LinuxGameCast Weekly 374: Team Sweeney

Shadow Of Mordor gets a Vulkan Linux beta! Jackbox Party Pack counts to 6, NVIDIA fixes DXVK titles, and is that a DAW in your pocket? Then HedgeWars 1.0 faces, the CHAIRQASITION!


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Timestamps:
03:00 Steam winter sale dates
05:10 Steam music DLC
06:54 Devolver defends Steam
10:22 Shadow of War Vulkan beta
14:41 Shadow of the Tomb Raider release data
17:07 >Connect
18:51 Jackbox Party Pack 6
21:11 Shameless self promotion
24:50 NVIDIA fixes DXVK
27:10 NVIDIA RTX remasters
29:15 DXVK 1.4.3
31:46 2500 ’90s games
34:11 ScummVM 2.1.0
35:45 GODOT Vulkan progress report
37:34 Stadia launch day
41:33 Analogue Pocket
43:59 CHAIRQASITION: Hedgewars 1.0
54:12 Hate mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Upcoming sale dates

  • Quick note for holiday sales.
  • Oct 28, Nov, 26, Dec 19.
  • Plenty of time to look at a game on sale, wait for it to go on sale during the next one only to be dissapointed.

 

Steam music

  • Game soundtracks are now a distinct item you can buy in the store. You can also get per-track data if you’re a music producer
  • Cuz people use steam to intentionally purchase and listen to music question mark?
    • That might not be the intention, but I can see this being extra money for not a lot of work for developers.
      • Except should the developers get revenue for the soundtrack and not.. You know…the musicians?
      • Yes, if they sold the rights to the developer.
  • And if there is a game which you like the soundtrack of but can’t really enjoy the gameplay itself, this means you still get to support the devs and send the message.

 

Devolver defends Steam

  • Yeah, most of that sounds awfully familiar.
  • Folks keep writing stories about it, so we keep having to talk about it
  • Valve is far from the moustachioed, tying-women-to-railroad-tracks, old-tymey villain Epic paints it to be
  • It would be great to see Timmy actually bite his tongue and admit that the Epic Store as it currently stands is not competition.
  • But he’s clearly not here to compete.
  • He’s taking the market by storm and buying as many escwusives as he can
  • It would be great if the developers actually released the numbers of their Steam vs Epic sales, but since Steam doesn’t allow that I’m inclined to believe Epic doesn’t either.

Steam: Game Updates

Shadow of War Vulkan beta

  • Just opt-in from the betas tab.
  • Getting 55-60 ingame @2160p with the video toaster.
  • 100 on Ultra with drops into the 50’s in hella complicated areas.
  • Now give me one for DeusEx!
    • ^ That’s the one that fucking NEEDS it
  • There are some artifacts with the RX 570 in El Cheapo, but it went from 59 average in the benchmark to 86 at 1080p Ultra.
  • On this box with the 3700X and the GTX 1080 at UHD, it went from 38FerPS to 64FerPS on average in the benchmark.
  • Do more Vulkan!
  • It’s important for Feral to show that they are able to deliver better performance vs DXVK.
  • The 1080TI has it pegged @ UHD in and at around 65-77ferps. Not to shabby

Steam: New Games

Shadow of the Tomb Raider DE

  • About. Damn. Time.
  • Regular SOTR + $97.85 worth of DLC.
  • Now we see whether or not Feral has a business model for linux
  • I haven’t bought it yet, did you?
  • The date is close enough that I can wait.

 

>Connect

  • Dive deep into a world of cyberhacking
    • I may have had a bit of a giggle fit upon reading this
  • It’s another hacker-simulator-puzzle game
  • This one has multiple endings though

 

Jackbox Party Pack 6

  • Still rocking the day-1 Linux release.
  • Hope they are rocking something higher than 720p this go around.
  • Friday jackening has some new fuel. I’m personally looking forward to more Trivia Murder

News:

Long Lived Beta

  • Beta for the long lived branch, 440.x
  • Ooh, Dicks Vicks fixes for saints row
  • EGL support for PRIME rendering offload means that wayland based managers are gonna have an easier time implementing GPU switching on laptops
  • Fixing DXVK titles is still an odd thing to see.

 

Nvidia remasters

  • INb4 Hello Kitty RTX Island Adventure
  • I look forward to playing other classics at 35-40 FPS.
    • 14 Ferps baby
  • Curious to see which games they pick.
  • Also curious to see if Intel’s or AMD’s Ray Tracing implementation will be able to play ball with these games.

 

Trixxy Vixxy

  • New, smaller state cache format. It’ll also reformat your old state cache on launch
  • More CPU overhead improvements as well
  • No game specific updates this time around, just maintenance
  • We’re at the point to where performance improvements seem to be the focus.

 

2500 DOS games added from the ‘90s

  • And you can play them in the browser.
  • Simpsons and Mortal Kombat!
  • There are definitely some gems in there
  • Some of them are fan games though
  • Because my Steam backlog wasn’t big enough already…

ScummVM 2.1.0

  • Improved Text to Speech under linux
  • 16 New games supported including Duckman
  • The new version of myst is supported as well, so suck it lack of linux support on your kickstarter! That was using scummvm already what

 

Vulkan progress

  • Juan’s been a busy bee lately
  • Spatial Material has been named to Standard Material to better indicate that you should use it
  • There’s a performance profiler that was added as well
  • Also support for Basic Universal textures, which should result in about 25% reduction of texture sizes
  • No post processing effects yet but he’s certainly making good time!

 

Stadia launch day

  • $10 a month for the privilege of buying games.
  • I can’t wait to see how “negative latency” works in the real world!*
  • So the regular 1080p version where you just have to fork out for games is coming in 2020?
  • I’ll wait.
  • I do like how football manager on steam dropped linux support, but here they are running on stadia.
  • The pricing isn’t actually that bad considering you’re effectively renting hardware. Given that you can easily drop about $1500 on a beefy up to date gaming PC, which represents 12 years of stadia fees
  • Hell, even El Cheapo represents about 3 years of subscription costs

 

Pocket DAW

  • I still have some gameboy carts kicking around. Their batteries are probably dead though
  • Still, it’s a pretty slick looking piece of kit and I kinda want it.
  • That price though…
  • When you can emulate all of those games and many many more on a $100 phone with a 1080p screen and attach a bluetooth controller, I can’t justify it.
  • They are branding it as a devkit of sorts, so I can see it for something like that.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: HedgeWars 1.0
Devel: Hedgewars Project
Engine: Custom (SDL, Qt, Lua)
Price: Libre

Wazzat: Hedgewars is a turn based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game, featuring the antics of pink hedgehogs with attitude as they battle from the depths of hell to the depths of space.

Mandatory Disclosure: It’s open sauce



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • After installing 500MB of deps, yes.
  • The copy pasta on the page resulted in a working build.

Performance @ 1080

  • Yeah, it manages.

Graphics

  • Not bad looking for a FLOSS game.

Control

  • The default keyboard layout is wonky but it works.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • Yes
  • I grabbed mine from here because I’m lazy

Performance @ 1080

  • It’s good enough

Graphics

  • Cute little copyright infringing SVGs

Control

  • Basically just use the arrow keys and right click


Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • Got the Flatpak from Athenaeum and it worked out of the box.

Performance @ 1080

  • It defaults to locking the FerPS at 125 and I didn’t see a reason to unlock it

Graphics

  • The zoom option was borked and setting a resolution and fullscreen doesn’t seem to make a difference in text size.
  • May be an issue with the flatpak version but that means at 2160p the text is teeny tiny!

Control

  • Mouse and gerbil out of the box

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Debian:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • Let me be the first (but not last) to say it’s FLOSS Worms.
    • NTTWWT since Worms seems to be universally loved by like, six people.
    • Now if you don’t know what Worms be, think GORILLA.BAT turned up to 11 and when you’re done with that, get off my lawn.
    • You’re spread across a destructible environment with a satchel of guns, explosive, drills, and other assorted bits of mayhem and nonsense.
    • Then you take timer-based turns trying to murder each other to death.
    • And most importantly it has what all gamers crave, online multiplayer.
    • Unfortunately the UI for setting up multiplayer, teams and the like is down right hostile.
    • Then another damn window pops up with the game in it??
    • On behalf of people using OBS to stream games to the internet… that’s some unnecessary bullsh*t that will stop streamers in their tracks.
    • As far as the point release, yeah, it runs great, online multiplayer makes with the working, and it has the added benefit of being a little bit of alright.
    • Playing in forever alone mode is kinda boring and that two window UI needs ti DIAF.
    • Best of all, if you don’t like it there is no two hour restriction on refunds.
  • Jordan
    • It’s worms!
    • Aaaaand like worms, you basically need multiplayer to be fun cuz the AI is just better than you
    • Like I was saying on the stream on thursday, I think 2-4 is the ideal group size for this. 8 Players just seems like a lot
    • The RNG (yeah, I know there isn’t any RNG, but it’s still rng) can be a little much at times, but having friends along really mitigates the frustration
    • In single player, not so much
    • But yeah, for 1.1 definitely get to work on improving that UI
  • Pedro
    • Opensauce worms to a fault
    • Worms has always had a bit of jank to it, but in Hedgewars that jank is janked up!
    • You know how in worms if there’s a tiny bit of ground in left, you’ll end up blowing yourself up with a bazooka shot?
    • In Hedgewars that tiny bit can literally be 1×1 pixel in size and you will hit it and it’ll blow up in your face.
    • Even the supposedly medium difficulty CPU team is also pixel accurate with their shots.
    • I’m saying I don’t like it because it’s hard, I’m the one who likes Dark Souls (take a shot).
    • I’m saying I’ve always been a bit meh on this whole genre.
    • I like playing it with other people but that’s cuz I’m playing it with other people.
    • I wouldn’t sit down and play Hedgewars or Worms on my own.
    • Version 1.0 still doesn’t change my opinion in that regard.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Woody

El Cheapo

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