LinuxGameCast Weekly 396: Thirsty Anime Vampires

Steam cracks 20 million concurrent users! Nvidia adds multi-vendor ray tracing, MangoHud gets support for OpenGL, and GOG has a bunch of free Linux games that will help you pass time at home.

Special tanks to:
Christian (latest patreon)
LinuxGnuru (hot stick-chan)

Listen:

Download:

Subscribe Spotify | Pandora | TuneIn | RSS | More

Timestamps:
07:11 20 million concurrent Steam users.
08:58 Steam client beta
10:39 Steam interactive recommender
13:19 Proton 5.0-5
15:09 Proton 5.4-GE-1
19:24 Steam game festival
20:34 Steam now shows refunds
23:14 Early Access last updated
26:04 Top Steam releases of Feb
27:56 Neverwinter EE Patch
30:26 POCKET Cars
32:58 Shameless self promotion
38:45 Nvidia universal ray-tracing
42:09 AMD hiring lead kernel developer
45:49 DXVK 1.6
47:41 vkBasalt 0.3.1
49:01 MangoHud 0.3.0
52:13 Free GOG games
54:12 CHAIRQASITION: Bloody Rally Show
01:05:06 Hate Mail

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

20 million

See? COVID-19 is great for businesses. What are you talking about?
As it turns out, if people stay home, they play more video games
Don’t play games on the work lappy.

Vulkan updates

New runtime, as well!
I wonder what actually did get updated in the runtime

Interactive recommendations

Oh, look it’s my wishlist!
Kudos for basically nailing it but on the other hand, are you just looking at my wishlist and peppering in the occasional MMO/Online game with EAC?
I know I probably would like those games already, I just want to be able to play them!
It does a good enough job but it’s not showing me anything I’m unaware of.

Proton 5.0-5

“Add support for new Vulkan extensions used by some recent titles.”
- Doom Eternal is already improving Proton.
Didn’t scoop up the latest Dix vix. Probably will get updated next week

Proton-5.4-GE-1

Not safe for work launcher patch added.
- Oh, good!
- Thankfully the dev made the patches he made to WINE publically available
- Damn, I was actually hoping for tiddies, not cars

Indie game fest

Play for free until 14 Dec, or not, well, some of them.
Tactical Galactical sounds like an abandoned beastie boys track
Otherwise, it;s a bunch demos that you likely would have otherwise got from the developer’s crowdfunding effort
Speaking of, when the hell is that System Shock Remake supposed to come out. It’s been like three years
Also, did we travel back in time?

Refund reviews

1700 hrs: not fun, don’t play.
Name and shame!
It works on both the developers and players.
Players get called out for leaving BS reviews and developers get a public and constant reminder of just how many of their purchases were refunded.
This is a pretty good move on steam’s part. Gives a bit more credence to the user review system when you know more about the users behaviour.
In some cases at least. There are a bunch of scenarios where you can buy a steam game and not get a refund

Yeah, that

It’s a valid point.
I’m sure valve has some sort of automated solution in the works to help weed out unmaintained early access games from the search
- Whether or not they release it would be another matter
Part of me says just check the damn news feed on the page.
However, having a “last updated” somewhere on every game page would not be a bad thing.
Can we have that for all games, not just Early Access ones?

Top of Feb

Hey, murderbots made it on the list.
Good on them.
Death and Taxes, Stone Shard, Skul and Scourgebringer (that’s a lot of Ses) all have native linux versions too, so give them a look if they seems like your cup of tea

Steam: Game Updates

Never Patch

This is the roll up of the dev patches we mentioned last week.
It came out just in time for the new DLC/premium mod announcement.
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1247750/Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition_Dark_Dreams_of_Furiae/
  - 3 Levels is a pretty shallow DLC
  - It is supposed to intersect with the latest published tabletop campaign, which is a little interesting if like me you’ve read or played the adventure and you like picking out easter eggs
Or that is probably, exactly why.

Steam: New Games

Pocket Linux

I hope this apes Re-Volt as much as it looks like it does!
So not quite rocket league gets a linux version. I’m sure a lot of RL’s competition is itching to fill the void left in linux land
It looks like a bit of fun.

News:

Nvidia Vulkan Rays

Can I Q2 at 60 yet?
- You can for the low low price of $800
Standards based ray tracing is a good thing. It’s not gonna keep nvidia from doing their shady proprietary extension stuff, but at least it’ll help level the playing field

AMD Hiring

A person, one, singular.
You know AMD split their GPU stack, right? #CDNA.
This will be for compute, not RDNA.

DXVK Version 1.6

Wait, aren’t the black square artifacts what cause the zombies to appear in dead space?
You can now use Wine’s Dx10 effects framework in conjuction with the DX10 support already in place now, which should help some games work
I’ve played a lot of Dragon’s Dogma and didn’t notice any Fullscreen issues…

vkBasalt 0.3.1

You can toggle post processing with the home key. Hopefully you don’t use it for anything
There are some issues with amdvlk-pro, but you really shouldn’t be gaming on those drivers. Those are for actual work
Still no joy for 18.04.
They do make it a point out of not mentioning Ubuntu or build instructions for it at all.

MangoHud Version 0.3.0

Craps out with a Meson error when compiling.
./mangohud-setup.sh install
mangohud MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full %command%
It works.
Oh, OpenGL 32bit support as well! Nice!
It can also do adaptive sync over GL. Very nice!!

GOG Stay at home

Couple of free Linux titles in the mix.
94 games on GOG, huh.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Bloody Rally Show
Devel: Kodo Linija
Engine: Unity

Price: £16 / $20 / $23

Wazzat: Bloody Rally Show is dystopian roguelite combat racing game with infinite variety of race tracks, campaigns, missions, leaderboards, daily challenges, track editor, car editor, car tuning, customization, car battles, and multiple game modes, including one where you are a pedestrian.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launched OOTB.
Holds 60 @ 2160p until the 3’rd set of races then things get chuggy on occasion.
Works with Xclone, and PS4.
It made noise but I noped the headset after a few minutes.

Fun?

I don’t know what I expected from top-down combat racing.
Is it racing, or a drifting contest?
Not that it really matters with the camera zooming in, out, near, far.
Yes I know you have a few crude settings in the options menu but that’s something that should be accessible ingame.
And just for fun your minimap is, get this, partial.
An hour in and I’m not 100% about how exactly I get weapons.
I did figure out killing gets extra nitro.
The tracks are randomly generated and if we’re being honest, it shows.
Blazinginly mild variations of the same circuit.
But I did find some small amount of entertainment sliding around the tracks but not $20 worth.
And that’s a good thing since in the latest update the developer said the price will soon be reduced and he will not be working on it full time.
I guess he’s right, I don’t get the depth and breadth of the game.
Also WTF is up with meme kitty popping up telling me about the tutorial 16 races in?
It does have a story of sorts but it’s a wee on the edgelord side of things for my taste.
You have a 2D top-down combat racer, or at least the framework of one.
If you are going to keep hammering on it, focus on that.
Make some real tracks that people can learn and make strategies around.
People who like racing games loathe procedurally generated tracks.
Get this online.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB and holds 60 with the 580
The comic style for the interstitials is okay, but I think they probably could have used a little more polish
Aeroela controlla worked out of the box too. But those controls man

Fun?

Oh man, this driving feels awful, especially with that default camera whipping around like it’s Willow Smith
Changing it to floating helps a little
Still, you end up whipping around and drifting a bunch. And then the game starts giving you bonus goals like assassinating people. Or snowmen. With your drifting
I can see how this could be the skeleton of a fun death race-esque game, but I’m not a fan of everything being so slidey
Also, whar online multiplayer? There’s a leaderboard so you can compete with your friend’s high score, but I at least figure you could squeeze out some fun by smashing into your friends.
- Or smashing your friends into bystanders

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

That last patch made the game freeze at times mid race.
Other than that, the performance is adequate
It worked out of the box with the DualShock 4
And it lets you rebind everything.

Fun?

Admittedly for a bit there, I did have some fun
The driving feels fine, it’s easy enough to get in the zone and drift your way around the track
Until they start introducing the weird mutators, like flat tires, or controls being reversed.
I hated that race where left and right were reversed.
But I suppose there’s only so much you can do to keep the game varied.
Unfortunately, for me personally, that little shit sprinkle ruined the fucking cake.
And if you add the random freezing in the middle of a race, a solid maybe is the best I can do.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:

Hate Mail:

OMGOG