Steam drops official support for Ubuntu 19.10! Counter-Strike turns 20, DOTA Underlords enters Early Access, and Linux drivers reveal mysterious Navi cards. Then Zero G Arena faces, the CHAIRQASITION!
All this, plus your hate mail!
Special thanks to:
- MikeG (new router)
Timestamps:
03:21 Steams drops Ubuntu
05:17 Steam SACK exploit
08:27 20 years of Counter Strike
10:46 DOTA Underlords
15:03 Quake 2 RTX 1.1.0
17:05 Hero Siege 150
19:09 Vambrace 1.08
21:46 A.N.N.E
23:06 ISLANDERS
30:09 Mystery Navi cards
36:00 Ubuntu dropping i386
46:48 Blade Runner on SCUMM
49:32 OpenVIII
52:04 CHAIRQASITION: Zero G Arena
01:04:26 Hate Mail
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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- Don’t think a reversal on the part of Canonical will change a damn thing.
- This is about the fine folks at Valve having it dropped on them out of FK ALL nowhere.
- Anyway, more on this topic in the news segment so go ahead and get the Hannah Montana download started.
- Valve is downstream from debian, not ubuntu (of which debian is part of it’s ecosystem, right shuttleworth?), so I don’t really see this affecting valve’s linux efforts too much.
- Proton needs that 32 bit baby
- That thread is full of adorkable jockeying from distro fanbois though
- “We’re in discussions with Valve about the best way to provide support from 19.10 onwards.”
- [X] Doubt.
- The fix for the SACK exploit broke Steam in current kernels
- It’s already fixed in 5.1.14 and the newest version in other branches.
- Linus himself went to the github thread to address this:
- Remember when I brought up how Linus used to tear into people for breaking userspace for the sake of “security”… It’s the second time in less than two months.
- Go play OG DE: Dust and reminisce about the days when you could go through an airport without a rectal exam
- 16 years late.
- I would have no doubt been sucked in if this was around 1999.
- OG Dust 2…
- If there’s ever a map in a videogame that I could play as a terrorist and place the bomb in either A or B, blindfolded, that was it!
- I’m pretty sure I can’t do it anymore, but at one point I could actually do that in CS Source.
Steam: Game Updates
- There’s Vulkan in em.
- I kinda understand what’s going on.
- Plenty of RNG and that UI, wow.
- Do mobile UI or desktop, not both.
- Yeah, it’s the gratuitous space battles of DOTA
- It’s auto chess, it’s any of the star wars or marvel heroes games on Android.
- The big difference here is it’s DotA characters.
- It passed Artifacts peak player count in, wait for it, two hours.
- Inverted gerbil controls, really?
- Linux install script now*works*with*spaces.
- I see they’ve finally discovered the power of quotation marks
- Or \
- Yeah, maybe in the future I’ll be able to play this.
- The recent reviews are Mixed and from some of the negative reviews it appears people have issues with how the devs are handling somethings.
- The base game is 6.99 and each bit of DLC is another 3.99 on top of that.
- There’s the difficulty slider.
- There’s some more variety in recruits now, with a random ability they can get
- They also revamped some of the RPS mechanics for monsters, so now certain monsters are weak/strong against certain types of attacks
- Your perks are also reset so you get a free re-spec with this update.
Steam: New Games
- Made with my tax dollars!
- Hybrid platformer/side scrolling schmup seems interesting
- They’ve definitely gone all in with the pixel art, though. The backgrounds look gorgeous
- A shmup which also gives you the option to lose the ship and go explore things on foot…
- I’m okay with this!
- Something for the Cities Skylines crowd. Now with Ctrl-z Support!
- Always nice to see an example of devs adding linux support as opposed to abandoning it
- *glares at bloodstained*
News:
- Certainly one way to get winbros on the linux hype train.
- They gotta crawl through kernel code to find out which new GPUs are being released.
- While they’re in there, why not fix some bugs?
- Vega and now Navi certainly show a better AMD when it comes to handling the open sauce drivers.
- Something tells me that some things that rhyme with schmoogle and cradia had a smidge to do with that
- Hopefully Mesa will be able to handle the new cards on release better than when Vega hit.
Ubuntu dropping i386 from 19.10: (RTheren):
- So, this is dropping ALL THE THINGS, apparently.
- I imagine some people will have a problem with this.
- RIP games.
- RIP Lutris, more importantly.
- Do you want people running 1804 until the heat death of the universe?
- Cuz this is how you get people running 1804 until the heat death of the universe
- If 32bit support is really necessary, you can remain on 18.04 for another 4 years.
- Of course their solution to this is “run 1804 in a chroot or better yet use 1804 snaps”
- To play the FSM’s advocate, this is something that will eventually need to be done.
- Eventually, when we start moving to x86_128 maybe
- For now, I think it’s unlikely that devs are going to go back and publish 64 bit builds for their old games.
- This got the WINE team up and moving, looking for solutions.
- Sometimes it takes a hard line in the sand.
- Much like Wayland, someone has to take the first wave of bullets.
- It’s one way to accelerate finding out what that future looks like.
- How will you play games?
- “It may be possible to run 32 bit only games inside a lxd container running a 32 bit version of 18.04 LTS. “
- I. Shit. You. Not.
- MULTI-ARCH PEOPLE!
- Like Katana mentioned in the show notes, you don’t have to use ubuntu, but lots of games do list that as a system requirement for linux. And I have no doubt some devs are going to use this to feed the linux fragmentation myth
- It’s a good way to cut down on that pesky non money making Desktop side of the business.
- Yeah, Debian isn’t going anywhere.
- And if VALVe cozied up to the Intel Clear Linux folks and made a desktop distro, I know I’d be jumping all over that business.
- Yeah https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147881.htm
- That entire thread is very much worth reading!
- At the end of they day it’s not that people are upset about losing mul-arch.
- It’s that this was dropped out of the fk mothering sky without warning.
- Unsolicited advice, ya might not want to frame this as a “time and resources” issue.
- Also, this is going to cock up some audio production.
- Several musicians use 32-bit audio plugins through WINE.
- Doing some final public testing of their vanilla Blade Runner support
- They’re also working on a “restored content” version, whatever that means. That said, if you are testing that and find a bug, specify which version you’re using.
- You’d think I wouldn’t need to remind people about that when filing bug reports, but if folks in a professional context won’t do it without prompting, why would any of you?
- 64-bit goodness.
- I’ve never played Final Fantasy (and plan to keep it that way) but this is kinda neat.
- I like FFVIII, this may warrant a full playthrough at some point
- FF8 is one of the more contrived Final fantasies IMO, but it does appeal to the teenage edgelords. I wonder if you can convince them to compile shit from source.
Game: Zero G Arena
Devel: Johnathan Wood
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Price: £7.19 / US$9.99 / CA$11.49
Wazzat: Zero G Arena is an arena shooter with zero gravity, ragdoll physics, grappling beams and magnet boots
Mandatory Disclosure: Thanks MassiveOni
Does It Launch
- Everything works if you don’t do something crazy like enter fullscreen.
- Go ahead, try it.
Performance @ 1080
- 60 @ 1080 easy.
Graphics
- No glitches, but there is not much to glitch.
Control
- It’s classic WASD with the introduction of the E button.
Does It Launch
- Fullscreen no worky
- Neither does steam overlay
- That’s okay its really easy to find servers when nobody else is playing
Performance @ 1080
- No problems
Graphics
- Black floor == grapple. White floor == don’t.
- You can tell people apart, but some of the levels are actually really big so it can be hard to see your white opponent against a white backdrop #racism
Control
- Wasd
Does It Launch
- It fails to set the open file limit on Solus, so I had to append -nocore for it to launch
- Fullscreen borderless works, regular Fullscreen doesn’t.
Performance @ 1080
- It wasn’t until I raised the FPS cap to 400 that I saw some movement in the FerPS counter @1080p
Graphics
- No issues that I could find, here.
Control
- Gamepad Left gets around!
- Seriously, count how many of the default mappings read Gamepad Left.
QA Score:
Fun section:
Fun?:
- Venn:
- I’ve honestly lost track of the person who sent us a copy of this game.
- Because it’s been a minute and for good reason.
- I wanted to see if the game ever managed to develop a community.
- It didn’t.
- That’s a damn shame since there is a fun little mechanic going on here.
- At first it’s RNG rag-doll pew pew time but once you learn the maps and turn the bot AI a few notches above potato it’s kinda fun.
- At the end of the day it’s FPS with grav boots and a grappling hook filled with programmer art and sound effects.
- Comes across as not fully baked.
- Just finished multi with Jordan, kinda fun.
- Jordan
- It’s just not fun to play this sort of game on your own
- You need an active community, or at least some friends you can con into playing with you
- Otherwise what you get is a slightly fucky third person shooter with some dumb bots and an interesting gravity mechanic
- The levels are pretty big and they make the most of the surface area given
- The level with the giant balls is pretty fun, cuz they all have their own gravity.
- But again, with all this cool stuff, it’s a shame nobody’s playing.
- Pedro
- I have played far worse and far more uninteresting shooters!
- The only real problem I have with this game is the fact that it’s dead.
- First time I launched it I sat on the one public server and it was just me the whole time for almost 15 minutes.
- Playing with bots gives you a glimpse at what could’ve been but even with a 100 kill limit, the bots only put up enough of a fight to last 20-ish minutes.
- It does look like it would be fun to have a server full of people flinging themselves wildly while attempting to shoot everyone else.
- But that won’t happen unless you can herd enough people together to make it happen.
- It looks absolutely chaotic and insane, which could have been a lot of fun, but I guess we’ll never know.
Fun Score:
Hate Mail:
- Tap that recurring PayPal button, fam.