Linux Game Cast Weekly 440: Gun Accordion

Denuvo Anti-Cheat lands in Steamworks! Proton adds enables support for futex2, Sonic CD gets thoroughly decompiled, and Heroic Games Launcher has something special for you dual-booters. Then Scraps faces, the ChairsQAsition.

Special thanks to:
Daniel (new pat)
Benjamin (new pat)


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:44 GabeN teases new games from Valve
10:49 Valve gets fined for geo blocking
14:14 Denuvo comes to Steamworks
17:34 Futex2 enabled in Proton
19:54 Proton 6.0 GE
23:09 Toejam & Earl update
25:10 Volcanoids updates
27:50 Robocraft updates
30:50 Skul 1.0
32:25 Slice Back
34:00 Jumpala
36:40 Plugs, shoutouts, and shameless self-promotion
42:40 Nvidia 2060 back from the dead
48:10 Sonic CS 2001 decompilation
51:20 Heroc Game Launcher 1.1
53:50 OpenHV
55:50 Review: Scraps
01:08:35 Hate mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

New games from ValveTime

  • Gabe said there wouldn’t be another HL until there was a massive shift in how games are played.
  • Gabe chose the one where you have to stand in place, look around, and awkwardly grasp at things while getting face-FKD by a toaster.
  • So much for releasing a game with the number 3 on the end.
  • So if the whole VALVe office goes full Kiwi, will the human to sheep ratio be 1/1 then?
  • I’m sure Liz Qulty would be quite happy with that development
  • Gabe seems to be something of a Kiwiaboo
  • So apparently we’re getting some new single player games in the works that may or may not ever be released to the general public
  • It’d be neat to see a big open world RPG or some other thing they haven’t really done
  • I look forward to “Half Life 2 Episode 2 Part 2 Act 2” and “Left 4 Dead 4 Ever”.

Geo blocking

  • Valve: And?
  • They were the only company that didn’t assist with the investigation.
  • A lot of what they’re being fined for seems to be related to grey market key resellers and price shenanigans in eastern europe
  • Still paying less fines than Zenimax.
  • Although 1.6 Million pounds is chump change.
  • Expect the Steam EU Fines Reimbursement sale in a few weeks
  • Focus Home, publishers of such classics as Bound by Flame, The Surge, and the new Call of Cthulhu game (which I hear is shit but I still want to try), got hit the hardest.
  • I guess being French does put the scrutiny into high gear when you’re actively dicking people over in your own turf.


Steamworks gets Denuvo

  • Implementing anti-cheat it through steamworks does make it a lot easier for Valve to support anti-cheat related issues with proton
  • Hypervisor support really concerns me though. As apps become more and more containerized, I really don’t want Denuvo snooping through my IPC
  • Denuvo isn’t really the issue on linux though. EAC is.
  • Guessing EAC does not have Steamworks integration, right?
  • Denuvo doesn’t bother me as much since it eventually goes away.
  • Denuvo anti-cheat did show up in Doom Eternal which did stop Linux people from playing the game.
  • Lead dev at the time paid some lip service to the penguin crowd by saying they would account for that in the future.
  • Is this what they meant? “These VALVe people seem to know a bit about Linux! I say we let them implement our thing for us.”


Oh FUTE!

  • Gonna need 5.10 and some patching.
  • I’m interested to see what kind of performance difference this makes.
  • Apparently this is the root cause for a lot of memory and timing issues in Wine, especially when using E-Sync
  • I patched up 5.10 with the hotness and all it got me was a hang while trying to load Trine 4.

Eggroll 6.0

  • Catherine, Black Ops, Darksiders and INjustic 2 are borked
  • They’ve fixed controller hotplugging. Let’s see if they disable that in ge-2
  • Mangohud support as well.
  • This one’s not crazy exciting, but there are definitely going to be some growing pains moving everything over to 6.0
  • DXVK updated, contains F1 game fixes but we’re not going to tell you what.
  • NRATCF & Persona 4 are back on the menu.
  • The lack of fullscreen hack is still a point of contention for me!
  • I really don’t want games fighting my XOrg.conf

Steam: Game Updates

Toes & Jam

  • 100XP for hats
  • Fix Ghandi not providing his safety if another Ghandi was nearby
    • As you do
  • 40% less dense bush
  • Oh hey, and the movies will work on linux now too!
  • I played around with the original hardware and never understood what was going on.
  • The one on Steam stuck to those roots.


Combat drills

  • The combat’s been reworked to include iron sights, recoil and superior pew pew noises
  • The they’ve also stopped the bots from using their superior computer brains to headshot you instantly
  • This game has always looked the pretty.
  • I didn’t like Rust, but this looks like it could scratch that itch for me.
  • I did reach out to their PR peeps about getting them keys but so far nothing.


Robocraft ‘21

  • Spreadsheets, the update
  • A lot of the part math got updated to try to balance out all of the options
  • So much math
  • Litteral, fkn, spreadsheets.
  • At least that tells you who this game is aimed at.
  • F2p with $69 of DLC.
  • 151 hours I lost to this game and seeing this now makes me want to lose a few more.
  • Last played it in 2018, according to Steam.
  • With this big of a rebalance, the “car” style robots may be back in the Meta.
  • I was a big fan of the small fast car with one or two of the biggest machine gun/laser type weapons they’d let me have.
  • It looks like that’s a viable build again since wheels are better now and the fire rate of the minigun has been buffed.


Skul’s 1.0

  • Plenty of Polish and extras in the 1.0
  • New chapters, NPCs, improved bosses, and a bow on the story.
  • That looks very nice!
  • The combat reminds me of Dead Cells a bit, which is a very good thing!
  • It’s also using the head/body swapping mechanic. It’s having a bit of a renaissance now, isn’t it?
  • If the trailer is any indication, it’s a very pretty 2d spectacle brawler

Steam: New Games

Slice Back

  • Reminds me a little bit of scourge bringer with sushi
  • Coming spoon
  • Still hungry?
  • The herky-jerk is part of the game, right?
  • I have praised many games in the past for the use of freeze-frames to convey impact.
  • That’s a little excessive in that trailer!


Jumpala

  • Infinite climber towerfall
  • But unlike towerfall, you can play it with friends and not get covid!
  • Get me some of that online play!
  • That actually looks like it could be positively infuriating to play against the two of you.

News:

2060 Deux

  • Back for another lap?
  • According to Overclocking.com, the reintroduced RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 SUPER will be priced at 300 EUR and 400 EUR respectively.
  • Having something to sell is better than nothing but unless they are priced at 2/250 nobody is touching them.
  • Hell, if someone offered me a 2060S for $150 I would have to think about it.
  • Then again, people who want a physical card this side of the rapture might.
  • They were the most popular of that series…
  • Mostly because the performance gains from the 1060 to the 1660 were a bit shit.


Sonic CD decomp

  • libsdl2-dev libogg-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev should get your sorted.
  • 18 year old did it over a few weekends.
  • SDL so the controllers work.
  • Steam databits work.


Heroic game launcher 1.1.0

  • Dual booters can import stuff from your windows drive now
  • Better terminal output is a must in these projects. The downsides of point and click solutions is that they usually have to hide a bunch of shit from you
  • Works with Feral GameMode
  • Finds Proton if you have Steam installed from Flatpack
  • Save sync is very nice to have!
  • I know of a certain compatibility layer in another gaming service which could easily implement that by doing a diff of the default Proton prefix filesystem versus when you run the game and see what files changed.
  • Then it would just be a matter of uploading them and then sync’ing them back to the same folder.


OpenHV (RTheren)

  • It’s being done in openRA, so shoutouts to those guys
  • THe assets for hard vacuum got released, so they’re building a new game from scratch, which is kinda neat. Kind of reminds me of something like “the other side of the wind”
  • I was about to say Dune 2 but yeah, guess they know that.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Scraps – Modular Vehicle Combat
Devel: Moment Studio
Engine: Unity
Price: £9.99 / $14.99 / $16.99
Wazzat: Scraps is a vehicle combat game where you can build your vehicle from functional parts, with design as your ally and physics as your accomplice. Compete against human or AI opponents in a combat arena, or build up your vehicle while fighting through Gauntlet mode.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches on the wrong monitor because old Unity.
  • Fullscreen works.
  • Keyboard and gerbil work.
  • 60 @ 1080 no issues on the 2060.

Fun?

  • Scraps has been the developers side bitch for eight years and it shows.
  • Buildable vehicle combat games weren’t really a thing in 2013.
  • Well kids, the landscape has changed in the last eight years.
  • In 2021 we have Robocraft, Besiege and the like.
  • Fair or not that’s what it has to stack up against and yeah, it doesn’t.
  • Scraps 1.0 was very much a “I’m done with this project, don’t expect updates, only bug fixes” release.
  • So what do you get?
  • A basic build system featuring guns, cooling, armour, and engines.
  • You get dropped into a relatively empty map and face off against kamikaze AI.
  • Collect some scrap, get the to exit, repeat.
  • Visually the game is primitive and in-game vehicle physics can accurately be described as floaty.
  • Music is a bit all over the place but guns go pew.
  • I was hoping multiplayer would spark joy but alas, it makes with the empty.
  • If you’re in the market for a retro tech demo this might be just the thing.
  • But for $14.99 you can pick up Besiege, and have fun.
  • But hey, at least he shipped the game and that’s more than a LOT of crowdsourced projects can say.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches on AMD. Same on nvidia, but it likes my other monitor
  • Hold 60 ferps on both
  • Keyboard and mouse works fine. Targeting gets a little weird, but that’s kind of part of the game. Didn’t work with my switch pro controller
  • The graphics are very basic. Pedro is right, they haven’t changed since we first covered the game forever ago

Fun?

  • It’s just okay.
  • The whole point of these games is building your murder machine and going ham
  • This game is stuck in the early years of the genre and as such the experience is limited
  • Other games like besiege give you so many options that this just feels super limited
  • The driving is little weird and most of the combat is sneaking up on dudes and broadsiding them until they crumble
  • It would be nice if you had a creative mode with all of the options instead of having to unlock them in the single player
  • Barring that, I wish there was some better developed single player to pad it out at least
  • I guess it might be a little different with multiplayer, but nobody’s playing
  • Also, the menus are really, really bad

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box
  • If you’re not streaming it with NVEnc it holds 144@2560×1440
  • It looks and sounds exactly like I remember it from the demo. But more on that later
  • Mouse and gerbil works, I didn’t try the controller on account of the aiming.

Fun?

  • I really like the building of the death car when it works properly
  • The positioning is so finicky and being even a single pixel off will put the component on some completely random ass part of the vehicle.
  • There isn’t a difficulty curve so to speak.
  • The forever alone mode is pretty easy right up until you get to the “The Boss”.
  • Which I have tried and failed to kill 6 or 7 times now.
  • The furthest I got its health down was about halfway and then he landed all 7 large canon hits on my cockpit and 1 shot me.
  • I got up, pointed at the screen and proclaimed “Bullshit” just loud enough that the neighbors wouldn’t be terribly inconvenienced.
  • But the thing that stuck out to me the most was that it looks the same.
  • It looks almost exactly the same as the demo I played back in 2013.
  • There’s some burning earth type textures that deal damage if you drive over it in some of the later levels.
  • I guess that was new.
  • Also, multiplayer was very much non-existent at “launch”, just before the 1.0 release Bill did put out a very grim post about the realization that things didn’t go terribly well.
  • I will give it a bonus Chair for having a dedicated server option.
  • That’ll ensure someone can always get it up and running if they want to multiplayer in the future.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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