Linux Game Cast Weekly 428: Chunky A$$-Manual

The Steamy Halloween sale is live! Black Mesa Definitive Edition enters beta, Mario comes to Vim, and Linux gaming is about to get a whole lot better.

Special thanks to:
poopsock (new patreon)
Thanks to our EU Amazon shoppers.


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
07:29 Steam Winter sale
10:45 Top releases of 2020
13:40 Pressure vessel source release
16:10 Vangers Halloween update
18:45 Golf with Friends Deep update
20:45 Black Mesa definitive edition
23:35 Orion Trail
26:35 Star99
28:00 Savage Halloween
30:10 Arcante
33:15 Shilling and self promotion
38:20 Nvidia 3070 drivers
42:40 RX6000 paper launch
51:26 Intel adds support for ray-tracing
53:51 Linux gaming is getting better
59:41 Julius 1.5.0
01:00:46 Vim Mario
01:02:46 ChairQAsition: Scourge Bringer
01:17:11 Hate mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Sales

  • So we get the fall and winter sales in november and december, same as every year
  • There is a fighting game sale coming up if you wanna grab kinds of kung fu on the cheap
  • Of the games left in my wishlist, it looks like most don’t get sales of over 50%


Top Releases of September 2020

  • Unrailed and Medieval Incest Simulator 3 are your linux picks for september
  • The heathen in me wants Hades and Kingdoms of Amalur REEEEEEE.
  • SS4 made the list, still waiting.
  • Pedro wants to play waifu football.

Pressure Vessel

  • VALVe’s answer to the competing container standards? XKCD 927!
  • Interesting TIL, Valve’s gitlab is for public projects, github is for stuff they released
  • Following flatpak’s design structure is consistent with what they shared in that presentation from early this year
  • Based on their readme there’s still quite a bit of design work to do with handling known file location, pulseaudio paths and the like, but it does work with very simple games

Steam: Game Updates

Vangers

  • If we don’t count the Linux release as an update, it’s been over 20 years.
  • This is a community developed update.
  • It’s cool to see games like this being kept alive by their fans and supported by the devs


The Deep

  • 12-player action!
  • Have not been able to get online in the past few releases.
  • Now with 100% H2o.


Black MEsa 1.5

  • Now they are dicking around with the narrative.
  • Bold move.
  • On a Rail was bad and VALVe should be reminded of that!
  • I much preferred the Black Mesa take on it.
  • I’m not touching it until I finish my playthrough.
  • Lost too much progress during the beta days.

Steam: New Games

Orion Trail

  • Not from the makers of Organ trail
  • What if oregon trail but FTL
  • It could be fun. I always have to question when projects self describe as “hilarious”
  • The mixed reviews have me pondering my choices a bit longer


Star99

  • So it’s 1942 with 99 man PVP eh?
  • Certainly interesting, likely a massive fustercluck
  • But hey, online multiplayer is online multiplayer, and it’s cheap enough
  • I want a 99 person DOOM DM level.


Pump Kin

  • I’ve seen this game before on a youtube show about bargain basement psn games
  • For 5 bucks it looks alright. Santa has a minigun, so it’s quite festive
  • I remember talking about this one a few months back.
  • Still think they have the colours down.
  • That looks very Contra-y


Arcante

  • It’s not a week on Steam if you don’t see a game which looks like it’s made of assets cobbled together.
  • I like the artstyle they used for the cover/logo, but even that looks like a mish-mash of copy pasta.
  • It’s clearly a one man job, and likely the dude’s passion project about discovering how to not get killed in eye of the beholder or hillsfar
  • Damn son. We’re talking about 4:3 old school.
  • Dude is working on the combat system.
  • This should be pulled back into EA.

News:

3070 Drivers

  • For the seven of you who got one.
  • You have a neat ability on mobile to now use the intel IGPU as the display offload if you just want everything running on the dedicated one
  • You’d think at that point you’d just switch to the dedicated graphics altogether and be done with it.
  • I’m sure there’s a use case, but I don’t see it.
  • Tested, works.

R6K Launch

  • Those prices show a lot of confidence.
  • Welcome to 16GB land.
  • Well, if these numbers are to be believed, nvidia might get a run for their money.
  • Install time support for these cards on linux is probably gonna be somewhere closer to this time next year.
  • Maybe closer to august?
  • It’ll be interesting to see what these guys can do with the open sauce drivers
  • Welcome to the budget high end option being $999.
  • It is most certainly not optimized for my wallet.
  • Also, allowing NVidia the cheap option for the new gen GPUs is not a good move!
  • AMD software based ray-tracing is DXR only which means no performance gains in Quake 2 RTX!
  • Unless VKD3D can do DXR in the time it takes Mesa to get those cards up and running.
  • Runs better with AMD processors. .
    • Yeah, smart memory access on the 500 series chipsets seems to really narrow the gap. I wonder how real that actually is tho
  • Not a word on dedicated streaming hardware.


Intel tracing

  • It’s intel only at the moment
  • Laying the groundwork for upcoming Xe mildness.


Linux Gaming 2021

  • This article is based off of this slide deck for the presentation from the Open source summit https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/osseu2020/ea/Gabriel_Krisman_Bertazi-linux_gaming_in_2020-kernel.pdf
  • It goes over the approach colloabora has been taking to fix some of the longstanding issues with running windows games on linux, mainly case sensitive filesystems, anti cheat and memory management
  • The team has been trying to fix as many problems in userspace as possible before implementing specific kernel level solutions to tackle the issues
  • Case insensitivity has been supported in linux for a while, and it applies on a per directory basis. The issue there is distro adoption
  • Implementing specific futex2 code has allowed for better performance with fsync
  • To help work around anti-cheat, they’re looking at adding a syscall dispatcher which might help reduce wine being flagged as a cheating solution.
  • That’s supposed to be in 5.11, so look forward to that being worked around by EAC next year
    • Easy anti cheat will work 100% no issues with kernel 5.11.
    • Guaranteed.
  • I’d like to play Paladins again.
  • I wanted to watch this live but there were so many hoops to jump through I tapped out.


Orange

  • Open Source Caesar 3 continues to chug along
  • No linux fixes this time around, but lots of gameplay fixes and a –windowed flag


1UP VIM (rtheren)

  • Nintendo gonna get maaaaaaad
  • Wait until they find out about htop donkey kang.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Scourge Bringer
Devel: Flying Oak Games and E-Studio
Engine: MonoGame
Price: £13.49 / $16.99 / $19.49

Wazzat: ScourgeBringer is a fast-paced free-moving roguelite platformer. Help Kyhra to explore the unknown and slash her way through ancient machines guarding the seal of her past, and maybe the redemption of humanity.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dear Villagers, the publisher, sent us some keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • On a technical level it’s legit.
  • 60 @ 2160p as it should.
  • Xclone & PS4 makes with the works.

Fun?

  • My, aren’t we a floaty little fkr.
  • There, that’s my main complaint about this game.
  • You weigh slightly more than a hummingbird’s right testacle.
  • Touching the floor is code for you done fked right up.
  • Sometimes that’s no joke since spikes hang out there.
  • This is one of those games where you are expected to die a lot and occasionally get a little story.
  • You float around the same damn room with shite slightly rearranged while killing some baddies.
  • You have stab, swing stab, dash-stab, and pew at your disposal.
  • Upgrades come in the form of RNG and blood. Oh, and a skill tree.
  • So I guess I should call it one of those games where you are expected to die a lot LITE.
  • Most of your time is spent in hover ginsu mode trying to stay alive.
  • Especially after you discover holding down X == permaswing.
  • Spoilers: You won’t.
  • Go back to the hub, wash, rince, repeat.
  • The combat was fun for about the first ten minutes but repetition set in with a quickness.
  • Not to mention the lack of variety in the rooms and enemies.
  • I made it to a giant ball that killed me rather quickly, once.
  • That’s my street cred for ScourgeBringer.
  • I would really like to see the character (and story) unfold in an actual game.
  • One with thought out enemy placement, crafted levels, and the occasional save point.
  • Floaty or not the controls are tight and the stab game is on point. Don’t change that.
  • It’s the old world vs rooms debate, eh?
  • If you’re looking for a pick up and dick around for a few minutes simulator it will fill that void.
  • I would give it the one but you won me over with the soundtrack that kicks in whilst killin.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box on fedora 32 and holds 60. It likes to start in a 720p windowed mode though
  • Controls are very tight and responsive. You really do feel like a super bouncy ball of death
  • Your little nubbin of a player character gets easily lost in a sea of pew pew
  • The soundtrack alternates between zen and heavy guitars, but it whips back and forth like a smith child

Fun?

  • The gameplay loop seems a wee bit mashy to me
  • Oh, I’m sure with time and practise you can become a finely tuned, precise murder machine. The fidelity on those controls makes it very clear
  • But until you can get to that point, you’re just kinda flailing around trying to kill everything before it has a chance to attack and kill you
  • The goal here is to run through all the rooms to find the miniboss, so you can kill it and kill the actual boss
  • I actually managed to get to the 1st boss, who is some kind of body building flying torso. Got it to about ⅔ hp and then I died and back to the beginning I go
  • The rest of the times were either getting zapped or from the orb miniboss
  • I think the thing roguelikes have to balance is the ratio of luck vs mechanical advancement vs player advancement.
  • Here the scale tilts fairly heavily on player advancement. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that your gameplay loop has to be engaging enough to support a player investing the time to “git gud”
  • The combat is really good, but the levels themselves are kinda boring. Most rooms have two waves of enemies, others have one, but they’re few and far between enough to give you some false hope
  • But the game is really about getting good enough and lucky enough to make it through the first boss fight in good enough shape to deal with the second, and that doesn’t really do it for me.

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launched with no fuss
  • Holds 144 at 2560×1440
  • You do want that Pixel Perfect option enabled, it’s a little too blurry otherwise
  • Dual Shock 4 worked out of the box, but it does have XBox prompts.
  • The combat sounds are most definitely on point
  • If there was background music, I couldn’t tell you anything about it

Fun?

  • I never thought I’d see a hipster pixel roguelike rendition of the Devil May Cry style combat, but here we are!
  • They nailed the primary gameplay loop almost to a T.
  • There’s just one teeny tiny issue.
  • You can’t see your character while you’re in the thick of things.
  • Sure, there’s this white blob in the midst of the bright explosions and white flashes of enemies being hit, but good luck spotting it.
  • It is a bit more forgiving than you originally think it will be, as it’ll fling you towards the enemy you want to go to even if it’s not at the perfect 45º angle the D-Pad gives you.
  • Those little things, they help with my enjoyment of what is a very hard game.
  • Yes it’s more forgiving than you’d think, but it’s still hard.
  • I can get to and sometimes beat the boss of the first level, but I’ll be damned if I can beat the second level’s.
  • ScourgeBringer also actively rewards you for being fast in getting through the levels, which complements the frenetic combat system very well.
  • If you can obliterate the two waves of enemies in most rooms quickly, you’ve probably not taken that much damage doing it.
  • I love it when small indie games focus on one thing and do it really well.
  • Maybe it’s the Linux user in me appreciating the UNIX philosophy, maybe it’s the teeny tiny optimizations to the combat, which make it flow from beginning to end.
  • Whatever it is, I like it very much!

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

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