Linux Game Cast Weekly 427: Co-Canes

Frictional releases a buggy Rebirth, GONNER2 gets a day-1 Linux release, DOTA fights toxicity with Overwatch, daily amdgpu firmware updates for Ubuntu, and work begins on Open Suspect. Then Dungeons of Clay faces, the ChairQAsition. All this, plus your hate mail.

Special thanks to:
Lordmokka (new patreon)


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:49 Steam beta client update
09:19 Fixing DOTA with Overwatch
14:39 VR Bioshock
17:19 Amnesia: The Buggy Descent
21:44 GONNER2
23:44 Medulla
25:49 Mesmer
27:54 9 Monkeys of Shaolin
30:44 Jackbox Party Pack 7
32:29 Tsuro
34:54 Shilling & shameless self promotion
42:24 Nvidia 5.9 kernel drivers
44:39 Daily AMD GPU firmware
50:24 Video game source project
52:54 X11 GODOT report
55:34 Devolver shacks up with Croteam
57:19 Machines: Wired for War source released
01:01:24 Microsoft accoutns for Java Minecraft
01:03:04 OpenSuspect development
01:05:04 Review: Dungeons of Clay
01:15:13 Hate Mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Proton fixaroo

  • Fixes for remote play as well.
  • They also have some fixes pushed for wayland. BTW, proton on wayland isn’t complete dogshite
  • Proton on Wayland might be the only way to play native X11 games on NVidia cards if Wayland is ever considered good enough for distros to not ship X anymore.


Toxic Dota

  • How long have we been reading stuff about DOTA 2 toxicity?
  • So, who’s sued/threatened to sue VALVe this time?
  • Migrating some of the moderation tools from CSGO to Dota is probably a good move long run
  • This is primarily to combat smurfing it seems
  • Between this and chat filtering, they might actually be able to attract some new players

Steam: Game Updates

VR Bioshock

  • Using some stock Alyx assets.
  • Lots of custom work and it does a good job looking like Rapture.
  • you think donation is possible? here it is paypal
  • ^ Exactly!

Steam: New Games

Amnesia: The Buggy Descent

  • A nice technical shiteshow right out of the gate.
  • Not something I would expect from Frictional.
  • On AMD cards, people have figured out you can set the MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE envvar to 4.2 to work around the problem
  • No such envvar for the NVidia side.
  • Proton button works.
  • I hope this was the result of someone only having an r600 GPU to test and not being aware of the issue, and not from it not having been tested at all.


GONNER2

  • I liked the first one because strange.
  • Linux support on day one is always nice


Medulla

  • Keeping blasphemous company in the realm of trippy aesthetics
  • Not hipster-pixel though!
  • The children’s book illustration aesthetic is on point
  • ….And then it tuns into a terry gilliam cartoon. Excellent.


Mesmer

  • What if I’d like to see societal collapse rather than redemption?
  • Proton only demo cuz raisins


9 Monkeys of Shaolin

  • It’s a bit slow paced for an action title.
  • Fighting is clunky.
  • It’s Streets of Shaolin!
  • Also got that proton only demo


Jackbox Party Pack 7

  • Couple of new games mixed with reshases of older one.
  • Still living that 720p windowed lyfe.
  • Talking points was fun, still gotta give the other two new ones a go


Board James

  • Released during the steam tabletop festival
  • I’ve played the cardboard version and it’s pretty fun. Short game
  • They sent us some curator keys

News:

5.nein

  • Blackmagic told me 5.7 is best kernel and to STFU.
  • This is in the CUDA forums, so may just impact cuda functionality? They’ll probably stop you in the installer tho.
  • From what MrAlert and other people were reporting, it’s the unified virtual memory module which doesn’t load in 5.9.
  • So yeah, it mostly impacts CUDA.


Feeling brave?

  • Looking for a little daily RNG on your graphics stack?
  • As someone who recently got that card, maybe ubuntu just sucks at curating firmware versions?
  • Still, if this is a problem and you feel like russian roulette is your only option, go for it
  • Offering up-to-date drivers and firmware isn’t exactly Ubuntu’s selling point here.
  • But if you do find a firmware that works, you can just disable the PPA without purging it to keep the up-to-date firmware.

Game source

  • The moral of the story is that you never know until you ask
  • Apparently a lot of devs are cool with giving people access to their 30 year old code, the issue is just getting the IP holders on board
  • We’ve been saying from genesis that this sort of thing is necessary and I’m glad a group of folks have decided to pick up that torch.
  • A lot of artifacts of early film and television are just gone due to lack of foresight, hopefully this will help avoid that in the gaming space
  • I’d like this to pick up momentum!
  • I want AAA publishers to release the sauce of some old games.

X11 GODOT report

  • This got me thinking, any game developers out there would like to create a desktop environment in Godot?
  • It might not be the most efficient in the way of resource usage, but I’d like to see what people could come up with by using an OS with a game engine based GUI.

Devolver

  • How does this affect the Sam 4 release?
  • Devolver has always been hands-off so this is a good thing right until it’s not.
  • Devolver has also published a shite ton of croteam stuff, so it seems like a natural move
  • I’m just happy it wasn’t EA or Actiblizzion


Wired For War


Javacraft

  • We’ve reached the extend phase.
  • Has MS said when they plan on killing the Java version?
    • It’d be a ballsy move, to kill your most popular game.
  • I mean, I really don’t think it’s going to drop usage too much. Everyone’s got a spare hotmail/msn/outlook.com account from some point
  • It’s the slow digestion by microsoft


Kinda Sus

  • Amoongus is pretty popular these days and after the whole fall guys fiasco, linux users are hesitant to hop in bed with another multiplayer wine game
  • Enter opensus. Right now they have walking around a map working, but they’re looking for contributors
  • I hope this gets playable sooner rather than later so we can start using it in the aftershow
  • The original looks fun but yeah, not going to tango with online.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Dungeons of Clay
Devel: ShotX Studio
Engine: Game Maker Studio
Price: £7.19 / $9.99 / $11.49

Wazzat: Explore the ever-changing dungeons in the surreal world made of clay. Unlock the hidden secrets, overcome the dangers, defeat dreadful creatures and reap the treasures to acquire almighty power.

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



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Good luck using a controller.
  • Even if it kinda works you are stuck with whatever spray-and-pray it puts out.
  • Yes, options to rebind exist, they don’t work.
  • Does not remember windowed mode when set.
  • Fullscreen time all the time, babby.
  • And it does the round-robin windowresize in real time.
  • Outside if that the performance is fine.

Fun?

  • What can I say about Dungeons of Clay?
  • For starters it’s about as random as my opinions of roguelikes and procedurally generated levels.
  • Not, fkn, very.
  • Yea, I feel like I played the same map several times with a few enemy variations later on.
  • Couple of different guns and the occasional wheel of booga booga.
  • Playing with the keyboard / gerbil was a glorious pain in the arse and yeah, up to jump?
  • What kind of hipster BS is that?
  • Gamewise there is not much to it, jump around, kill some baddies, repeat.
  • By the look of things a full run takes about an hour.
  • What’s up with some things just passing the hell through you?
  • Eh, spooky sax guy was alright, I guess.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launches. Runs well on AMD and nvidia
  • Doesn’t respect your fullscreen preferences, but it does remember your control remaps
  • No controller support is a bit of a shame. Having to platform with WASD is always awkward. Also, making up jump is a little weird. Never played a mario game, eh?
  • Visually everything is pretty clear. Not much in the way of character blindness
  • Soundtrack is just kinda there

Fun?

  • Maybe this would be a better experience with a controller. We’ll never know
  • The random levels, arent’ really that random. Sure the exact positions of things are different, but the layout is more or less constant
  • So you run around and try to cheese dudes to death. Sometimes your finger guns jam
    • Which is actually a game mechanic, you can trade jam chance for reduced enemy health, etc
  • Once you’re done, spin the wheel of booga booga to see if you gotta fight more dudes. If you have keys, you can go to stores or heal
  • All in all, it’s a pretty basic roguelike. The shooting is just kinda meh, and Pedro is 100% right about lack of feedback when you get hit. I’ve died a few times not realizing what happened
  • There are a lot of other roguelikes that do this sort of thing, but better

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launched out of the box
  • Had to go into the options to make sure that what you see on screen was intentional and not a failing GPU.
  • Character design reminds me a lot of Danger Gazers
  • Pew pews from your hand guns sound amazing and the slight screenshake when you shoot is very well done.
  • There’s little to no feedback when you get hit, though.
  • Sure, your character goes semi transparent but that’s hard to see when you have those filters going.
  • I do like the background music, especially in the respawn room.
  • Didn’t bother with the controller since I’d probably need to set Steam Input to emulate the mouse and keyboard.

Fun?

  • After bringing the post fx option down to off, I was actually able to reach the first boss.
  • I do like the music, though.
  • The levels are short enough that the tracks don’t really loop more than twice that I noticed.
  • And the emphasized beat in the music helps get a bit of a rhythm going.
  • But great as the music is, I still didn’t find much enjoyment out of Dungeons of Clay.
  • I did like Danger Gazers but with this one I feel rather meh about the whole thing.
  • I also didn’t like that one of the options in the end of the level wheel will straight up kill you and then you have to start over.
  • That feels like a dick move
  • And if I’m praising the background music in spite of everything else, it’s probably not a good sign.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Game breakers

  • Multiplayer straight-up doesn’t work.
  • Graphical glitches.
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