Building a £300 Linux Gaming PC! Steam’s ‘Remote Play Together’ brings local multiplayer games online, open-source GTA San Andreas, and we find out what it took to port Indivisible to Linux.
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Timestamps:
03:39 Steam September hardware survey
06:51 30% game industry cut
10:29 Steam Remote Play
14:12 Proton 4.11-7
16:38 Indivisible Build #39125
17:45 Portal 2 update
19:08 Half-Life 1 update
21:03 CS:GO update
22:57 Pine
25:12 Hexa Trains
27:27 Shameless self promotion
30:35 Interviewzen: Cybik: Porting Indivisible to Linux
52:46 OpenTESArena 0.10.0
55:33 AMD NUC
58:04 Atari VCS architect quits
01:00:50 Games for Grunts
01:02:03 £300 Linux Gaming PC
01:05:36 Google Stadia negative latency
01:11:40 Hedgewars 1.0.0
01:13:55 SanAndreas Unity
01:16:16 Open Gothic test build
01:19:23 Carnage 3D
01:21:12 CHAIRQASITION: Indivisible
01:35:57 Hate Mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Linux usage crawling up by .03%. Awww yisss
- 1060 still seems to be the card of choice across all platform
- Apparently on linux the Rx480 shoots ahead by .79%,
- Someone other than me finally bought a 2060!
- The lack of Ryzen is still bothering me!
- Most people have 2 or 4 physical CPUs.
- I was thinking this was because laptop but the popular GPU is the 10 series.
- So it seems with the exception of Humble, Itch and EGS, ~70% takeaway is about the best you can do
- Although if you’re dealing with Sony, M$ or Nintendo and you got some backing, you may be able to negotiate a better deal
- One thing we haven’t really shut up about though is the fact that there are some real tangible benefits to valve taking that 30% like free linux support via proton, mobile streaming infrastructure and an entire private network for hosting globally accessible game servers
- I mean, Valve could offer an “Epic” tier.
- We only take 12% and you only get a Play button on the Store page.
- No forums, no workshop, no Steamworks etc.
- I don’t think developers would be happy about that but it’s all you get with the Epic store.
- That’d be fun to see, for 12% you get exactly the same Epic offers you in terms of store infrastructure!
- It’ll probably be hella janky at first
- But either way: Yaaaaaaasssssss
- This gets extra interesting when you realize only one person needs to own the game.
- Will Player 2 end up playing via streaming?
- I’m thinking this’ll end up being the case
- They’ve been putting a bunch of development into the steam mobile play app, so that’s some pretty solid foundation
- If so this will be a good datapoint for testing the upcoming Steam streaming service.
- 30% cut, people.
- Death Road to Canada!
- Yeah! This is the kind of value added to your game if you’re willing to part with a 30% chunk of each sale.
- This is going to require the host PC to encode and stream to player 2.
- WHAR the goddamn Batman!
- Better support for controller hotplugging.
- It broke fullscreen in one of the games I have been cocking around with.
- Proton 4.15 to the rescue.
- Introduced some performance regressions in Shadow of War.
- We’re only talking like, 5%.
- Unfortunately it brought back the cutscene spite-crashes and those can nuke 15/20 minutes of progression with a quickness.
- Such is the way of WINE and Proton.
- Fix some issues, introduce others.
- Over here, I didn’t really notice anything in the shift from 4.11-6 to 4.11-7.
Steam: Game Updates
- Some changes to the default controller layout.
- They mention one specific achievement no longer always popping up.
- Correct prompts for dualshock and switch controllers are nice
- Plugging security holes in your multiplayer game is nicer
- I wonder if the material rendering issue fix allows it to be captured by OBS without fucky workarounds now
- That would be a nice accidental fix.
- GoldSRC updates!
- If memory serves, aside from the linux update this is the second time we’ve seen this ol’ gem get das patch
- This is the second update in 2019, probably something to do with the half-life update above.
- This new layout on the patch notes pages is great, since it shows the latest 3 down the bottom as well.
Steam: New Games
- 3.5 years in development by a 7-man team.
- It looks rather impressive.
- Better yet, no turn-based.
- That looks really nice!
- I think I’d enjoy a well done survival RPG with some crafting elements, but the ones I’ve played thus far are all … meh!
- Fucking moon trains! Trains going to the moon!
News:
- Someone saw that an Elder Scrolls game was going without an open source engine re-implementation and said “NAY”
- Written in C++17 and uses SDL2 for cross-platform video, WildMIDI for music, and OpenAL Soft for sound and mixing.
- No actual gameplay yet.
- M-O-O-N.
- Might as well, I guess.
- There’s already engine reimplementations for TES2 and 3, so it had to happen.
- I hope OpenMW gets Morrowind done so they can start focusing on the Oblivion bits.
- The desktop is dead. Long live the desktop.
- I am the desktop?
- I mean, the article is right. Desktop computing these days is either for people who want to play video games/heat their house or folks doing actual work like development, design or content creation
- Most folks are happy with just a cell phone or table, let alone a small form factor PC
- In fact, I’d even say that SFF computers appeal more to the former crowd for stuff like set top boxes, single task on-site servers or jitsi machines and the like
- I want a full sized PCIe hole!
- I don’t think I ever saw a proper NUC.
- I saw some of the clones, like those Zotac nano boxes.
- Moral of the story: Pay your fucking contractors.
- Love, a contractor.
- Makes you wonder where those millions in crowdfunding disappeared to.
- Nice to know there will no longer be a custom Linux OS.
- At least, if it comes out, we know it can run proper Linux.
- Remember that person they mentioned wasn’t going anywhere despite having started another company?
- Yeah, this was that person.
- Want to throw this out there as a little PSA.
- Free games for current and ex US military.
- For $379.31 you too can build a bitching system that can kinda-sorta play the video games.
- I’m sure you can find these parts for much cheaper on US eBay.
- Outside of Metro and Deus Ex, this will play just about everything on High/Ultra.
- I’m including the whitelisted Proton games in that blanket statement.
- It may not be able to do so well with newer AAA games, if you can get those running in Proton.
- I guess we’ll see once the rest of the ACO work is done
- Speaking of which, since this is my tinker toy, I loaded the mfutex kernel and the ACO version of mesa to see what shakes loose.
- Game streaming will be the future.
- That future is not “a year or two” away.
- I can imagine how, especially in a multiplayer game, predictive latency compensation could be a bit frustrating.
- Granted, the predictive control was only noticeable when using the keyboard / gerbil during the beta.
- Depending on how it’s implemented, it may get better over time as their algorithm begins to better learn how people play certain games
- So what if this AI can play out and render (think 3 or 4 streams) predicted scenarios and switch to the one you choose.
- Open sauce Worms reaches 1.0!
- As is tradition, all that means is that they feel reasonably confident in their work.
- I hope they keep working on it.
- It’s been a while since we’ve had an open source game on the chairquisition that wasn’t tuxkart
- Case sensitive file system support is nice. It’s amazing how difficult this is for some people to grasp
- Should build OOTB in unity editor now
- FYI: VirtualBox doesn’t support Vulkan, so don’t expect to see full Linux support in next release.
- Developers! Please please please please PLEASE don’t fucking do this
- You know what supports Vulkan? A $50 Ivy Bridge/Haswell laptop and it’ll run Linux better than VirtualBox.
- Welcome to container culture.
- Welcome to linux support as an afterthought culture
- It’s open-source, someone can ferk it.
- The Swick speaking the tru tru!
- There isn’t really a compelling reason to NOT use SDL2.
- Unless you just want a faster path to hair loss
- Helps to mitigate that one scenario you didn’t account for.
- And to round off the engine reimplementations this week, one for the OG GTA.
- This one seems to just be a hobby project. Also no SDL used.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Indivisible
Devel: Lab Zero Games / Cybik
Engine: Z-Engine (like Skullgirls. Thanks Cybik!)
Price: £34.99 / US$39.99 / CA$53.46
Wazzat: Indivisible is a hand drawn action RPG platformer from Lab Zero, creators of the critically acclaimed Skullgirls! Set in a huge fantasy world, Indivisible tells the story of Ajna, a fearless girl with a rebellious streak who sets out on a quest to save everything she knows from being destroyed.
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent keys
Venn:
Does It Launch
- No issues with launching outside of the constant Funded achievement spam.
Performance @ 1080
- 60 @ 1080 & 2160.
- Needs a gang of memoryram or 8GB of swap.
Graphics
- No issues.
Control
- Correct buttons /w Xclone and PS4.
Jordan:
Does It Launch
- Yes
Performance @ 1080
- Holds 60
Graphics
- Weird mexican, indian, mongolian anime vibes
- I’m in to it
Control
- All the buttons work on the dualshock
- The interface though, that’s another thing entirely
Pedro:
Does It Launch
- It does launch.
Performance @ 1080
- It holds 60 on El Cheapo!
- Also holds 60 at 2160p in this box.
Graphics
- Anime as shit and Razmi is best waifu!
Control
- The prompts change to match the device you last poked with your greasy fingers.
- DualShock 4 also worked out of the box.
QA Score:
Fedora:
Soulless:
Debian:
Fun section:
Fun?:
- Venn:
- 33 minutes in and my working theory is this kid snapped after witnessing the death of her pops.
- Turns out I like speed TBS less than regular old fashioned TBS.
- I spent the first 30 minutes getting the exposition dump and learning the base mechanics.
- I spent the second 30 getting killed by the first Golden Oozaru.
- Some people were complaining about the battle mechanics never clicking for them, guess I fall in that group.
- Kudos on Lab0 for trying something new but it just confused my old arse more than anything.
- Jordan
- The beginning of this story is very clearly a reference to the 1983 masterpiece, Conan the Barbarian.
- They even get Worf to voice their Thulsa Doom character
- From there, you take on the role of a lady who sucks people into her brain and forces them to fight for their very survival
- There’s also a bit about how Thulsa Doom thinks that she’s the herald to the end times or something to do with those weird 3 circle things in the intro battle
- The gameplay itself is alright. The platformy bit’s aren’t too difficult, although some of them do involve quite a bit of trial and get blasted by face lasers
- The combat system is kinda weird
- You have four characters, each of whom have a fantasy strike style attack bound to one of the face buttons. Based on their speed and your level, their attacks recharge at a given rate. Sometimes you have to do fighting game combos to break through enemy defenses.
- Then on your enemies’ turn, they attack one or more of your dudes, and you gotta either block with everyone or hit that character’s face button
- It’s interesting in theory, but in practise it kind ajust ends up being a little button mashy.
- The map and save stuff is also a wee dumb, having to hold donwn a button and press a directional key. Seems a bit needlessly complicated
- But all together, the experience is pretty enjoyable. They got a talented stable of voice actors and the story is tolerable
- Pedro
- I’m 5 hours in and only now has someone actually explained Ajna’s background
- This is the point where I’m going around to unlock the fast travel system.
- I still haven’t unlocked the abilities to get through the green and orange sparklies.
- I was going to tear this game a new one for the price, but fuck me sideways!
- This is a huge fucking game!
- I can absolutely see the cost justification and something tells me there’s going to be even more stuff to do (and probably a bunch of optional bits once you unlock everything)
- The way the story is going sorta reminds me of Final Fantasy X.
- Granted, not the best of the bunch, but not the worst either. Final Fantasy IX still exists, after all.
- The big difference is that indivisible is 2D and the combat is a bit more active than most turn-based games.
- It took a couple of hours of play for my brain to click and a big thanks to Lockdonnen for the Steam Controller!
- Because for some reason when I was using to play the game on El Cheapo, the nubbin that constitutes my right thumb kept going exactly to the right button.
- Once it clicked, even the occasional difficulty spike became minor.
- And the game as a result became very enjoyable.
- It’s still expensive as balls, though!
Fun Score:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
- CPU and depending on which software you prefer, a GPU with 8GB of VRAM.
- If you’re doing editing, it may be worth the extra cash to go for the Ryzen 5 1600 if you’re trying to keep the cost down.
- For GPUs, basically anything with 8GB of video memory or higher.
- But then you’re not looking at £300, at least £600.
- And you’re going to want more storage.
