LinuxGameCast Weekly 390: Laser Beavers

Proton 5.0 makes Denuvo encumbered games playable! GeForce NOW snubs Linux users, GODOT receives an Epic grant, and playing Vulkan games using pure Wayland. Then Dark Hope faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special thanks to:
Frosty Claw (new exec prod)

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Timestamps:
05:36 Steam breaks player count record
08:01 Linux reaches 0.07%
10:06 300% jump in Steam reviews
11:36 Proton 5.0
15:26 Mango HUD
16:56 Devil May Cry 5 removes Denuvo
18:35 Knockout Daddy
20:55 Shameless self promotion
24:05 Nvidia 440.59 drivers
26:35 GeFore NOW snubs linux
29:50 System 76 Threadrippers
34:45 DXVK 1.5.4
36:10 WINE Wayland
39:25 GODOT Epic grant
42:25 Yuzu Vulkan render
44:55 Chewman
46:45 Eggs for Lutris
49:05 CHAIRQASITION: Dark Hope
59:25 Hate Mail

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steam is ded

I like how none of the other third party stores are saying much about numbers after this came out.
18.8 million ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
The previous record was 18.5 million.
But there’s about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago).
Looks like steam’s investments in china are literally paying dividends
Chinese seems to be the most popular language now

We are the 0.07%

Bet you’re sorry about killing Rocket Cars now, eh!?
Steam peaked at 18.8 million people concurrently in January.
That means 170K of those people were on Linux, if we were to apply the same logic someone once applied against me on Reddit.
The 1060’s losing some ground on linux. The RX580 and 5700XT are gaining some traction

300% jump in reviews

We’ve noticed you have played the game.
Would you like to review it?
HOW ABOUT NOW!??
That’s like saying “Like & Subscribe” on YouTube.
A lot of people are genuinely just doing their thing and don’t even remember that’s an option.
So reminding them makes it so they may actually do it.
Or look for a way to quit annoying them.

Proton 5

Basically all the goodies from WINE 5 with the Proton treatment.
D9VK is now on by default
The change in how binaries are compiled means Denuvo will be a bit more likely to work
- Like the Goddamn Batman!
- Goram batman!
- Nuke Esync and futex.
- Don’t crouch because CRASH!
- The grapple is disabled when the game thinks that it is pirated.
- Presumably this still needs more work.
That was a pretty quick Turnover from the GE version last week
I wonder if they’re just straight up pulling from his repo?
Proton will also start reporting itself as windows 10
They call out the Wine multimonitor support as a point of focus for upcoming improvements. I’m interested to see what valve comes up with

MangoHud

Didn’t get any love on the Debian system.
It claims to be missing vulkan validation layers here in Neon 18.04 land.
I can’t install those, apparently.
I need to wait for the 20.04 update.
Build script works OOTB on fedora. Fetches missing dependencies and everything
https://imgur.com/A3kqgtQ.png

Steam: Game Updates

Devil May Tamper

Not that I ran into any issues, but if you did.
Just in time for Proton5 with it’s handy dandy denuvo handling

Steam: New Games

Knock knock

I remember being an edgy teen.
Thankfully there was no way to mass market my artistic creations.
Lazer beaver is a little OP.
Getting some serious early 2000s newgrounds flashbacks
1.99 gets you the pay 2 win pack, which gives you extra lives, more health and a fancy fuckin’ sombrero

News:

Nvidia 440.59

Displayport audio.
Added a default filename when saving the Display Configuration file in nvidia-settings if an existing configuration file is not detected.
- That only took… how many decades?
They rolled in the PRIME Sync and DXVK fix from the vulkan drivers too
Apparently there is an X crash that can happen when defining more than one screen per GPU

GeForce WHEN?

Advantage: Stadia.
Damn shame, really.
GeForce Now by all accounts is the superior service.
I tried it back in the day when it was free for SHIELD owners, no not that SHIELD!
It wasn’t great either.
Maybe it has gotten better…
Considering that most of the guts of a given browser is shared amongs it’s various binaries for different OSes, I’m hazarding a guess that it has to do with the DRM scheme with their plugin?
Remember that Nvidia doesn’t love or hate linux. They just see it as a market to sell shit to. Most of that market is enterprise, not linux gamers

Threadbooper 64

My 64-core (realistic) workstation came out to a measly $7,894.
32-GB of RAM and a 2070.
It would not allow me to add a 2060 Super as a second GPU, only a 2080 Super or Ti.
Yall need to fix that.
If I’m building an editing box for Davinci Resolve I want a low end /power card dedicated to driving the display and a big-brains chungus for rendering.
- ^ That’s literally a checkbox configuration in Resolve.

DXVK 1.5.4

Throw a cloud at your Witcher.
Fixed another regression that affects multiple D3D9 games.
Aw Shit, Demon Stone is playable? That was actually a fun little brawler. I gotta try and dig out my old copy

Wine-wayland

Currently limited to AMD GPUs on AAAAAAARCH!!1!
When you need to play DX9/DX11 and Vulkan games using pure wayland and Wine/DXVK.
The only downside is having to use Wayland.
No controller support
No GDI apps support
Launchers are not working
No OpenGL support
No custom cursors
Hey, it’s a start and with some luck Wayland will actually do something this decade.
I brought this up a while ago. Especially for a lot of old unity ghetto games, Wine is gonna be the only way to play these reasonably on wayland
Glad someone is putting in the legwork

Epic GODOT

Good on them.
$250’,000 less from the excwoosive fund.
Epic is playing eleventy D chess and only doing this to undermine Unity.
Well, according to the internet.
There’s that saying “A high tide raises all ships”
Like Venn said, the theory seems to be to give a lot more competition to unity
It could also be to accelerate development of highly wanted features so developers can start churning out games that Epic can then make exclusive
Plans within plans young Atreides. Y’all should still sub to their pateron

YUZU LLAP

Didn’t sort the BayO compatibility.
Would be great to play Breath of the Wild on the Linuxes
Always cool to see emulators break down the issues they run into when trying to implement these changes
Apparently Nvidia does freaky shit in hardware for openGL, a lot of games take advantage of it and when you try to rebuild that behaviour in vulkan, you’re gonna have some problems

Chew Man

Vulkan man
Requires CPPFS which doesn’t seem to be provided by fedora and doesn’t want to build on my box

It’s Lupis

It’s a handy dandy guide on getting started on our favourite baguette and blunt fueled gaming platform; Lutris!
It shows off the GOG integration too.
- Oh what a lovely shade of purple those folks waiting for a linux Galaxy client have turned

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Dark Hope
Devel: Broken Bunny Studios, Inc.
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79

Wazzat: Dark Hope is a puzzle adventure game set in a steampunk world where electricity started and ended its existence with the light bulb. Towering clockwork puzzles and archaic symbols cover the halls. Strange rifts of light span the hallways.

Mandatory Disclosure: Thanks to the dev for sending us keys over Curator Connect

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Do you like fullscreen?
Do you like stuttering frames?
Do you like oily smears disguised as motion blur?
Son, do I have the game for you.

Fun?

I ran around the mostly empty rooms trying to figure out what to do.
Read some things, turned a few knobs, and visited the portal room.
Unless the lighting was broken everything was well lit so you can herk and jerk you way to various items and attempt to interact with them.
I say attempt since all you have is a dot and it’s RNG if something does a thing half of the time.
Then you get bored after thirty minutes of wandering around reading things.
I’ve played tech demos with more depth than this.
Yet I’m unable to call Dark Hope a tech demo, since that would be an insult to tech demos.
Stock assets, horrid performance, empty rooms all devoid of a reason to explore the environment.
Good times were not had by all.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

It does launch and wasding does about what you expect it to
Interacting with the world is a little imprecise. Sometimes your white dot reticle lights up when you can e or click on something, sometimes it don’t
Lots of stock assets abound
Steam overlay was reporting a solid 60, but frame timing was off sometimes. Motion blur was a bit hit or miss cuz text on the wall blurs a little too long

Fun?

I’ll give the game the fact that the janitor in the personnel file is named “Yan Itor”
The rest of it is kinda eh?
There’s some ooky spoopy atmosphere going on with the sounds of water pipes and gears in the background
Gotta wander around, figure out where you can’t go and find a litany of post it notes and memos that will eventually reveal what you need to do
But the janky interaction system makes doing what you’ve found out what you need to do kinda difficult. And that’s bad
It takes a kind of Myst approach, which I can respect, but I never really liked myst

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

It launches just fine
It looks a bit Unity-y
You know what I mean, there’s that look that games have when they’re made from store bought assets.
The sounds are odd, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they were going for.
No complaints in the sound department.
Controls are WASD/arrows and you don’t really have a way to change it.
The performance is weird. On high at 1440p, I’m getting anywhere between 45-60 FerPS
On medium it shoots all the way up to 115.

Fun?

For the first 30 minutes, I was running around not really knowing what the hell was going on.
There’s a lot of reading you need to do.
I do like puzzle games, but I prefer those that make the puzzles so that you don’t really need to read anything.
That goes for most videogames for me.
The less text you have on screen the more likely I am to enjoy your game.
And there’s a lot of text on screen in Dark Hope.
But what really killed it for me it’s the “inertia” when you start moving or when you interact with something.
It takes almost half a second for stuff to happen after you’ve hit a key.
It feels like it’s broken.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:

Hate Mail:

Dongers