Valve is working on wireless VR! Neverwinter Nights gets fractional scaling, speedy shaders for Mesa, and a clean-room reimplementation of Half-Life: Deathmatch. Then Can’t Drive This faces the ChairQAsition.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:13 Fast shaders for AMD
05:43 Wireless Steam headset
08:43 Clean-room Half-Life Deathmatch
12:03 NWN:EE Beta 8193.21
14:18 Robocraft server melt
15:28 Dead Age 2
19:18 Derelict Void
21:28 Neurodeck
24:53 Deserted
28:23 Shameless self promotion
33:33 GODOT RC
35:18 WINE 6.4
38:08 Heroic 1.5.6
39:53 Pixel match switcher
43:18 Lunar lander
44:53 Review: Can’t drive this
57:58 Hate mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Small speedy shaders incoming.
- It requires a really recent version of Mese.
- One thing I noticed is that Shader Compiles have gotten much faster on Nvidia.
- Even when you first launch a game it’s usually done in less than a minute.
- Yeah, unless you’re tracking Mesa-git, you don’t get to have faster shaders.
- Shame they couldn’t get it into the 24 release. Hopefully they do a point release soon
- Needs a cup holder.
- My brief romp though VR land has impressed upon me the need for a wireless solutions
- Hopefully they can drive the weight and cost down
- Wireless and eye tracking modules would be interesting.
- I have been severely disappointed in the lack of VR injury related videos.
- This could fix that.
- “It’s designed to work with the content from the CD version of the game. Currently I do not aim to support the Steam version.”
- I’d have to ask my little brother to create an ISO of the Half-Life CD and then download it off the internet.
- Might as well just rent out a copy from the local video store at that point.
- A lot of folks still have fond memories of the pre 1.6 HL days, which is the version currently on steam
- I guess if Valve ain’t gonna release HL 3 someone’s gonna get cracking on it…eventually
- I’m guessing the source was leaked at some point or does this guy really like typing clen-room?
- Does it only rock the Synder cut ratio?
Steam: Game Updates
- Fractional scaling for the UI
- Improved new options menu
- A featured content section to highlight good mods you have installed when starting a new game.
- Water improvement looks very good.
- Some path-finding updates.
- Which, if you were watching the stream on Tuesday, didn’t fix a damn thing.
- The latest post says they’ve now got it working internally
- Should be back up in a few days.
- Give Freejam Games some credit, they have daily backups.
Steam: New Games
- One of the first games we ever pooped all over is back with a sequel
- They moved to a newer darkest dungeon inspired combat system instead of the redneck final fantasy from the first game
- Speaking of, they have a sphere grid now
- A new faction system and some supposedly better designed narrative
- If they want to throw us some keys, I’ll be very curious to see if there’s any improvement over the first.
- Don’t know if the strategy here is what I’m after.
- I’d love one of these but as a first person or third person game.
- There’s Void Bastards but that game is a little too reliant on RNG and dicking you over.
- Basically, I want 0x10C like Notch originally first envisioned.
- Seems very much like a hyper-modern Oregon trail
- Apparently it’s very, very hard and very rng based
- Best take I can get is to fly around, pick up people, build factories, die.
- People in the reviews don’t feel like the mechanics and presentation gel particularly well with the subject matter.
- Something, something, ludo-donkey disco-baubles.
- I do like me some deckbuilding rogueliteness, so I’m curious.
- Takes about 2.5 hours to cut through it.
- Action points AND stamina AND drawing power.
- People like the art.
- That looks like it could be my jam.
- What if another world was hyper light drifter
News:
- Lots of stuff coming down the pope in 3.2.4
- The RC doesn’t have anything special, just bug fixes leading up to the final release.
- Not Linux related but they added support for the M1.
- Implemented a –no-window mode for Linux.
- Prevent audio corruption in the ALSA driver.
- Serious Sam 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and a few others will now start on vanilla wine thanks to implementation of VK_OBJECT_TYPE_SURFACE_KHR
- Added support for the DTLS protocol and improved theming.
- Fixed Vulkan sunlight with Witcher 3.
- Offline mode is a new feature.
- Why did it ever require that?
- Not eating shit when starting up without an internet connection is a plus
- That WINE grabbing solution from anywhere in the system seems like the developer Lutris’ed some of Lutris’ own features.
- Throwing this in since they sent in a pull request to OBS.
- The pull request is massive and it’s going to require some poking time.
- No standalone plugin is available but they do maintain a fork of OBS if you want to play the home game.
- So does this open the door for a full choreographed Steamy news segment.
- Automagically hiding elements or switching scenes when it detects a certain pattern on screen is interesting
- If for nothing else than seeing people fight it when it inevitably misreads something and hell breaks loose.
- The level of absolute fkry this unlocks is interesting.
- Load and hide UI elements based on what’s on the scene at that time.
- A lunar lander with a twist?
- Hey at least the Itch page has a screenshot, kinda.
- Friend and Patreon Katana_Steel is learning how to Godot.
- It crashes, and then the game crashes.
- Fall, smack, crash.
- Same on Debian.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Can’t Drive This
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/466980/Cant_Drive_This/
Devel: Pixel Maniacs
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79
Wazzat: Race your monster truck WHILE your friend builds the road. Go too slow, and you’ll EXPLODE! And yes, it’s as chaotic as it sounds – especially in four player split-screen.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- On a technical level everything works OOTB.
- Full / win modes work and controller pick up as well.
- 140 @ UHD and capping around 500 @ 1080 using openGL.
- No audio video glitches.
Fun?
- This is a great proof of concept and I’m kinda excited to see what they come up with before leaving Early Acce…. Oh. Oh no.
- Since the developers are going to be watching this I want to give a little shout out to the person (or persons) on the team who said this wasn’t ready, you were right.
- And if that person doesn’t exist, ya need to hire them.
- Playing Lone Racer in forever alone mode is a nonstarter since you’re required to build and drive the track, defeating the “fun” mechanic.
- The other two modes basically tell you to not even fk with them in single player.
- So you’re going to need some friends to get the most out of this and that’s going to be a challenge.
- Pedro and I did a test last night, Friday, release day, prime time… and I sat in matchmaking until Pedro searched for another player.
- While I can’t speak to how much fun you can extract from a 3+ player experience; 2 players scrapes the bottom of the barrel in 30 minutes.
- We were doing our best to find something to keep us going but after a few rounds of Lone Racer and Drone we had seen it all.
- In the future if they can get rid of the dog shite split screen co-op for online, add a preview block like Tetris for the tiles plus additional non endless runner modes it might be worth a revisit?
- As it stands right now, na.
- You had five years to make a game from this (I’m including 2019 when no updates were made) and you even “pulled the plug” as a joke, but it kinda wasn’t.
- Hope the FFF got their money’s worth.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Gnome really thinks this game is about to eat shit. Every time I launch it, gnome gives me the force quit option
- Runs like butt @ UHD on the 5700xT, knocking it down to 1080P improves things, and you’re really not gaining much by running things @UHD anyways
- Nvidia OpenGL is definitely a better experience at UHD
- Works with the Dualshock and Switch pro, but them mappings are all wrong. Have fun explaining that to a 10 year old
- Sounds are okay
Fun?
- I guess one of the stealth benefits of domestic life is now I have ready access to player 2 and 3 for couch co-op.
- And the co-op levels are fun enough. Build the track for other people to either race on or capture flags
- It wears out its welcome pretty quickly though, and we tried a couple rotation schemes for who gets to build vs who gets to drive
- And honestly, if you’re building, the best bet is to spam blocks. Cuz you gotta keep moving if you’re driving. Take to long and you a splode
- Oh boy, the driving is super fucky.
- They do have a vs capture the flag, but that requires four players
- The single player is pretty garbo though. Time limit to capture the flags and you gotta switch between building and driving. Nowhere near as fun as the multiplayer
- So what you have here is something that might be fun as a party game that gets rotated out after a couple of rounds
- That’ll shit achievements out at you, if that’s your jam
- I’d say wait for a sale
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It launches out of the box.
- It mostly holds 144@2560×1440
- The graphics all seem to work, including the vision obscuring clouds.
- It does make some noise, as well.
- Controllers work, the DualSense still needs SteamInput to be properly mapped.
- But I mostly played with the keyboard for the driving and the mouse for the building
Fun?
- It is fun but it does get a bit repetitive.
- And the repetitiousness is made worse by the two game modes currently available.
- There’s supposed to be a third one about capturing a 3000lbs concrete egg but when Venn and I were playing on stream on Friday, it wasn’t available.
- Forever alone mode is a bit frustrating.
- This is one of those games that does require multiplayer to be enjoyable but even then we run into the lack of variety.
- SinglePlayer could have had a mode where the AI builds the track as it goes, or a track is generated from a seed and you just have to try it.
- Or even the reverse, you build a track to get the AI driver as far as possible.
- But all of my suggestions really do boil down to: it needs more.
- More modes for both single and multiplayer, maybe even different car types to make you be extra careful when driving.
- It needs more, because as it stands… It’ll only grab people for a few minutes and then they hit the refund button.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
