LinuxGameCast Weekly 356: Mayonnaise Enthusiast

Steamy games from E3! Microsoft buys DoubleFine, WINE vs DXVK, and DOTA Underlords enters beta. Then The Final Station faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special thanks to:
Adam


Timestamps
04:30 New look for Steam
08:31 Steam client update
10:16 Proton 4.2-7
11:51 Steam games from E3
15:32 DOTA Underlords
22:50 Mesa 19.1.0
24:44 nVidia Super rumours
29:13 Atari VCS preorders
33:22 Hand on SMACH Z
36:45 Microsoft buys DoubleFine
39:53 WINE vs DXVK
45:17 ioQuake3 hacked
47:12 CHAIRQASITION: The Final Station
01:02:07 Hate Mail


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

The new Steam

  • Valve time ladies and gents.
  • It’s new and I hate it if true
    • I’m on team “does it still launch games” when it comes to how it looks.
  • Side-jag, anyone see what MS did with their game pass?
  • Buffet selection for $10 a month.
  • That doesn’t look terrible!
  • Remains to see how it will function…

 

Linux updates

  • Yay! I can download more than 40MB a second again!
  • Re-worked the shader system to enable downloading and pre-compiling of the whole collection of Vulkan pipelines for a given game.
  • It’s the old steam beta scoop and doop.

 

4.2-7

  • Small fix that sorts some speed regressions.
  • More performant nazi screams
  • Nothing really out of the ordinary to report here.
  • Though Fallout 4’s cracklies seem to be gone, I can even have a youtube video going on at the same time and it doesn’t crackle anymore!

Steam: New Games

Steam games from E3

  • I counted 14 Linux circles.
  • Shame we’re not getting this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/557340/My_Friend_Pedro/
  • Proton makes this list hurt a little less. I’m still sad we’re probably not getting BG3 under linux despite the fact that Larian has demonstrated that they’re perfectly competent at porting their games
  • I hope Hellpoint delivers!

 

DOTA Underlords

  • Baron Underbheit intensifies
  • I guess they’re abandoning the “auto-chess” moniker, for trademark reasons?

News:

New drivers for everyone else

  • OpenGL 4.5 is a thing now for the 2 games that actually use it
  • Lots of RadV and Intel Vulkan driver fixes, which is what we’re really all here for
  • A few game specific fixes here and there, including some Proton love.
  • Fix for the Vulkan performance hiccups.

 

nVidia Super Duper thanks for asking

  • New chips for the 2070TiS and the 2080TiS
  • 2060 is 2070 and 2070 is 2080.
  • 2080S is 2080Ti non S.
  • If someone told me nVidia had a CCB (chief of confusing bulls*it) role in the company, I would believe them.
  • That said, if you will be handing out 2060’s /w 8GB of memoryram sporting 2070 guts for $350 ima buy one.
  • Oh, I get it!
  • AMD announced the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT to compete with the 1080 and 1080ti, or 2070 and 2080 respectively.
  • So NVidia makes the old 2080Ti the new 2080 and breaks into a rendition of MC Hammer’s U Can’t This
    • And just like that the new nVidia card does not compete /w the 2070.
    • It will only trade blows with the 2060 Super.. that’s $350.

 

Atari VCS preorders (RTheren)

  • It ain’t cheap, Brad.
  • Comes with an option to boot another OS off of a thumb drive
  • Yeah, I don’t see this selling particularly well, considering that it’s competition is sub $100
  • Might’ve been an ok steam box. Kinda harkens back to the days of atari being a “home computer”
  • $50 for a Joystick with 3/4 buttons? Are fucking kidding me?
  • I can get an old style Atari joystick with 50 games built in for half that: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Atari-Retro-Joystick-Electronic-Games/dp/B076BS5WVN

 

Hand on SMACH Z

  • Hot & slow, like two snails banging.
  • Also, thiccc.
  • That demo unit looks to have the build quality of a potato with a learning disability.
  • I do like their dual mobo set up. That way when you’re completely dissatisfied with the $1000 handheld you bought, you can give them even more money for an upgrade
  • Smach Z weighed about 600 g (~1.3 lb) 200 g (~0.4 lb) heavier than a Nintendo Switch.
  • Tom’s Hardware reports that units at E3 2019 were only averaging around 17 FPS in Monster Hunter World and 30 FPS in Doom, while simpler games like Rocket League hovered at approximately 50 FPS.

 

Microsoft buys DoubleFine

  • The hell happens to Fig?
    • That 100% depends if it’s making money or not
  • First Obsidian and now double fine.
  • Almost makes you wanna scream “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS”
  • I’m curious if microsoft will help reign in their inability to deliver on time and on budget or exacerbate it with all those dukats
  • On the plus side Psychonauts 2 will be the second game on Linux from MS studios.
  • Well, at least they didn’t immediately pull an Obsidian and run into the money filled arms of Epic.

 

WINE vs DXVK

  • Yeah, there’s gonna be some “my team vs your team” wankery happening.
  • It’s been like this since you had a choice between ed and ex
  • I’ve mentioned the decoupling of components a few times and why having the graphics compatibility stack move at a different cadence then the main project is a good thing
  • However, as scoots mentioned, the beauty of open source is that even competing projects can help each other via the method known as “Stridering”
  • From the outside perspective we went from “it’s DX11, can’t play” to “hope it’s DX11 so it runs good” in under a year.
  • As of recording, the DXVK implementation has the advantage of, well, working.
  • The “Ultimately a dead end” is questionable, at best .
  • However, stating “Wine’s own Vulkan D3D backend should make DXVK superfluous” might ring true, in a decade or so.
  • DXVK, should it decide to swallow D9VK and VK12, will be the API to rule them all.
  • I have no doubt WINE will achieve the same, in a decade or so as Venn put it.

 

ioQuake3 PSA (RThren)

  • Server got the hacked.
  • Looks like they were only mining but don’t take chances.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: The Final Station
Devel: Oleg Sergeev, Andrey Rumak, Do My Best
Engine: Unity

Price: £10.99 / US$14.99 / CA$16.99

Wazzat: Travel by train through a dying world. Look after your passengers, keep your train operational, and make sure you can always reach the next station. Make your way through swarms of infected at each station. Explore mysterious and abandoned stations looking for supplies and survivors.



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • Unity scream of nope.
  • Mouse input does not work on the title screen, controller works.
  • Nopes to desktop when getting the first code.
  • Forced to use Proton to get past the first code.
  • Cloud sync is incompatible between version.

Performance @ 1080

  • It kinda (sorta) holds 60 @ 1080 with the latest version of proton.
  • It’s playable but can dip into the low 30’s sometimes.

Graphics

  • Hipster-pixel.

Control

  • Menu does not let you in the game OOTB.
  • If I didn’t have a controller I would have been stuck.
  • Well, it seems if you launch it in windowed mode it works but nope, that broke.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • Yeah, the linux build should not have passed qa
  • Also yeah, unity scream of nope. That’s a double fuck you

Performance @ 1080

  • It definitely runs with the aforementioned performance hits
  • I’d like to comment on the performance of the native version, which had a range of 60 to zero

Graphics

  • Pixelly, but effective

Control

  • There is input delay when I play it using the steam controller or the droolspock
  • I could start the game with the controller but ended up using wasd and mouse. This is a game I wanted to sit back on the couch and play, but that don’t seem to be allowed

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It launches but it tends to crash if you have the audacity to try and play it

Performance @ 1080

  • It seems to hover around 60
  • The only time I noticed a dip was when the Steam overlay came up to tell me I had received a stupid card.
  • Can we disable those notifications VALVe? Please? No?! Well fuck me, then!

Graphics

  • There are many things which don’t work about this game, graphics are not one of them

Control

  • DualShock behaves weirdly in the native version.
  • You can tell the game is taking inputs from it since it skips the intro screens but I couldn’t navigate the menu at all with it.
  • Proton made it possible to navigate the menu with the controller, though.
  • Didn’t have the same issue Venn did of not being able to hit play with the mouse

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • One of the better Half-Life games I’ve played.
    • Technical asshattery aside, this game has managed to tell me a story with pixels that’s legit interesting.
    • At first I thought it was another Tiny Built joint but while it shares some of the control DNA that’s about it.
    • You wake up, go to work, and shite starts getting real.
    • All while doing an excellent job of explaining the game mechanics without hand holding.
    • It’s two parts, find the key codes for the choo-choo and keep the train running while babbysitting the fkrs you saved.
    • I, like Pedro, didn’t care for the babbysitting until I realized how much those critter were worth in money and bullets.
    • After that I became service focused on my passengers… unless they had the bleeds.
    • Sorry, I need the heals more than they did.
    • As a whole it’s just, tense. All of it.
    • Limited supplies and a story that makes you want to stay alive so you can figure out WTF the endgame is.
    • Also, telling the backstory via the passengers was a nice touch.
  • Jordan
    • It’s an effective little survival horror/steward simulator
    • Venn’s right with the half life comparison. The storytelling is very similar. Minus being able to fuck around with the environment while people were barfing exposition
    • The survival horror portions are very well done. You’re almost always going in a loop, trying to find some magic numbers and encountering zambos along the way
    • And you better either be good at resource management or cheesing, cuz if you’re like me, there’ll be no shortage of moments you have to fromage your way out of because you have no ammo
    • And then you click some shit and make sure your passengers don’t starve or die
    • And yeah, the only time to waste medkits on bleeders is if you’re right at the end anyways and you’re sure they’ll make it, otherwise keep your medkits. You will need them
    • The narrative is the real highlight though. It does a good job of giving you bits and pieces of information about what’s happening. You basically just trip over exposition through left notes and computer “logs”, but it’s unobtrusive and sometimes made me stop scrambling and go “huh, interesting”
    • Just a shame the native version fuckin’ sucks
  • Pedro
    • The atmosphere is awesome!
    • I didn’t like having to babysit the passengers and having them randomly die because I didn’t have enough medkits for myself, let alone them.
    • Also, I did start to resent the increasing scarcity of bullets and the ever increasing number of enemies but the game does give you enough environmental stuff like TVs and toilets you can throw at enemies.
    • But these are good complaints to have.
    • These are nitpicks and they didn’t stop me from playing the game.
    • As it stands it is an amazingly fun game to play.
    • It tells a story with very little text on screen.
    • It even builds a whole world by showing you what’s happening as the train zooms along rather than slapping a whole wall of text on screen or having someone narrating for you.
    • Show, don’t tell!
    • And if it weren’t for the glaringly obvious problems with the native version, I’d probably give this game 4 chairs.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Stadia natives

  • Umm..it comes with the $130 bundle
  • And stadia ain’t running windows on the backend

Space Stadia

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