LinuxGameCast Weekly 355: RTXOMGWTFBBQ

Goggle dishes on Stadia, Quake 2 traces rays on Linux, Smach Z hardware gets finalized, and John Romero turned out the lights. Then Vambrace: Cold Soul faces, the CHAIRQASITION!


Timestamps:
04:30 NVIDIA RTX adoption
09:09 How Steam killed Valve
11:37 Proton 4.2-6
13:52 Rocket League updates
15:56 Drone Spektra
17:48 Super Versus
19:19 Quake 2 RTX
27:09 Google Stadia pricing
31:38 SMACH Z Hardware
36:00 SIGIL
38:35 Dolphin Emulator Progress
41:30 Puzzle Massive
44:05 CHAIRQUISITION: Vambrace
59:09 Hate Mail


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

RTX adoption

  • Turns out everyone being broke isn’t good for GPU sales
  • Turns out not having any games that take advantage of ray tracing don’t help either.
  • When you can probably still find a refurb 1080 for 2060 prices, or lower if you go second hand, most people are just going to get that.

 

How Steam killed Valve

  • Silly hippie, Steam made Valve into the questionable force for good it is today.
  • Minimum effort highest profit is how businesses grow.
  • Honestly, I’m very glad and forever thankful to our lord GabeN for the continued Linux support.
  • Most other gaming companies don’t even acknowledge the penguin, let alone create and maintain a market for us here in Linuxland.
  • The core argument here doesn’t make sense.
  • Companies evolve and change over time or they die out like Xerox.
    • Don’t believe me?
    • If it didn’t, nintendo would still be dependent on Hanafuda cards and IBM would still be trying to violate people’s human rightoh wait…

 

Proton 4.2-6

  • Well, I’m glad they’re compiling dxvk on somthing newer than bloodsheed C++
  • Updated Faudio bits to give Pedro false hope about Fallout
  • Speaking of false hope for Pedro, they have some non-english locale fixes too
  • To be fair, FAudio 19.01 fixed most of the garblies, and 19.04 made it so the rest of the issues were fixed and I could actually finish Fallout 4.
  • I do appreciate the non-English locale consideration!
  • Having to pass LC_ALL=C to games seems kinda backwards in 2019.

Steam: Game Updates

Rocket League updates

  • Hey, new mode!
  • Oh look, volleyball.
  • Now I can suck at a rocket league mode about as well as I suck at the game it’s based on
    • Also wasn’t dropshot supposed to be volleyball?

Steam: New Games

Drone Spektra

  • There seem to be quite a few drone racing games popping up.
  • Did someone create a base asset and put it on the Unreal/Unity store and now everyone is doing a UnitZ?

 

Super Versus

  • It’s like ZEQ, but with superheroes.
  • And you have to pay for it.
  • 6DoF with human-like characters.

 

Quake 2 RTX

  • Getting best results with medium yolo tracing, around 45 @1080.
  • It’s legit 60 @ 720.
  • DL Q2 with Proton for importing the full game before launch.
  • The RTX 2060 with everything on 11 is getting 30-ish @1080.
  • Best I could do was 20 FerPS on the default settings at 720p.
  • Bumping it to 1080 cut those in half.
  • 4 FPS @ UHD, 14 FPS @ 1080p. RTX ON BABY

News:

Stadia stuff

  • 129.99 up front and $9.99 a month, on top of individual game purchase costs.
  • Having to pay a monthly fee to rent the “server” is going to be a hard sell, brad.
  • Ethan also had a very good take on this:
  • They’re doing a PSN thing by giving away “Free” games, on the platform that you pay to access
  • Seamless device switching would be nice
  • Flibit’s tweet was perfect!
  • One way or another, I might finally get a chance to play Destiny so that’s cool.

 

Yeah, right…

  • This, this is my junk food / soap opera.
  • I’m legit curious how much longer they can keep it in “development” before disappearing.
  • I hope that’s not the retail price, otherwise it’ll fail worse than the whole development rigamarole we’ve covered up to this point.

 

SIGIL

  • I wonder if Romero had to pay the Satanic Temple for Baphomet’s likeness
  • People like watching others play retro shite.
  • I hadn’t played OG doom in UHD, it feels exactly the same as it did back in the 90s.

 

Dolphin Progress

  • Lots of peripheral support this time around.
  • The Quest for unfucking USB continues
    • While somehow Linux managed to work with these devices, we found out that Dolphin was using the wrong buffer sizes for games using USB VEN. How this
    • didn’t cause more problems, we don’t know, but upon fixing that, nothing really improved
  • There was a really weird bug in Star Fox Assault that they were able to fix once they realized that the gamecube and Wii will discard a certain number of bits from a command buffer.

 

Puzzle Massive: MMOJP

  • Do jigsaw puzzles count as games?
  • Either way, this is a VTT for jigsaw puzzles.
  • I hate jigsaw “puzzles”
  • You’d think, being someone who very much enjoys a good puzzle videogame I would probably enjoy the analogue version
  • But jigsaws are so mind numbingly boring.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Vambrace: Cold_Soul
Webzone: Vambrace_Cold_Soul
Devel: Devespresso Games
Engine: Unity
Price: £19.99 / US$24.99 / CA$28.99

Wazzat: Vambrace: Cold Soul is a roguelike fantasy-adventure set amidst a frozen landscape. Plan your expeditions underground, then journey to the cursed city surface with your team of heroes. Wield unique powers, avoid dangerous traps, brave strange encounters, and survive deadly combat!

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys. They were sticky



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • No issues.

Performance @ 1080

  • 60 @ 2160.

Graphics

  • You like fullscreen 2160p? Ya better.
  • And you best not want windowed over 1080p.

Control

  • Hard coded PS4, Brad.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • No problems

Performance @ 1080

  • Stays at 60

Graphics

  • Much Animoo

Control

  • I get correct button prompts on the areolla controlla

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • No issues

Performance @ 1080

  • It’s locked at 60 from what I can tell.

Graphics

  • Proto-anime characters, but good looking nonetheless

Control

  • No rebinding of keys but they seem to have covered all the bases
  • Dual Shock 4 also worked just fine

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • This, this is a visual novel with a halfway functional game bolted onto it.
    • Unfortunately that game is Darkest dungeons SE.
    • Short-bus edition, not special.
    • To the games credit it’s dead simple compared to DD.
    • No character progression outside of the one piece of equipment.
    • Two skills.
    • No healing.
    • But if you like furries and WAR heels it might be worth a look.
    • Hell, if you like visual novels with a dash of RNG because FK YOU that’s why.
    • That art and sound department did a bang-up job and all the technical bits are there as well.
    • The game OTOH, well, I will put it like this.
    • This game does an excellent job demonstrating why I find DD boring.
    • All the advance tactics and spreadsheet juggling simply don’t exist.
    • It’s boop, wait your turn, boop again.
    • At least there is an attempt at a story unlike DD.
    • I don’t hate it, it’s one of the better interactive visual novels but…
    • Calling it a full fledged game would be like calling us journalist.
  • Jordan
    • After two hours, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I like darkest dungeon better
    • Because it punished me, it gave me something to do with an actually compelling reward loop
    • Vambrace attempts to blend the Darkest Dungeon Crawling mechanic with the FTL map mechanic, via a Final fantasy style overworld
    • All of the “dungeons” are done in sequence to a final dungeon, and I think that’s where it falls apart for me.
    • The mission structure in DD is pretty fast and gets you stuff pretty quickly. This has you grinding through dungeons, towns and inns to get resources to keep your HP and Vigor up so that when you eventually run into fights you don’t get killt
    • I just like the faster and more punishing DD loop. This one is kinda boring in comparison
    • The Story is pretty meh. I’m not finding I like or care about any of the characters and they all seem pretty bland. And they talk so much
    • And finally, the combat. The meat and potatoes of any dungeon crawler. It’s just kinda meh. Your dudes have a basic attack and one on a recharge. That’s it. It’s a little too dumbed down for my taste and I’d like some more variety
  • Pedro
    • Much like Darkest Dungeon, this is a hard game.
    • Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there’s an actual overarching plot and proper main character.
    • The emphasis here is very much on the story.
    • So much so, the first patch made the game considerably easier.
    • And I’m okay with that.
    • If you want to tell a story, then you need to make the obstacles for the player at least overcomeable. (No squiggly on that, I’ll take it)
    • We already have Darkest Dungeon, if you want a game that actively punishes you when you try to play it.
    • Vambrace, as it is, I’d say is in the sweet spot of hard and still being able to tell a story.
    • It’s different, but certainly worth your time.
    • Though the price is somewhat justified in my opinion by having had someone actually draw all the characters, a bit more voice acting wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

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