LinuxGameCast Weekly 388: Pedronnaise

Epic cancels Linux support for Rocket League!  Half-Life games go free to play, open-source Hearthstone using C++, and Wine 5.0 takes the Proton approach.

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Timestamps:
04:44 Half-Life: Alyx skips Vale Time
08:49RetroArchSteamlaunchupdate
11:24 Half-Life games go free to play
14:19 FTL gets achievements
16:09 Epic kills Linux support for Rocket League
25:29 Desolation Portal 2 MOD updates
28:24 Shameless self promotion
32:29 Radeon RX 5600 XT
37:04 Wine 5.0
39:19 Godot game hosting
41:24 OBS AMD encoder maintainer steps down
46:44 Lakka with RetroArch
50:09 Open-source Hearthstone
52:54 Terminal Phase
54:44 CHAIRQASITION: XenoRaptor
01:04:59 Hate mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Valve Time

  • Apparently Laidlaw has actually been involved with the story in some capacity,
  • It definitely sounds like they’ve put a lot of time and effort into the fidelity of the game
  • I think Valve has learned their lesson though, wait until something is pretty much done before announcing it.
    • Inb4 I look like Frank by the time it gets released
  • Still kind of a dick move to have a new entry in the half-life series be a VR excwoosive.
  • I don’t really like the idea of paying the price of a new PC just for the thing to be able to play the game.

 

RetroArch Steam launch update

  • They’ve been working hard to make sure there’s no gpl violations
  • I like the framework + core-as-dlc approach
  • They’re shipping with a boatload of cores too.
  • This is going to make the SteamBox a hell of a TV PC.

 

Free Freeman

  • It’s a decent way to drum up hype
  • Also I’m pretty sure valve stopped making money off the sales of the various Half Lives years ago
  • If you have some free time and want to binge on all the previous games but didn’t own them on Steam, now you can.

Steam: Game Updates

FTL achievements

  • These ones are a bit of an afterthought, and not as integrated into general progression as Into the breach
  • Still, has some fun challenges to satisfy your freudian impulses

 

Rocket Leave

  • There it is!
  • I expected this earlier…
    • I would have thought they’d at least wait until the EGS got a shopping cart
  • Can’t even play online with just friends after March, just to rub that bit extra salt in the wound.
  • Ginormous cunts!
  • They do say in the steam forums that proton might work but is not supported
    • Inb4 the update immediately after the final linux patch introduces EAC
      • ^
  • In terms of technical debt, I”m curious if they’ve hit a wall in the hacked up UE3 version they’re using or if they’re planning on moving to UE4.
  • If the latter is the case, it’s kind of a self-admission that UE4 on linux is kinda garbage
  • Speaks volumes about the cross-platform abilities of Unreal Engine.
  • Something to consider when picking an engine for your next game.
  • Windows users are rattled as well since this is only a little spring cleaning before it pops over to the Epic store.
  • Mark my words on that one kids, you don’t nix revenue streams unless there is a damn good reason.
  • The “new technology” they’re referring to is the Epic games store.
  • Soon clicking play will download the Epic Games launcher ala GTAV.
  • That reason will be Epic Store market share and have no doubts that will take place this year.
  • You can play it with the Proton until then.
  • Gotta start looking for a new aftershow game I guess
    • Thinking about GRIP.
  • Sad, but this is going to play out like we (and everyone elks) predicted last year.

 

Rocket Spin (Romlok)

  • Apparently the technology is DX11… Yeah, that’s their excuse.
  • And as Romlok mentioned in Discord, this reason doesn’t really hold up when you consider the Switch.
  • That doesn’t run DX11.
  • To keep these versions functional, we would need to invest significant additional time and resources in a replacement rendering pipeline such as Metal on macOS or Vulkan/OpenGL4 on Linux.
    • Uhhh, no, you could just do it all in vulkan and have that baked in support for switch, linux, windowses 7-10 and mac with moltenVK
  • According to this, Ryan and Timothee basically used something similar to indirect X to get the port up and running. Which seems a wee out of character for them?
  • 0.3 percent of 50 million is 150,000.
  • So if we are highballing with $19.99 refunds that’s about 30mil.

 

Portal 2 Desolation

  • Guess we need modders if we have any hope of playing more Half-Life or Portal games that don’t require head mounted toasters.

News:

RX 5600 XT

  • Still surprised Nvidia didn’t release three new cards to compete with it.
  • Little oopsie with the BIOS rollout.
  • Hey, it made NVIDIA shave a few $$ of the 2060.
  • Nice to see AMD coming out swinging with some new mid range stuff, especially now that Navi support has stabilized on linux
  • Lil’ Sebastian didn’t give us a look at the Vulkan performance, but I’m definitely curious how well this performs with the 5.5/Mesa19.3 + ACO wombo combo, especially in proton land
  • I still think $250 would have been a better MSRP.

Wine 5

  • Looks like wine has upstreamed the proton approach of building the wine modules as DLLs using minGW and more closely copying a windows installation. This should help with stuff like EAC and copy protection support
    • Let’s play the “let’s speculate on what got upstreamed because of proton” game!
  • Update for vulkan 1.1 is nice
  • They’ve also improved input device handling, so stuff like controllers, driving wheels, etc should work better
  • Multi Monitor support has also been improved
  • I very much look forward to the continued effort to stop DRM/Anti-Cheat from not allowing us to play games.

 

GODOT hosting

  • GOTM, or game of the month, will host your godot pck files for free
  • For those of you asking “what the hell is game of the month?” It’s a godot-focused game hosting service that lets developers distribute web clients of their games
  • Makes distribution of your prototypes that much easier and lets everyone in the world play your game.

 

OBS AMD

  • After hanging around in the OBS Discord, yeah, most of that tracks.
  • Having read just this thread on the subject, it does seem like a clash of egos more so than anything related to OBS itself or coding ability of the involved parties.
    • I was right there with you until it got to the volume meter.
    • I’ve never seen the first bit of logic behind whatever the hell that thing is.
    • Took forever to get numbers on it.
    • And it’s not representative of anything a normal human would understand.
    • Seriously, it kinda-sorta matches a K20 meter.
  • If you’ve ever requested a Linux feature in IRC or Discord you are painfully familiar with the “we don’t run Linux but feel free to send a PR”
  • A lot of bonus soda features are not implemented on Linux because there is no LinuxBrowser integration.
  • No LinuxBrowser integration because it’s being looked into… for the last several years.

 

Lakka 2.3.2

  • The time has come for them to tier their hardware support
  • Running emulator boxes on arm boards is fun, but supporting the myriad of them isn’t, especially when they get discontinued or fall out of popularity
  • New retroarch means more emulator goodness
  • 3.0 is on the horizon as well
  • Also has an x86 version which I can confirm works very well.
  • If you can put together an APU system to run Lakka and get playing most everything up to the PS2 era.

 

Hearthstone simulator

  • Just dangle that needle right in front of pedro’s face
  • Just the base game is implemented but they are working on the expansions
  • It’s built in Python2.
  • I was hoping I could at least use the GUI to see the simulations happening, but I’m not smart enough to figure it out.
  • I built it all and it does something by the way it pegs one of my CPU threads at 100%, but I don’t know what’s going on.

 

Hipster Terminal Phase

  • More late night deployment funtimes
  • I’m all for having more CLI games that aren’t D**m, The Roguelike and hangman.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: XenoRaptor
Devel: Peter Cleary
Engine: Unity
Price: £6.99 / $9.99 / $10.99

Wazzat: Take control of a cyberdragon and annihilate swarms of rocket propelled chainsaws either online or via LAN in this high speed, high skill 8 player co-op twinstick shooter.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys via Curator Connect



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Runs at 100+ @ 2160p.
  • And crashes a bunch, did I mention the crashing?
  • No, not the fun kind, nay.
  • The hello desktop kind.
  • This happened once in the first zone but Mars is a smorgasbord of spite crashes.

Fun?

  • First things first, sunlight is white, brad.
  • That said, we do like to take a look at smaller titles from time to time because you do find the occasional gem.
  • That is very much not the case with XenoRaptor.
  • While it is, in fact, a bullet-hell space shooter that’s all it is, and only just.
  • You’re greeted with a bog-standard menu followed by fk and or all in the way of instructions.
  • Spin, pew, dodge, fire the alt and collect some coolant.
  • For something that’s been in development since 2014 it doesn’t have much to show for it.
  • Multiplayer exists but as you might have already guessed, it’s vacant.
  • If you want some solid pew pew for the free give M.A.R.S. a Ridiculous Space Shooter a look and if you want something that mixes things up a bit checkout Waves 2: Notorious.
  • This, this is an Early Access game cosplaying as a finished product.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • The weird parallax scrolling gives me whiplash. Seems to be less of a problem at 1080P
  • Yeah, it’s pretty crashy too. I tried pedro’s advice of lowering the quality and it seemed to make it worse?
  • It’s weird too, cuz at first I was able to get past the first boss. And then it just started eating shit
  • It’s got a decent soundtrack though. I was getting into it

Fun?

  • Well, crashing or no, It’s a bullet hell schmup.
  • You got a railgun, you got a spray gun, and most of the time you’ll just be using that
  • Other than that, it’s pretty bog standard
  • The soundtrack is one redeeming quality though, It matches the gameplay pretty well
  • So yeah, I think it’d be a mediocre schmup if it wasn’t a crashy mess. And it is a crashy mess

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • I had several crashes.
  • After the ship explodes it looks like it triggers a countdown and the game crashes shortly after that.
  • That or the Mars level is what’s causing the crashing.
  • Either way, I can’t seem to keep it going past 15 minutes at a time.
  • I’m not the only one, there’s a massive thread on the Steam forums of people complaining about the crashes.
  • Apparently reducing the graphical quality helps.

Fun?

  • This is the hardest bit, for me.
  • Yes, the game is fun!
  • It is an absolute blast and you feel like a badass as you’re exploding everything around you.
  • Then it crashes.
  • Crashing is never good.
  • Even if the game was terrible, which this one isn’t, it would still be just compounding technical issues on top.
  • But this game could be awesome, if it didn’t crash so much!
  • I might come back to it at some point to see if this is fixed, but right now I can’t recommend it.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Rockets

Rockets Pt Deux

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