LinuxGameCast Weekly 358: DicXs VicKs

Ubuntu cancels 32-bitmageddon! Black Mesa releases playable Xen, Steam nerfs a Corgi, and Proton makes broken Kickstarter dreams come true! Then Steel Rats faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special Thanks:

  • Aldius (Sïgnäl fröm Tölvä for us 3 and Jill)

Timestamps
04:45 Steam on 32-bit Linux support
08:23 Steam Summer Sale
13:09 Steam Summer Sale confusion
15:45 VALVe’s Freelance KWin
17:50 Proton 4.2-8
22:37 Steam DOS 0.4.0
24:18 Music generated player ships
26:06 Rocket Patch 1.65
28:22 Xen Technical Beta
31:38 Shameless self promotion
34:36 DXVK 1.2.3
36:44 Hollow Knight E3 update
41:04 FOSS board game publishing
34:10 Open E-sports
46:04 CHAIRQASITION: Steel Rats
58:57 Hate Mail


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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steam on 32-bit support

  • Steam will be released as a Flatpack on 19.10, calling it.
  • So after finally realizing it was a bad idea, Canonical walks back their 32 bit position
  • Valve dropping support for 19.10 wasn’t any sort of condemnation, more of a “Our solution for this sort of thing isn’t ready, so don’t try and use it in a pure 64 bit environment”
  • And the world keeps on spinning
  • Anyone elks notice die-hard Arch “users” getting rather upset about Ubuntu support going away?
  • I wasn’t far off on Wednesday.
  • Though it would be good for VALVe us mere mortals to have a contingency in place.
  • Canonical seems a little too keen to focus on their profitable cloud ventures, but there is still a place for desktop Linux.
  • Even if it’s just for us degenerates.

 

Steam Sale

  • Day one was 504 + meh.
  • Of course corgi is winning #wargi
  • Something something steam sale diminishing return
  • Since everyone and their cat joined the Corgi team, it has apparently been nerfed.
  • I have been looking for something to burn cash on and nada.
  • Well, I yoinked Dirt4 if that counts.

 

Summer sale confusion

  • I don’t think me not understanding what the hell is going on will hurt sales.
  • Could be wrong.
  • The confusion sprung around the fact that every day someone on the winning team will get a game from their wishlist.
  • What wasn’t properly explained, is that you get the top one.
  • So people started pruning their wishlists so they would win the games they wanted.
  • And what they wanted were the pricey AAA games, which means indie games got culled out of a lot of wishlists.
  • Wishlisting apparently raises a game’s Trust score and that allows devs to have the extra trading card revenue.

 

VALVe’s Freelance KWin

  • DUde’s getting paid by valve to make sure that Kwin doesn’t perform like ass while gaming
  • Seems legit
  • You know, fixing KWin’s underlying issues would me make all the happies.
  • At this point, KWin is the single most likely thing to fail on my system.
  • And it does, occasionally.

 

Proton 4.2-8

  • I’m a little against them fixing issues for bloodstained just so that it disincentives non windows folks from buying it.
    • Well, they are in the business of selling games.
      • LET ME LIVE IN MY FANTASY WORLD DAMN YOUS
  • Better alt-tab support is always welcome though
  • One thing I noticed is that Proton games now properly grab the cursor after alt+tabbing out and going back in.
  • I also noticed, this update made it so when you go back to the game, you’re presented with a window at whatever resolution the game was running.
  • Basically, it disables the fullscreen flag on that particular window and thus breaks the nice bit of scaling Proton does for fullscreen windows.

 

Steam DOS 0.4.0

  • This project continues to chug along, creating alternate runners for dos based games on steam using dosbox
  • I still want to see a version of this targeted at installing open source engine re-implementations for games that have them

Steam: Game Updates

BH2 New Feature: Music generated player ships

  • I wonder what kind of ship “BIkey man” would generate?
  • I played a lot of Beat Hazard on Android back in the day.

 

Rocket Patch 1.65

  • Sandy nights and regretful mornings
  • That’s a growing list of Known Issues.
    • Don’t worry, they will be fixed on the Epic store.

Xen Technical Beta

  • You can run it in Proton if you really really want to see it.
    • Cuz the best way to test your game is to only do it on one platform
  • “Running the game at 4k resolution at max settings may drastically lower your frame rate”
    • Isn’t that the case with all games?

News:

DXVK 1.2.3

  • Small performance bump.
  • AKA the Jackson 5 Release
  • Memory improvements which may help with “low-end NVidia GPUs”… the 970, you mean?

 

Hollow Knight E3 update

  • Silent protagonist no longer
  • They’ve changed the healing for Hornet so she heals super fast, but it’s all or nothing. They say the choice is to make fights a little more swingy. We’ll see how that works out
  • The real question on everyone’s mind is whether or not buying this game will also net you like 3 full other games from free dlc
  • Going full valve-time on the release date.
  • More Hollow Knight by basically telling all the surrounding character stories would be a very good way to keep the series going indefinitely.

 

FOSS board game publishing

  • This one takes a little explaining
  • Boardgame.io is a nodeJS framework for making board game rulesets
    • You define the rules and what happens on a turn, and then you can convert that into a playable game
  • This is a way of getting folks to actually be able to play your boardgame.io games
  • They have a hosted version that the curate, but you can roll your own cuz open source
  • Considering the two other boardgame apps available on linux, TTS, and Vassal are a bit hefty and in some cases cost money, a browser based alternative seems ideal

 

Open E-sports

  • Oof! That’s almost 10GB of anticipation.
  • Wouldn’t be so bad if my download speed from Mediafire wasn’t capped at 8.7 MB/s
  • … something something… first world problems!
  • That’s a big ass manual, though these are SIM games so that’s par for the course.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Steel Rats
Devel: Tate Multimedia
Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Price: £15.99 / US$19.99 / CA$22.79 (50% for Summer Sale)

Wazzat: Ride in style through the retro futuristic world of Steel Rats™. Set in an alternate version of 1940’s USA, gear up and mount your chromed stallion and save Coastal City from the invading horde of Junkbots. Your motorcycle is your weapon designed to crush your enemies in awesome and stylish ways whilst traversing up, down left and right, over rooftops and through enemy-infested tunnels.



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • This, this a marvel of technical failure.
  • It launches on the second monitor in fullscreen and bites down.
  • I can get it in windowed if I dig around the *.ini.
  • Proton to the rescue.

Performance @ 1080

  • Native, it runs like but.
  • Proton delivers in excess of 100+.

Graphics

  • Ya like brown and hazy?

Control

  • O.M.F.G.
  • Shit moves when you press buttons, i’ll give it that.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • Yes, it technically starts when you hit play
  • But hoo boy

Performance @ 1080

  • I thought hey, lets sit back on the couch and play a game
  • And it ran like ass on the 580. Solid 30 fps, except when switching to and from cutscenes
  • So I decided, hey, lets try the i7, 1080TI box. It certainly will be better
  • Nope. Also, no cloud save, so I had to play the tutorial over again
  • So then I decided to try proton. That worked, but again, no cloud save so I had to play through the first part of the game yet a third time

Graphics

  • They definitely appear on teh screen

Control

  • If I can say one nice thing about this game’s controls, it’s that in the native version if you have a ps4 controller plugged in, it gives you correct prompts

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It launched out of the box

Performance @ 1080

  • Performance is always somewhere between 30 and 50 FerPS.
  • Changing graphical settings made 0 fucking difference
  • Maybe lowering resolution would do it… nope!
  • The resolution changing thing only shows 0x0

Graphics

  • The graphics work

Control

  • The controls tied my brain in a proper knot but that’s not a technical fault of the game.
  • DualShock 4 works

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • Excite Bike meets Psychonauts.
    • The controls for this game are bullshit.
    • Like, lol wacky floaty insanely WTH bad.
    • Almost amusingly fun until got to a part that required me to “race” a boring drill down several ramps.
    • Ever try and race a drill down scaffolding in 1/10’th earf gravity?
    • Fortunately this all takes place in the first 60 minutes so make use of the refund system.
    • And you should.
    • Even if the controls made sense and the physics made FK and or ALL sense I wouldn’t recommend it.
    • It’s FKn Excite Bike with a flaming spinny death wheel and they somehow managed to cock that up.
    • In closing, this game is less than a year old and their “native” version is junk.
    • You can do UE4 on Linux correctly, we’ve seen it.
    • These shithats tapped the export button and shipped.
    • <bell>shame</bell>
  • Jordan
    • Excitebike with a plot sounds like an ok base for a game
    • You…you just have to get the game part right
    • The controls? They’re really just awful. Just so bad
    • And no amount of rail grinding or murder wheelies are going to change that
    • In fact, it’s hard as shit to murder wheelie because the controls are so bad
    • It was a little better when the game wasn’t eating shit performance wise via proton, but not enough to derive any sort of enjoyment from it
  • Pedro
    • Something about this game had my brain rejecting it all the time I spent playing it.
    • My hands couldn’t learn the taps and double taps, regardless of whether I used the controller or the keyboard.
    • But the constant herky-jerks and enemies attacking you from off screen, I really couldn’t find in me the will to learn how to control this.
    • That bit with the drill on the 5th level was pretty much the proverbial nail in the coffin for me.
    • I wasn’t having fun at that point, the sole reason I kept going was out of sheer stubbornness.
    • But that says more about me than it does the game.
    • I wasn’t having fun.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Sad

Downfall

Downfall Pt.2

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