOM

  • Sort of a survival mode doom, based on doom 2
  • It’s in a flatpak so you can just run the fucker
  • Keep moving and pew pew
  • Does the flathub plugin just not work with Chrome?
  • Cause it don’t.
  • Installing was simple as saving the flatImagePakSnap to the Desktop and using the Buntu software installer.
  • This game ships with proper jacked keyboard layout with mouselook disabled.
  • Looks alright, bit like HL-2 on a budget.
  • Flathub is a bit slow!
  • Even on my passable connection, the best it could do was 2,7MB/s

 

DHEWM

  • Bunch of windows/win32 fixes we don’t care about
  • They are supporting some mods with custom SDKs now
  • I like DHEWM, it’s one of the few DOOM 3 source ports that actually lets me use the arrow keys for movement.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: South Park: Stick Of Truth
Devel: Obsidian
Engine: Onyx
Price: £25.99 / US$29.99 / CA$39.99

Wazzat: From the perilous battlefields of the fourth-grade playground, a young hero will rise, destined to be South Park’s savior. From the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, comes an epic quest to become… cool. Introducing South Park™: The Stick of Truth™.


Venn:

Does It Launch

  • OOTB as advertised.
  • 8 hours and not so much as a hiccup.

Performance @ 1080

  • Holds 30 @ 1080 and 2160.

Graphics

Control

  • Does not work out of the box with the Steam controlla.
  • This is not evident until about an hour into the game when you learn the Dragon Shout.
  • Fortunately there is a community config that mostly works but makes aiming… wonky.
  • No rebindable controls.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • It will never not be weird to see directX installing through steam

Performance @ 1080

  • Capped at 30

Graphics

  • Funny thing, the FMV sequences aren’t in UHD, so all of a sudden everyone gets a little more pixely

Control

  • Works OOTB with the dual shock, but ye get xbox prompts
  • Which fucking sucks for the guitar hero segments, let me tell you

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • Indeed

Performance @ 1080

  • Oh, look! It’s locked at 30, then again it’s South Park so it’d be good at 12FerPS.

Graphics

  • Not much in the way of options but then again, it’s not like you need them to attain the desired effect.
  • 10 hours in I got hit by some cracklies which made the whole game sound garbled.

Control

  • Worked ootb with the 8BitDo SNES Pro controller
  • Lack of rebindable controls is a damn shame but I felt the default layout on the controller was workable.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • White power crystal, hitler hobo, straight-up fkn with you on the simon says.
    • Jimmy press B to skip.
    • All games, given enough time, lead to Nazis.
    • …and Nazi fetuses, kittens, cows.
    • Canadian Matrix.
    • Battle while your parents shag (there are several YOU WENT THERE) moments in the game.
    • Snuke!
    • Stupid Nazi zombie unicorn.
    • Venned it in 10 hours.
    • Whatever the default difficulty is, well, it could stand to be set a wee higher.
    • Unless the point was to have a interactive SP movie.
    • It did a good jerb of keeping me entertained between the “”fighting”” segments.
    • Jordan hit on something that made me think for a minute.
    • Stick of Truth gave me something to do during battles that was more than waiting for RNG, blocking!
    • It looks and sounds like SP and that’s not a bad thing.
    • I really enjoyed the attention payed to the soundtrack.
    • Play it for the story, it’s a good one.
  • Jordan
    • Like Venn said, it’s a playable episode of south park.
    • The RPG mechanics are pretty bare bones, but they are there for you to take advantage of getting massive number stacks’
    • It does do a good job of enforcing the gameplay mechanics it establishes, so you’re not as inclined to just spam attack through the game
    • I played through this already on PS4, so I decided to take the fine tooth comb approach and all the item placements and in jokes are spot on. The environment was fairly meticulously crafter
    • The combat system is pretty much lifted from legend of dragoon. Time your attacks to a prompt for massive damage
    • Blocking is a wee annoying as sometimes it feels a little arbitrary when a block registers or not
    • What it lacks in gameplay depth is more than made up with the funny little world the devs built
  • Pedro
    • What if an RPG was told by means of satire and fart jokes?
    • What if the Fart itself was glorified to the point of core game mechanic?
    • Those two precepts are very likely to fall on the side of extreme campiness and any game relying on them would probably wear out its welcome really quickly.
    • South Park: The Stick of Truth manages to straddle the line between the proverbial dead horse of fart jokes and having really interesting gameplay.
    • If anything, the combat is the first thing that starts to wear thin on the ground and grating on me.
    • I couldn’t wait to unlock the ground stomp ability for the warrior, just because mob control abilities are very hard to come by for that class.
    • I really like The Stick of Truth but like most Obsidian games, there’s always something keeping me from giving it a perfect score.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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