LinuxGameCast Weekly 339: Funemployed

Steam adds a mysterious new partner API! Hollow Knight: Silksong is confirmed for Linux, GameCube Adapter Support for SDL2, and open source Metroid Prime with URDE.

Special thanks to our patreons:

  • Linda
  • Andre
  • David
  • MacGeek (exec prod)
  • Haplo (exec prod)

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro


Steam: News

It’s over

  • This article is a love letter to naivety in its purest form, born from the mind of someone who successfully called 2 or 3 minor events in the few short months since this started.
  • I don’t know if he’s wrong or right, time will tell.
  • Hell, we’ve been saying that Steam needs competition for a long time.
  • But competition assumes a certain evenness in terms of feature-parity.
  • And as the article wraps up, even the author has to admit the Epic Store didn’t come out swinging.
  • It came out peddling to the money grubbiness of developers and that, thus far anyway, is the only reason it’s even managed to get some of those “excwoosives”.
  • But as far as Linux is concerned, this is irrelevant. The Epic Store is irrelevant.
  • Are Linux users really gonna shed a tear for another AAA that doesn’t release on Linux?
  • That’s all we ever get! This just makes it harder to point a WINE prefix at.
  • We’re waiting on something better than Valve.
  • Thing is, Vavle has about 60 gajillion metric tonnes of good will with the Linux community.
  • Epic, free games and all did about the dumbest thing in the history of dumb.
  • Last minute exclusive.
  • They have, at most, one cockup left.
  • People already aren’t fans of market fragmentation, developers especially
  • It means that everyone has to divert resources/time/money to track stuff that is happening on multiple fronts
  • Homeboy mentions that many of the major publishers are starting their own storefronts, and that’s great, but that’s clearly motivated by a desire to not have to share revenue with steam from their published games and gamers themselves (the market) are clearly frustrated by it
  • That same thinking also lends itself to those larger publishers not supporting linux, as it’s not enough of their market share
  • For now, we’re stuck with GoG, Itch and Steam.

 

Speculate!

  • Ooh. Cryptic
  • Epic bought Valve.
  • Isn’t this just the server sharing thing?

 

Potaton

  • I wonder if The Crew works now.
  • Restore previous functionality of the Uplay client?
  • The hell is that about?
    • Maybe just a random regression? Or steam overlay not playing nice?
  • Woo updated DXVK. Maybe Resident evil will work
  • If you’re hooked on POE like some folks I know, now’s a good time to switch to linux

 

Easy peasy

  • EAC is “working on it with valve”
  • For online focused games, I get why they’re still including the anti-cheat stuff and Valve has done a decent job so far of addressing issues as they arise
  • However when you’re looking for DLL and syscall tampering, DXVK throws a hell of a monkey wrench into the operation
  • Yeah, I don’t see them making this “work” without telegraphing an unmonitored attack vector.
  • More than likely it’s going to remain if it works it worsk, if noBANHAMMER.
  • EAC is a pain in the neck for people wanting to play Paladins or Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 or Dragon Ball FighterZ in Proton.
  • In fact, there’s a lot of games using EAC:
  • Seeing as Proton doesn’t get updated very often, it would be a matter of simply checking all the files to ensure they’re kosher.
  • Hell, DXVK is open sauce, if EAC wanted to they could tell exactly what is DXVK and what is some other hack attempting to pass itself as DXVK.

Steam: Game Updates

Danger crash

  • So, no more spite crashes?
  • Hopefully.
  • If the render queue was what was causing all the crashies
  • Is second time the charm?
  • It better be, cuz VALVe can’t count to 3.
  • We got several round in and not a hiccup.

 

Bang bang

  • The best crappy looking RPG on linux is getting some DLC
  • 5 Bucks seems worth it, and if you haven’t checked out the base game I highly suggest you do. It’s surprisingly deep for being stick figures
  • How many hours you get out of this will depend solely on how far you want to keep digging.
  • Then again, that’s always been the case with the Loathing games.
  • I’m still impressed at how they managed to make a better Fallout game than Bethesda or Obsidian did.

 

Unityhammer

  • Oh no. Grid based tactical combat! With crazy technopriests? I’m sold!
  • Seriously, the Adeptus mechanicus are a cult of engineers who don’t understand how technology works so they pull fonizes and pray to get things working. They’re amazing
  • I’m going to need to check this out
  • Wharhammer in in Unity should make for some faced paced… naaa.
  • XCom 40k?

 

Bzzzts

  • Finite oil supplies, black death and the olympics.
  • Same day release on linux is nice, even if it is just DLC

 

Outenberg (Foxy)

  • The Bulgarians are coming
  • Oh look, they even added a fake portuguese translation
  • If you already own Verdun then you can get a 25% off coupon
  • No more early access
  • This is what Battlefield One would have been if they had strived for realism.
  • Made and published by the same people behind Verdun, so you know what to expect.

Steam: New Games

Riot release

  • Police brutality simulator finaly gets a 1.0
  • They’ve added some real world protests to spice your gameplay up
  • There are a lot of performance and VFX fixes that made the cut to 1.0

 

SilkyKnight

  • Veins, in it!
  • Well, I suppose they’d have to charge money again at some point
  • You get to play as bug waifu du jour, Hornet.
  • You get to play as the character that teaches you “oh, it’s that kind of game” in Hollow Knight.
  • People gonna complain that it’s not free, just you watch.

News:

418 NO USE

  • Totes going to use it.
  • Hey, it works and I now have all the NVENC glue needed for the new hotness.
  • What baffles me is how the Solus team got this beta up and running and available on the repo, but Ubuntu is dragging its heels.
  • That said, I did run into an issue with the game we’re throwing chairs at.
  • No issues with this one after a few days minus its inability to build kmod on 4.20.

 

Frags

  • This is less about gaming and more about the PITA of setting up AMD cards in Linux.
  • I can definitely see where it would get confusing for newer users
    • The paradigm can be a bit strange when coming from windows. Usually you wait for your vendor to produce the drivers and then you install them
    • Here, not only do they come with your OS, you can grab in development versions before they’re officially released.
  • I thought AMD cards were “the best” if you wanted that out of the box experience.
    • We have a word for people who say setting up AMD card on Linux is painless, liars.
      • Then call me Jim Carrey?
  • Guess that doesn’t extend to the Vegas.

 

Open Prime

  • An engine re-implementation of the metroid prime engine
  • Might be cool to actually play those games with wasd and mouse instead of a gamecube controller
  • Mind you, given our next story, you might just be able to anyways

 

Ole Switcheroo

  • That’s awesome!
  • But I do have to wonder, is this really a preferable alternative to a Patreon?
  • Doesn’t Patreon have the option to only pay out if you deliver on a project?
    • Nope.
  • Flibit jumped off the patreon train about a year back, so it makes sense
  • Getting one input device to represent up to four devices seems like it’d take a little bit of doing.
  • Dev updates:
    • Linux: It works. That’s… it, really.
    • we’re having to do more work to make macOS do less work

 

Happy Fun Times (RTheren)

  • Warsow lives on, sort of.
  • Decided lack of textures.
  • It definitely has execute permissions and launches

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: DUSK
Webzone: DUSK
Devel: David Szymanski
Engine: Unity
Price: £15 / US$20 / CA$21.99

Wazzat: Battle through an onslaught of mystical backwater cultists, possessed militants & even darker forces as you attempt to discover just what lurks beneath the Earth in this retro FPS inspired by the ’90s legends.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • No issues here.
  • 418 RTX master race!

Performance @ 1080

  • Limited to 122 on the 2060 @ 2160…. 60.

Graphics

  • Filled /w all switches, no problem.

Control

  • Ice skating with WASD, more on that later.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • After almost 15 years of openarena, it better damn run
  • The DOS thing at the beginning is cute the first time, but if I install my game on an SSD, I’d really like it to load like it was running off one

Performance @ 1080

  • Runs like openarena

Graphics

Control

  • Go on, play it with a controller

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It crashes in random places with the 418 NVidia beta.
  • Works fine with the 415.27 version
  • Not sure where the blame lies and 418 is a beta driver so I won’t ding it a chair

Performance @ 1080

  • Frame limiter defaults to 144, unless you’re playing in UHD (and even then) you may want to keep that.

Graphics

  • They work, there’s even several different color palettes.

Control

  • In my testing to see what was crashing, I changed to the proton version and that’s when I realised the mouse sensitivity on Linux is jacked all the way up.
  • In Proton, 0.05 sensitivity means the mouse barely moves.
  • In fact, the setting it to 0.25 in Proton is equivalent to 0.05 in Linux.
  • I thought this had been fixed, Unity!

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • It really quits, I like this.
    • If someone explained Quake 1 via interpretive dance to someone who never played it and that person made a game from their newfound knowledge you would get DUSK.
    • Every play the game telephone?
    • Because I feel like I’m playing the business end of that.
    • You have Quake graphics, Duke Nukem 3D level design, and Turuk (ice skating) movement.
    • New Blood Interactive got about 10% of what made classic FPS good, mainly the speed and the music.
    • The other 90% looks like something I would have rubbed out with Qoole back in the 90’s over summer break.
    • I was hoping to get in a little multiplayer but that’s… what’s the word, ah, dead.
    • David, you did the best you could with what you had.
    • It seems to have good reviews on Steam and I’m happy to see it.
    • However, for someone who grew up with this nonsense… this is a tinker toy and we both know it.
    • The only crime committed here is slapping the DONE label on it.
    • If you want old school done right with all the blood and gore pickup Apocryph, and save yourself $5.
  • Jordan
    • It really is an OK shooter
    • It’s an OK shooter that uses the visual language of retro shooters to try and invoke some nostalgia, but it really just is OK. Nothing stellar, just OK
    • And therein lies the problem with this game. All of the effort was put into making it look and feel like a quake game that controls like q3 arena
    • But we already have that! We have so much of that. Why not give us something new?
    • The sound design is pretty top noch, and the soundtrack is decent heavy metal noodling
    • Yes, you can strip away a lot of the bullshit modern shooters have and still have a good time. A lot of the review I read laud it for the retro feel, but I think the game just kinda rests on that and doesn’t do anything creative
    • Also fuck those rats.
  • Pedro
    • Playing through Dusk filled me with meh.
    • It’s a perfectly competent, retro inspired, first person shooter.
    • Like which there are a ton of on Steam.
    • Hell, I’d hoped for something like STRAFE but with the more traditional Quakeyness to it.
    • It certainly has the linear progression with the odd branching path and secret level.
    • But it really doesn’t do much else to be different.
    • Yes, some of the levels go all Serious Sam on the physics but those are very few and confined to the end of the game.
    • You can tell the end is coming because the levels start to get interesting.
    • And there’s only 30 levels (33 if you find the secret ones) so it won’t take you very long to get through it.
    • But when it comes down to it, there’s just nothing here to keep me interested.
    • Not even the Multiplayer.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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