LinuxGameCast Weekly 357: Happy Linus Fun Rants

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

Steam drops Ubuntu

  • 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.

 

Steam SACK (RTheren)

  • 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.

 

20 years of Counter Strike

  • 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

DOTA Underlords

  • 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.

 

Quake 2 RTX 1.1.0

  • 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.

 

Hero Siege 150

  • 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.

 

Vambrace 1.08

  • 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

A.N.N.E

  • 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!

 

ISLANDERS

  • 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:

Mystery Navi cards

  • 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.

 

Blade Runners Needed!

  • 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?

 

OpenVIII

  • 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.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


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



Venn:

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.


Jordan:

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

Pedro:

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:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:


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:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Bots

Rekindled

  • Tap that recurring PayPal button, fam.
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