Proton GE adds support for Mass Effect Legendary Edition! Fedora 35 threatens to replace SDL 1.2, porting Outer Wonders to Linux, and Valve reminds everyone where that 30% goes.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:25 Steam client updates
07:25 Steamworks 2021 recap
10:02 Proton 6.8 GE2 supports Mass Effect
12:52 Gang Beasts matchmaking beta
15:02 Controller support added to Pathways
16:17 Unforgettable You
22:27 Nvidia launches low hashrate GPUs
27:27 Zink progress report
32:30 Augustus 3.0.1
35:10 Fedora pushes SDL 1.2 compat
39:10 RedDriver 2 Beta 1
42:05 Building Outer Wonders on Linux
45:55 Lost Ruins
01:00:35 Hate mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- This brings all the deadzone fixes to stable.
- Fossilize will work with proton experimental, which is good cuz it helps make new games work with proton
- I’m only running stable on the laptops but that’s because Steam itself is not running most of the time when I’m on those laptops
- Controler reporting is a handy tool.
- A gentle reminder that wolfire’s suit might be a bit spurious maybe?
- I wonder if the controller analytics are the thing driving more game developers to properly support them or if it’s a Unity thing.
- Speaking of patch notes, VALVe used to be offender #1 in releasing updates with no notes.
- It’s not like you can read them from the client.
- Burned a heretic purchase on ME: legendary edition and can confirm it do work once you get past origin
- Running other games clients on top of steam, just to be able to launch a single game still doesn’t sit well with me.
- EA and Ubisoft are the biggest offenders.
Steam: Game Updates
- I suppose we have to give this a fair shake in the aftershow
- The old lobby was…less than 100% functional at all times, so I look forward to seeing the improvements
- Interesting Switch.
- Controller support does work, but not with the steamy input.
- With that it just decided to make my cursor go left forever.
- Suck it Derek
- More ways to play the game is good.
- Don’t think controller support is the thing I needed to give the 4th Chair for the fun.
Steam: New Games
- Ah yes, the contemplating platformer.
- Limbo with text on screen, no challenge, and somehow jankier animation.
- That takes work!
- This is like if someone took a Cure album and distilled it down to a video game. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to you
News:
- Aww they are going to mark the cards.
- Are they seriously not doing a 3060 LHR?
- They did and then they “accidentally” released the driver which completely sidestepped the whole thing.
- I guess not marking them might open them up to some false advertising shenanigans
- I guess it’s less so a problem if every card from now on is LHR, but the well poisoning was a nice middle finger to miners.
- Will manufacturers have any incentive to make these en masse?
- “Make these cards with less markup / demand” is a hard sell.
- Which begs the question, how long until someone finds out how to side step these limitations using the “accidental” driver.
- It went from “technically works” to sotra usable rather quickly.
- It’s entirely possible where we’re going to enter a moon future where performance parity between directX and openGL has been achieved through vulkan
- The thing with Vulkan is how there isn’t a visual studio to write the code for you.
- So all the performance gains will have to be done by hand.
- And I’m quickly becoming a big fan of Mike Blumenkrantz, here!
- And if it does end up working like DXVK in how the end user can run it at will, that’s going to make things very interesting!
- This is not Julius, this is Augustus.
- What’s the difference between the two?
- Julius is a true engine reimplementation, leaving the gameplay and mechanics the same while improving only the technical side of how that gets presented.
- Augustus is very much driving towards gameplay changes along with everything else.
- And I love them both.
- You have Julius for the purists and Augustus for the people who want to keep playing Caeser 3 but without the constraints of 1998.
- There is certainly a ton of new additions here
- Having never played any of the caesar ceries I don’t know if they’re much needed improvements or overpowered fanficcy bullshit
- Yes please
- Once again, fedora coming in with the forward thinking defaults.
- Willing test subjects.
- Don’t see arch lining up for this stuff.
- Very hard to test something when everything else around it is broken
- Willing test subjects.
- I look forward to going through all the old Humble ports and removing the SDL 1.2 lib
- ISOs/BIN images now supported
- Which is kind of a big deal in 2021 when most computers/laptops don’t have spinny media drives anymore.
- There’s a lot of gameplay and technical improvements with this release.
- Time to go and dig out your PS1 disc and USB DVD drive.
Building Outer Wonders for Linux
- A story about developers learning the caveats and tradeoffs inherent to dynamic linking/loading.
- Also, something about porting a game to Linux.
- Why not statically link SDL2?
- I know it was an issue with SDL 1.2 because licensing but it’s fair game with SDL2.
- Probably trying to adhere to some kind of best practice. A lot of this blog post seems concerned with that
- Honestly, a lot of the advice here holds true for most software projects, regardless of platform: Limit your external dependencies, try to keep things self contained to ensure consistency and actually test the damn thing in a production-like environment
- And yes, for the love of god, please use SDL2
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Lost Ruins
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1306630/Lost_Ruins/
Devel: ALTARI GAMES
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79
Wazzat: Lost Ruins is a 2D side-scrolling survival action game, where you play as a young girl that has awoken in a strange and foreign place without her memories. Explore a dark and dangerous world, battle hideous monsters, and topple incredible bosses.
Mandatory Disclosure: The publisher, Dangen Entertainment, sent us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Do you like 1440p?
- That’s as high as it was willing to go on old Threadbooper.
- No performance issues with the rendering set to full.
- Rebindable controls.
- Windowed and fullscreen work.
Fun?
- “Oh, oh no” –Everybody immediately after their first swing.
- That’s not exactly a hot take after reading over a few Steam reviews.
- “The visuals in this game should be shown to aspiring artists taking game design classes. The combat should be shown to aspiring game designers on how not to do combat. –Touch Fluffy Tail”
- That ladies and gents is Lost Ruins in a shell of nuts.
- Lost Ruins is an anime action’ish platformer with what I can only guess is a 2D Souls like combat system?
- You have the traditional invincibility roll and sluggish as hell melee attacks.
- Granted, different weapons have varying degrees of slug.
- You end up doing most things with ranged magic causing you to constantly nom various foods, this means many trips to the menu.
- But hey it’s a Metroidvania so you can spend your time exploring and you know what, that’s worth it.
- The environments are crazy well done and so is the pixel art.
- They even added a feature to the map that makes it impossible to tell if a room has an exit if that square is highlighted.
- I enjoyed the first boss battle, it has that going for it, I guess.
- Yeah, there is nothing hooking me so far.
- Generic memory loss blank slate story mixed with neckbeard dialogue and humour.
- I could power through that and enjoy the scenery while murderating the baddies but again, that 2D Sould on a budget combat system is comically bad.
- I’m talking about “LOL, wow, I bet something unlocks in a minute and I can start wrecking shit” bad.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out ot the box on f34
- Controller worked out of the box
- The animation in this game is gorgeous. There’s a lot of attention to detail here and all the movements are super well animated. There’s a bit of a clash between that and the pixel aesthetics
- The soundtrack is mostly anime girls moaning. I’m sure some of you are in to that
Fun?
- Oh my, the combat in this game is just atrocious
- Bad bad bad bad bad
- I had the exact reaction Venn described
- Which is a shame, cuz it looks so damn good. Anime bullshit or no
- I appreciate wanting people to be more methodical with the combat, but forcing all of my attacks to be at a snails pace isn’t the way to do it
- Castlevania managed that through careful enemy placement and thoughtful, innovative level design
- I may have also gone back and checked. Castlevania wasn’t this slow either
- This just makes you slow
- Also, no heals on checkpoints?
- They do have an “Accessible” mode, which removes much of the combat difficulty, but so far i’m not that into the story to want to commit the time
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launched out of the box
- Seems to have some dips down from 144 at 2560×1440
- Which if you look at the graphics it’s hard to justify.
- Had to enable Steam Input for the DualShock 4, otherwise it would move the cursor/character with the accelerometer/sixaxis
- Hadn’t seen that in a while
Fun?
- It’s a bog standard metroidvania that’s made artificially more difficult than it has any business being.
- How’s that for a one liner?
- As someone who likes big ass swords, I was very happy to find the Zweihander.
- I tried to use it and immediately went: Fuck that!
- Enemies can attack you 2-3 times in the span of your one attack with most weapons.
- Basically, if you use anything slower than the gladius/longsword you’re going to die.
- The enemies will all move and attack faster than you can.
- I found myself having to go back to certain places to farm health drops because the game doesn’t drop enough gold for me to buy them from the vending machines/NPCs.
- And the checkpoint statues don’t refill your HP/mana like most games of this ilk.
- So it’s disrespecting my time and artificially padding its own length and difficulty by being so completely asinine with its mechanics.
- Even killing a boss feels pointless.
- You don’t level up, most of the equipment you get is either useless or poorly explained, and your character doesn’t progress in any way other than getting striped underwear.
- Are there secret nudie panels? Is that why the game is Very Positive on Steam?
- I don’t know.
- I just know I don’t like it.
- And no, the Lusty Argonian Maid inclusion doesn’t save it.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
