LinuxGameCast Weekly 345: Easy Bake Vulkan

Humble gets a new CEO, Valve teases their new VR headset, DiRT® 4™ comes to Linux, and how Proton helped improve Wine 4.2. Then Undertale faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special thanks to:

  • Belrik (new patreon)

Timestamps:
04:27 Valve VR updates
07:02 Valve Index
12:00 Vulkan Fossilize
15:26 Proton 4.2
20:55 Steam Insight
23:28 Tangledeep 1.24
24:57 Duke 3D Fusion
26:34 Left 4 Dead 2 update
28:02 Valve abandons Artifact
31:51 Rise of the Giant DLC
34:44 Symphony of Stars
35:50 DIRT 4
38:59 Shameless self promotion
41:48 How Proton helped improve Wine 4.2
45:24 Pi powered controller
47:27 OpenMW 0.45.0
49:31 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. xray engine 1.6
53:29 Humble co-founder steps down
55:51 CHAIRQASITION: Undertale
01:06:05 Hate Mail


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro


Steam: News

Valve is still working on VR

  • So many linux fixes
    • Lots of them are for VRCompositor
  • USB speeds are a bit of a bottleneck that has been addressed. Also having a bunch of stuff plugged into a USB hub
  • Raising the file cap on the compositor to match the system’s Hard limit is a good idea.
  • It makes so much sense, though, that you wonder why it wasn’t the case to start with?
  • Basically what I’m saying here is “Hey, Solus! An 8k open file hard limit isn’t enough in the age of 12-thread CPUs for under £150!”

 

Valve’s new VR Headset

 

Vulkan tools from Valve

  • A lot of this seems to be targeted at being able to build up a static target that can be loaded as opposed to having to re-initialize vulkan targets at runtime
  • It’ll also serve to bring a cache which can be shipped reliably with a game to help cut down those initial loads.

 

Proton 4.2

  • This is what I like to see.
  • Downstream projects contributing patches to upstream *glares at canonical*
  • Down to 214 Patch delta from base wine. I’m curious if that’ll ever drop to double or even single digits
  • Also now pedro has to find something else to complain about.
  • Everything that ran still runs and vise versa.
  • Valve seems bent on turning it into a FK IT! button.
  • The mouse fixes now make so games like Fallout 4 no longer need a virtual desktop.
  • Games which rely on UPlay and previously had issues with it not starting properly now seem to work.
  • May actually end up playing The Crew, now.
  • Vulkan 1.1 support.
  • I can still complain about the lack of Easy Anti Cheat support.
  • There’s a bunch of Free to Play games which rely on it and I’d like to be able to play them.

 

Steam Spy 2.0?

  • Outside of the grossly inflated player counts it seems legit.
  • Pretty graphs are always nice to have.
  • PlayTracker Insight gathers public data from gamers around the world in a random sample and extrapolates that data to estimate total values.
    • Gotcha, bullshit

Steam: Game Updates

Tangledeep 1.24

  • Attempted fix for rare pet breeding bug that caused the pairing not to work
    • Don’t try to force it man. Sometimes these things just don’t work out
  • They did add a secondary config file located next to your Prefs that can be used to configure a bunch of ingame stuff they don’t have menus for
  • Tangledeep is a nice roguelike, I’m glad to see them keep at it!

 

Duke 3D Fusion (Empty)

  • It works, has multiplayer.
  • Might try it Friday.
  • If you can’t smoke your cigar in VR mode, this will have been a colossal waste of time

 

Left 4 Dead 2

  • Fixed a server exploit.
  • Might as well, since the original L4D developers are making a new game.
  • Would it have killed VALVe to pay them to call it Left 4 Dead 3?
  • Though after EVOLvE, I can see why they wouldn’t want to.
  • Wait, so you weren’t getting my shit posts in the lobby chat when we did Left4Brad?
  • My life feels so wasted

 

Artifact on ice

  • Giving it the episode 3 treatment.
  • It was a royal waste of money!
  • A AAA grade card game with an up-front fee that completely missed the mark.
  • I like card games, but I have this annoying habit of getting bored very quickly.
  • I was like that with MTG as well, which is why ended up playing gimmick decks.
  • And so Hearthstone remains the best MTG-like computer game to date in my opinion.
  • Valve, you’re no longer a game studio.
  • Nobody interested in making games is looking for a job a Valve.
  • They didn’t buy Campo Santo because people were knowing down the doors.

 

Dead Skins DLC

  • More free content is best content
  • They seem to want to team cherry dead cells
    • Na, they’d have to fix the Steam overlay first.

 

Curator Connect Offer

  • Hey, online multiplayer!
  • Apparently VR mode uses less than 3.5gb of vram
  • Wonder if it’ll VR under linux

Steam: New Games

Dirty 4 Linux announcement

  • Feral vs Proton Round 3
  • Now we see how well no tux no bux works when people got options.
  • I could give -4 fk’s about Dirt but I’m still patiently waiting Tombs.
  • At UHD with everything on Ultra it’s unplayable with Proton, but Feral’s port holds between 40 and 50 FerPS.
  • Good job, Feral!

News:

How Proton helped improve Wine 4.2

  • In contributing the Proton specific code upstream it improves the experience for anyone using regular WINE.
  • In contributing code upstream in general, your end product will end up better as those other features you need and have been working towards can be implemented farm more easily by other developers in future.
  • You’d think this would be common knowledge in the world of developers
  • This is the other side of the coin for that one story in the steam news segment
  • Surprise surprise, improving the stuff you base your stuff on gives you a better platform to build off of. Who’d a thunk it

 

Pi powered controller

  • In a not so rare LWDW crossover, it’s the foul-mouthed slice of P#$&%!
  • Fully assembled version is available to be bought

 

OpenMW 0.45.0

  • Still no shadows :(
  • The little quality of life things are finally coming along.
  • These bugfixes are getting increasingly specific over time. I wonder what the MVPs are after shdows get sorted

 

Open XRAY

  • This is based on the leaked source code?
  • According to some interview on boiling steam it is
    • Either way, it’s one hell of a long compile

 

Leaving Humble

  • After 10 years, the dude wants to do something else. Seems legit
    • No no no, we’re supposed to freak out and inform everyone Humble is about to implode.
    • Blamo!
  • The replacement did project management at double fine.
  • That’s…interesting.
    • And Zynga!
  • To be fair, from the timeline google provided about him, most of the scummy behaviour which came from Zynga was after he left.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Undertale
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/391540/Undertale/
Devel: Toby Fox
Engine: Game Maker Studio
Price: £6.99 / US$9.99 / CA$10.99

Wazzat: UNDERTALE! The RPG game where you don’t have to destroy anyone.



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • In a little tiny window, every, single, time.
  • A bit of F key mashing makes it fullscreen.

Performance @ 1080

  • 60

Graphics

  • Hipster

Control

  • Controller support under Linux is nonexistent.
  • Hell, even in Proton it only kinda works.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • Yes, in an itty bitty window

Performance @ 1080

  • It holds it’s 30, according to steam overlay

Graphics

  • They do

Control

  • Gotta use the overlay to play with a controller.

Pedro:

Does It Launch

Performance @ 1080

Graphics

Control

  • No controller support
  • You can enable Steam Input for your current controller and set some keyboard bindings, though.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • Alex Kid in Pokeman world directed by Tim Schafer.
    • Admiditally I was only curious about this game because OMG hype.
    • I gave it an hour to grab me, it didn’t.
    • That’s not to say I don’t get it, I do, but there is nothing here that really interests me aside from Mr. Evil Flower pants, the only character I found relatable.
    • If you like DoubleFine humour and turn based combat mixed in with a little RNG and a dash of mind-numbingly simple puzzles this might be your jam.
    • Not my jam.
    • Jam.
  • Jordan
    • I liked earthbound well enough
    • The buzz on release was that this game was inspired by it and I thought i”d give it a looksie
    • And there it was, staring me in the face. Bullet hell
    • Mind you, the bullet hell in here isn’t too awful, but I don’t enjoy it, and it’s a big distraction to the other shit i could otherwise be enjoying
    • It’s got the cutesey-not-really-its-sorta-horrifying aesthetic down pat
    • And I could maybe enjoy the characters, if not for the oncoming dread of dodging things
    • The puzzles are about pokemon level challenging.
    • And so I continue my quest to be nice to 50% of the people and indiscriminatntly murder the other 50%. Chaotic neutral motherfuckers!
    • I will say, I do appreciate Senor Fox’s choice to work social shit into the game’s combat engine. This is a carry over from tabletop RPGs, but I always hate when RPGs in general don’t give you a social conflict sytem.
  • Pedro
    • The internet was ablaze a few years back.
    • It was 2015; Paris suffered several terrorist attacks, Ireland became the first country to legalize same sex marriage by popular vote, and SpaceX landed the Falcon 9 safely.
    • Plenty of world happenings in that year.
    • In the videogame industry, a Hipster Pixel, Zelda-like, built in GameMaker Studio won game of the year from several publications and promptly cleaved the “gamers” into two very vocal minorities and a much larger group of people who really didn’t care.
    • I’m in the latter camp.
    • Undertale does a very good job of subverting expectations from what you’d expect in a game of this ilk.
    • But when we get down and dirty, it really only changes the act of killing to the act of conversing.
    • A twist which was done very well and didn’t remove your ability to still go in and murder everything.
    • It’s a simple game which will give you radically different views depending on how you choose to play it.
    • I see what it did, but I really don’t care.
    • I didn’t like Zelda either!

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Minetesty

  • Thank you for your comment on YouTube, the post on LGC… and (also) contact form.
  • Bit of marketing advice, if you tell anyone to “avoid any and all contact with that project and anyone who support it” the first and I mean FIRST thing they are going to do is go look up said project.
  • Seriously, half our audience comes from that.
  • Except in the case of open source Minecraft clones.
  • Outside of the 7 (possibly 11) people playing them no one cares.
  • However, thank you for sharing with us that drama can exist in any project no matter the size.
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