LinuxGameCast Weekly 359: Off Your Milkshake

Streets of Rogue enters final beta! Valve Throws shade at AMD, Godot learns Vulkan, and Supraland makes its Linux debut. Then the The Signal From Tölva face, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special thanks to

Nehemiah (Dac) increased pledge.
Jgirl (new)
MikeG – YOLO Swag mouse

Timestamps:
04:53 Steam hardware & software survey
07:30 Valve Index CAD designs
09:48 Steam Controller 2
13:13 AMD shader testing
17:07 Supraland
20:24 Planet Explorers goes F2P
24:36 Streets of Rogue final beta
32:56 NVIDIA 418.52.14 Vulkan drivers
35:13 NVIDIA Super thanks for asking
41:23 GODOT Vulkan progress
44:26 Unity Daggerfall progress report
46:48 DOOM reborn standalone
49:41 CHAIRQASITION: The Signal From Tölva
01:03:37 Hate Mail

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

June Steam survey

We are the 0.76%.
We point out this is RNG when it’s good, so it’s important to remember it’s RNG when bad.
I got 3 of them last month.
Both Mac and Linux dropped a bit.
8GB of RAM gained ground over 16GB.
The 1060 keeps slowly losing ground but the 1050ti is gaining.
The 2070 has higher adoption than the 2060.
AMD lost 0.13% of the CPU share.

Index CAD

Makers, go forth and produce some fucky Index accessories
Inb4 Sexy Toaster, Facehugger, and dildo controllers
I like that idea of a shell around your arm to help you hold the controller.
Something like that might even make it possible for me to play with the Knuckles at some point.

Areola controlla MKII

Could we get a second analog stick?
No more smacka smacka battery removal?
The patent only seems to show pictures of the changes to the back.
The squeezy bits are nice, I’m sure, but their usefulness is questionable at best.
I’m with venn on this, Rethink that battery bay
The only concrete change we know of for sure is the crush sensor on the squeezing part, which could have all sorts of funky applications
While we’re engaging in pure speculation, I hope the SCmkII has a soft serve despenser

AMD shader testing

So this is an interesting peice of fruit that fell off of the “Purchasing 50% of lunarg and giving mesa devs free games” tree
A brand new, gaming focused shader compiler for linux computer boxes that should improve some in game performance
- The samples are just FPS values, with no mention of the hardware behind it, so take those numbers with a big ol’ hunk of rocksalt
- Though they’re saying the performance delta might actually increase in ACO’s favour as they support more compile stages
If you can compile your own mesa or use AAAAAARCH, you can start testing right away. Right now it’s only available for RadV
They also say the games they show are the ones which have any significant difference with the new shader compiler.
Though getting RADV up to snuff is a pretty good thing in my book.

Steam: Game Updates

Superland

Now with Linux and clouds.
Big kudos to the devs for sending us 3 keys on the Curator Connects thing.
No major technical issues but it only manages 45/50.

Planet Explorers

They lost all the online databits.
However, the game is now F2P in forever alone mode.
How they actually lost said databits is questionable
They’re promising to be back and better than ever with PE2, but I think that’ll be a tricky pill for the fanbase to swallow
Moral ov ze story: Store your code in git and takes regular backups of said git
How do you keep everything in one server?
My software development endeavours were very limited yet I still have multiple copies of the sauce for all of them in different places.

Streets of Rogue final beta

Might want to make the Linux client, ya know, work.
Right now it defaults to a blue screen and the developer believes it’s not a problem since it works for him.
His recommended fix (from a customer) is -screen-width 1024 -screen-height 768 -screen-fullscreen 1
Granted, it works but… dude.

News:

418.52.14

Version bump for kernels.
The Vulkan driver has treated me well over the past month or two.
I think I’mma stick with it.
I’m sticking with these because they place nice with Davinci.
VK_EXT_full_screen_exclusive is a neat little addition. Bypass compositing for improved fullscreen performance, eat shit on alt-tab

NVIDIA Thanks for asking

Sometime in the future I would like to yoink a 2070 for playing sweet games at a super sick framerate research purposes.
I would like to thank NVIDIA for competing… against itself.
And it looks like AMD is knock off $50 from the initial pricing.
- Between that and ACO, Looks like we might be able to add another pro tickbox to AMD graphics under linux
Up here in Canadaland, those prices will be about 1.5x. Will we see a price drop for the non-super cards? Fuck no!
The new 2070 Super is actually using the 2080 GPU, from what Gamers Nexus was saying on their teardown video.

GODOT Vulkan progress

Vulkan does some stuff differently than openGL, so there’s going to be some godot api breakage
As it turns out, implementing Vulkan at the engine level is a lot more involved.
It’s not like this should be news to anyone but a first person account of it is always an interesting read.

Unity Daggerfall progress report

They’re apparently implementing google-autocomplete lite on the overworld map screen
Nystul (who also makes my least favourite magic aura) also did some work on the interior map to introduce some quality of life fixes and improve readability

DOOM reborn standalone

Not to be confused with Doom Remake 4, like I totally did: https://www.moddb.com/mods/lowpoly-doom-lite-10
No Linux build ATM but the source is available.
Needs moar rtx

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Signal from Tolva
Devel: Big Robot Ltd.
Engine: Unity
Price: £14.99 / US$19.99 / CA$29.99

Wazzat: The Signal From Tölva is an open-world first-person shooter set on a distant, haunted, future world. Unlock savage weapons and recruit robots to fight alongside you as rival factions struggle to discover the source of the mysterious signal. What you discover will decide the fate of a world.

Mandatory Disclosure: Aldius bought us copies.

Venn:

Does It Launch

No technical issues.

Performance @ 1080

It’s badsville here in 2060 land.
20/40 native and 45/50 with DXVK.
I’m not the only one in this boat.
Reading the forums looks like performance took a hit last year to the point some people quit playing.

Graphics

Meh, but working meh.
That intro is a little false advertising.

Control

WASD.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

Performance @ 1080

Holds 80 @ 1080P High
Don’t try to play this on UHD. You’re going to have 40 fps of fun

Graphics

It’s like an entire world of HK47s. At that level of fidelity

Control

Like dead island, for whatever reason they decided to make E melee and F use.

Pedro:

Does It Launch

It do

Performance @ 1080

The performance at UHD was really bad.
Lowering to 1440p got it stable around 60.
1080p is just fine.

Graphics

Thank the flying spaghetti monster they included the option to disable the camera sway/bobbing.

Control

You can rebind all the things.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- There’s a whole lot fk all to do combined with sporadic gunplay that’s just, bad.
- Oh, you collect shite on the way to buy new guns that are indistinguishable from the next.
- An hour in and I’ve found a few checkpoints, killed a few robots, and have no indication that things get better / interesting?
- It’s a walking simulator with bad gunplay, no penalty for death (aside from more walking) and performance that is only rivaled by the speed of smell.
- Mix that with big empty spaces and a slow moving character and you have a recipe for do not want.
Jordan
- This game is actually kind of relaxing for me
- Wander about, find money, capture points, scan shit to unlock gear and dudes you can bring along
- I do kind of wish that there was more mobility and a focus on exploration, cuz there’s not a lot there, it’s just big
- The gunfighting reminds me a bit of verdun. But with energy shields and plasma guns
- I like the MGSV scouting thing you can do, but the flights are just kind of sloggy
- Having enemy factions who are also enemies is a fun touch
- This game needs more content and a fuckier map. I get frustrated with the crappy jump and not being able to cheese my way up mountains
Pedro
- It’s a game about meandering about and sometimes getting murked when the AI is bored.
- It seems to come in waves, too.
- I don’t mind these kinds of games.
- Though I do mind the large empty spaces you need to traverse if your surveyor gets blown up as you’re trying to take a spawn point.
- The best parts are when you have all the different “factions” fighting a big ass robot and the moment it’s down it’s a big free-for-all.
- I also like the building exploration bits, though the “invisible to the naked eye” teleporty bits lose their charm after the 3rd or 4th time.
- I am curious to see if there’s something more to it, and since I’ve already explored half the map, I might just do that.