LinuxGameCast Weekly 419: Mr. Science Shorts

Steam ♥♥♥♥♥♥ their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! The Last Stand is headed to Left 4 Dead 2, SupertuxKart 1.2 enables SDL2 goodness, and GLX for Xwayland with the NVIDIA driver. Then Children of Morta faces, the ChairQAsition. 


Listen:


Download:


Timestamps:
04:49 Steam filters chat
07:39 AMD Vulkan shader update
09:09 Top releases of July
11:28 Wallet codes
14:48 Proton power
22:18 Left 4 Dead 2 new campaign
24:37 Children of Morta
27:07 Art of Rally
28:54 Glitch’s Trip
30:24 Can’t drive this
32:41 Microsoft defends Epic
38:47 Shameless self promotion
43:02 GLX for Xwayland with Nvidia
46:40 RPCS3 speed hacks
50:00 Unity going public?
54:04 Lab Zero disbands
56:44 Debian gaming setup
01:00:00 SupertuxKart 1.2
01:02:42 OBS virtual background
01:05:00 ChairQAsition: Children of Morta
01:20:16 Hate Mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Well ♥♥♥♥

  • But then I won’t be able to enjoy having screechy 12 year olds leveraging racial epithets at me or making assumptions as to my sexual orientation.
  • At least they provide the option to disable it.
  • Given how steam can and has been used for targeted harassment, this is ultimately a good thing.
  • Probably also makes things easier from a legal standpoint too

 

Team red Vulkans

  • The EA play stuff is live now. We’ll see what that actually means in a few weeks
  • Reduced memory usage for vulkan shader processing is nice for people with Radeon laptops or lower end cards

 

Top of July

  • Carrion and Heckpoint made the list.
  • You know, that Sword Art Online game I streamed is still the best in the series because they let you play your own character.
  • You don’t have to play harem master extraordinaire Kirito.
  • The new superhot is on the list
  • Pretty sure the new F1 is also gonna get the Feral special. Unless that contract is up
  • 5D Chess with Multiverse time travel just got linux support, but not in July

 

Steamy scams

  • Steam will no longer allow activating Steam Wallet codes issued in a different currency than the one of your Steam User Account.
  • What exactly is a wallet code?
    • Gift cards you can get at gas stations and grocery stores
  • Like the FTC article says, gift cards are a popular vector for fraud and money laundering, so it behooves Valve to not let people use their platform for that

 

That Proton magic

  • It basically doubled the amount of playable games on Linux in less than a month, and that number keeps growing.
  • I still stand by what I said, it’s not ideal but it’s the best we have and it’s doing a pretty good job of it.
  • The big problem with Proton is how people go around marketing it.
  • The “hey, come game on Linux now because everything works” approach is rather harmful.
  • Yes, for most of our crowd playing games on Linux with Proton is super simple, hell, downright easy.
  • That’s because we already knows how to Linux.
  • A Windows user will be at a severe disadvantage when they Linux and setting up a gaming environment only complicates the matter.
  • Resulting in an overall negative experience.
  • I mean, proton’s great and all, but that’s the big disadvantage to it being the way to play games. It’s always going to be on the back foot.
  • As linux gamers, we’re already kind of used to this being the way of the world, but like venn is saying, it’s not the special sauce that is going to make people switch over

Steam: Game Updates

Left 4 Brad update

  • Boys, we are heading to the lighthouse.
  • It looks like Valve is letting the community do most of the lifting on this one.
  • Who else was watching that teaser going “That’s a fuckbox, that’s a fuckbox. Ooh boy, that’s a fuckbox!”

 

Children of Morta

  • Big kudos to the devs for sending us keys.
  • At first they only sent one because they thought we were just a Steam curator.
  • They just released a free update pack too, so we get all the fun toys when throwing chairs at it

Steam: New Games

art of rally

  • I played the Demo, wow that’s hard!
  • I wish it wasn’t a top down helicopter view, though.

 

Glitch’s Trip

  • Super Vaporwave boy?
  • Apparently it’s about fighting your way through moons. I hope there are mooninites

 

Can’t Drive This (demo)

  • It’s been out for some time but a demo popped up.
  • I like this trend of offering a demo for Early Access games.
  • They promise stable online multiplayer for the final release

Epic watch is not over

MS defends Epic

  • Wonder if this has anything to do with Xcloud being disallowed on the iStore, hmm.
  • Still getting the 30% on Xbox onebox S one, Microsoft?
  • Judge ruled in favor of Epic to stop Apple from nuking UE4 but allowed the latter to continue blocking Fortnite specifically.
  • And with a new Forza on the horizon, I can see why Microsoft would jump in to side with Epic.
  • Apple nuked the ForkKnight.
  • Go sort ebay for SOLD iPhone 10’s.
  • Epic decided to push 3 updates for Fortnite to the Apple store regardless of the block status and Apple has now blocked the Epic iOS store account.
  • It’s a weird situation. The contracts say one thing, but then because of the scope of what’s involved, removing their developer access has such a wide reaching effect
  • Epic is 100% trying to break the rules and get away with it, and they’re essentially trying to ply pressure with their weight. Kind of like what microsoft did.

News:

GLX for Xwayland with Nvidia

  • It’s a bit hacky but if it works.
  • I’m not going to say it’s not stupid because the need for this is rather stupid.
  • Thanks Nvidia.
  • That sounds unpleasant.
    • Guy knows what’s up
  • It’s being implemented through mesa cuz the dev was basically already copying code from mesa anyways
  • RIP accumulation buffers and stereoscopic rendering with this solution
  • Eventually though this should be as performant as bare metal, so I’m thinking this is being positioned as “a solution” rather than “the solution”.
    • Which usually means it will become “the solution”. See Proton

 

RPCS3 zoom zooms

  • That higher clock speed in Intel CPUs is still the way to go for emulation it seems.
  • Yes, Ryzen 3000 does have better IPC but Intel CPUs still hit higher clock speeds so the performance will still scale better in heavy single thread loads, like emulation and gaming in general.
  • Ensuring you’re using x16 and the latest PCI-E revision can also improve performance
  • What I found interesting is that you don’t really get much of a performance boost above 8c-16T. Still getting that 3900x tho
  • Spectre/meltdown mitigations do cause a minor performance hit, but it’s more of a worst case scenario hit.


Unity going public?

  • I guess that would affect games with adds?
    • Adds and whatever other telemetry it collects.
  • I get the whole “you need to explain how you can make people money” thing when going public, but yeah, I gotta agree with some of the comments that it is concerning that unity is willing to use this to profit off their users
  • Use open sauce tools folks!

 

RIP Lab Zero

  • I should say RIP Linux support.
  • Their Linux support staff has left as well.
  • Can’t says I blame ‘ em.
  • That’s not a good working environment and if he’s gotten himself to the top, I say it’s a good time to leave.
  • If it is as systemic as the people leaving claim, and I don’t have a reason to doubt them, that behavior will not change. It’s just gonna get worse.
  • It’s a shame, since both Skullgirls and Indivisible are very good games.
  • But I’d rather lose those than enable that kind of environment.
  • I guess that’s that. You’re going to be an abusive dickhead, don’t expect your employees to stick around
  • I wish all the ex LZ guys the best. Hopefully they’ll find a place that will treat them right

 

Debian gaming setup

  • Someone needs to fork that and make it distro agnostic.
  • It has a little guided setup to install the NVidia drivers or update Mesa and installs the 32bit libs for those.
  • It also offers to install Steam, Lutris (with the appropriate repo), and WINE.

 

SupertuxKart 1.2

  • SDL2 hotness!
  • Gamepad hawtplugging!
  • If you’re running an IPV6 lan, you too can kart. Really going all in with that network support
  • There’s also a persistent online leaderboard
  • Vulkan support is also on the roadmap now, as is a 2.0
  • We found one bug.
  • You are unable to connect to servers if your name is Scott.

 

OBS Virt background

  • I know someone is going to want to play with it.
  • Needs the CUDA sauce so keep that in mind.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Children of Morta
Devel: Dead Mage
Engine: Unity
Price: £18.49 / $21.99 / $28.99

Wazzat: Children of Morta is a story-driven action RPG game about an extraordinary family of heroes. Lead the Bergsons, with all their flaws and virtues, against the forthcoming Corruption.

Mandatory Disclosure: 11bit Studios (Publisher) sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB.
  • Xclone & PS4 show correct prompts.
  • Holds 60 @ 2160p.

Fun?

  • Welcome to the wacky adventure of Mr. Pixel pants and the vampire stone.
  • At least that’s what I took out of the beginning of the game.
  • BTW, play that all the way through because all those things that light up and look like the save game icon, aren’t.
  • Well kids, we have another hipster-pixel dungeon crawler with, you guessed it, procedurally generated levels \:D/
  • Did I mention it’s an action roguelike?
  • *nonplused noises*
  • Like all games of this ilk it’s live die repeat but you have a moon crystal so instead of dying you are teleported back to the hub.
  • From there, you guessed it, upgrade your implements of stab and back at it.
  • But I left out an important step.
  • Everytime you return to the hub another crumb of story unfolds and ya know what, it’s at least not boring.
  • While adventuring you can do tank or ranged.
  • I found ranged more to my liking but overall boring.
  • Tank just got me killed to death alot.
  • I don’t know exactly where I land on this one.
  • Good art, plenty of replayability, and an actual overarching story.
  • And it’s only $20?
  • Hell, I could probably have an alright time doing some runs with me mates every now and then.
  • Well, as long as they have Steam, and one of us has a PC with the grunt and the bandwidth needed for remote play.
  • Yeah, Dead Mage only put local co-op in it.
  • Guess I’ll invite a group of friends over for a party and we’ll oh… wait.
  • Listen, I don’t hate it and it’s obviously well done and it’s priced wicked good for the level of work that went into it.
  • 2.
  • Tack some online multi onto them pixels.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB
  • Doesn’t play nice with steam input on the DS4, but disabling it gives us our nice DS4 prompts
  • I actually kinda prefer it with keyboard and mouse. The twin stick controls seem a bit off
  • No character blindness, everything is clear and distinct
  • Very very good pixel art, juxtaposed by matte paintings. Because sure
  • Generic fantasy sounds, don’t have any problem with it

Fun?

  • I have a soft spot for dynastic storytelling
  • It makes things interesting when you can cover the events that occur to a group of people over time, instead of from just an individual perspective. Events can seem larger
  • The narrator just kinda needs to shut up though
  • The gameplay itself is okay. It’s a pretty standard twin stick shooter dungeon crawler
  • I was honestly expecting ranged folks to have the edge here, but the melee guy they give you at the beginning is pretty solid gameplay wise
  • I don’t grok the little kid rogue though. He better have some cool upgrades
  • Still, the fights do seem to devolve to find a choke point and click things to death, or failing that kite them into oblivion
  • Boss fights throw a wrench in that, but most of the time, that’s what you’re doing
  • Speaking of boss fights, you’re a bit at the whims of the RNG for those. I managed to kill the spider basically because I got the wombo combo of health regen, a decoy buff and a melee companion who chip damaged everything while I was cowering in a corner shooting arrows at spiders
  • Multiplayer is another thing. It really irks me when a game like this is couch only.
  • The game’s alright, it just doesn’t really tickle my pickle

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launched
  • It held 144 at 2560×1440
  • It tickled my ear holes with the raspy narrator tones.
  • The pixels were particularly pixely and Grandma has a permanent o-face
  • DualShock worked out of the box with proper prompts
  • You can also rebind everything, if you so choose.

Fun?

  • I had a sneaking suspicion I was going to like Children of Morta.
  • I do. Very much, in fact.
  • When you die you don’t lose any gold, which means it doesn’t force you to grind to get upgrades.
  • You get them far more organically as and when you do start to feel like you need them.
  • Leveling up one character also provides bonuses to the others so you don’t feel like you have to keep switching between them for them to stay relevant.
  • The character unlocks also seem to happen in a bit more of a structured way.
  • But what I really like, it’s that this is a Roguelike with a damn story!
  • And not a terrible one at that.
  • Sure, it still hits all the tropes of the cursed family setting, but it’s presented in a very good way.
  • The narrator is not as good as it was in Bastion, but he does a good job of it.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Flying machines

Eyes

0 Comments

Leave Your Reply