Linux Game Cast 464: Hipster Pickles

Big performance gains for DX12 titles in the latest Proton! Amazon gives the Linux Foundation wood, new nvenc speeds up OBS, Fantasy Strike gets a facelift, and what makes a game HD?

Special thanks to:
Kohaku (new patreon)


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:48 DX12 performance bump in Proton
10:28 Do you really need a game trailer?
13:28 xHereos Raid
15:33 Pixel Cup Soccer
16:53 Base Jump
18:58 Crash Drive 3
21:43 What makes a game HD?
23:38 Fantasy Strike gets overhauled
32:48 Amazon gives O3DE to the Linux Foundation
38:33 Wine 6.12
41:28 Egg flavoured Wine
43:48 New nvenc for OBS on Linux
47:38 Frank
49:43 Riot games releases background noise for streamers
51:28 Wildermyth review
01:04:13 Email


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

VKD3D Proton

  • Resident Evil Village, Forza Horizon 4, and Anno 1404 – History Edition are playable.
  • Big jump in GPU-bound performance.
  • Got a speed bump in ginger Tomb Raider (pulse mono bug)
  • We’re talking from 55 to 70.
  • BTW
  • NODEVICE_SELECT=1 mangohud %command%
  • Also bar.

Steam: New Games

Catalyst Wake Demo

  • Remember that requirement for games to have a video on their store front?
  • Yeah, nah. Fuck that!
  • Apparently that’s too spoilery
  • Supposedly, this is just a motion comic.
  • The demo catches you up to the ongoing plot and gives you the first chapter
  • Still, you couldn’t cut a trailer?
  • There is no gameplay in the demo, none.
  • You get a couple of title cards with some text and a kid doing some line reads.
  • Saved you a download.
  • Oh, the default controller mapping has F12 mapped to a face button.


Heroes Raid

  • Hmmm, spongy enemies!
  • That’s exactly what you want to show in your trailer.
  • Looks like a monster hunter clone

Pixel Cup Soccer

  • Captain Tsubasa would like a word!
  • Sports games on linux are super underrepresented as a genre.
  • This is a rare addition.
  • You’d think a podcast featuring a german brit, a half-brazilian and a Portugese person would be a bit more enthusiastic for a footy game. You’d be wrong


Base Jump

  • Only local multiplayer
  • This is like smash bros on hella budget with more platforming, right?
    • I dunno. The fight mechanics in smash are a bit more…smashing?
    • This one seems more like splashing


Crash Drive 3

  • I didn’t hate 2
  • Even if multiplayer was a bit crazy, it was alright.
  • A purple pimpmobile.
  • And water sports!
  • Never really played CD2 despite having it.
  • You can run it on centos 7


Secret Agent HD

  • After Crystal Caves, this was necessary!
  • Of the old Apogee Platformers, this and Keen 4 were the ones I played the most.
  • They didn’t even bother to 16:9 it.

Steam: Game Updates

Striking updates

  • Some fancy new graphics to Rook, Grave and Setsuki.
  • They’re marginally better!
  • Now you can decide which controller is p1 and which is p2.
  • Apparently this will work with more than 2 controllers at a time.
  • Should be fun for local tournaments if you’re vaccinated
  • DeGrey was the one I liked best and it’s got a full round of nerfs.

News:

Open 3D Engine

  • Best I can tell it’s a rework of Lumberyard but nice and open.
  • Lumberyard = Amazon fork or Crytek.
  • The Linux Foundation will oversee the project and form the Open 3D Foundation.
  • I was curious about that multiplayer game Amazon was building, what happened with that?
  • Oh there’s two!
  • Crucible and New World, the latter is the one I was thinking of.
  • And it’s not even out and there’s already Easy Anti Cheat, fuck that.
  • The video they released to show it off is… horrifying.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebr8t_mz8p8
  • All of what passes for documentation is in video form?
  • Get, fkn, bent.
  • Yeah, I’m not sure what amazon dumping it on the linux foundation will actually get us
    • Sure I’m sure their stewardship won’t be awful, but this don’t seem like a thing they want
    • Also an aside, the fact that they have a Grand Tour game scheduled but haven’t even considered Clarkson Simulator is a crime
  • So that’s it for crytek/lumberyard.
  • I’m sure a few projects will still try to use it, but if it hasn’t been able to crack the unreal/unity duopoly so far, I don’t see much of a future.
  • Maybe TLF can spin this into something worth using, but I’m not really holding my breath


Wine 6.12

  • Lots of fixes for the Stalker series
  • Bugfixes for Bureau: Xcom, MGSV: GZ and rainbow six siege
  • Blue and classic blue themes for maximum retro-windows
  • Fixes for STALKER: Call of Pripyat and the Anomaly mod.
  • Deferred D3D11 contexts are now implemented in base WINE.


Egg Wine

  • Eggy’s custom wine builds
  • The 6.12 version has some EGS fixes for Civ 6, Borderlands 3 and Godsfall
  • Blizzard games seem to work fine. Until Actiblizzion decides to get stabby.
  • It’s always a good idea to remind people this is a thing.
  • Not everyone plays with the Steam.
  • You can extract these into ~/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine for use with Lutris.
  • Tried it with NFSW, and it launches but it causes the ModLoader to crash when launching.
  • Which means you don’t get any of the custom content and the game crashes if you get into a race with someone who is using a custom vinyl or custom car.

Nvenc

  • New nvenc for Linux, finally.
  • Nvenc on Linux copies rendered frames back to the system RAM, copies them again into an FFMPEG AVFrame, and makes FFMPEG upload them back to the GPU.
  • Like jim-nvenc on Windows this skips most of that nonsense.
  • CPU usage is decreased from around 25-30% to around 11%.
  • Only ARGB textures are supported so it’s not useful for streaming until that gets sorted.


Frank

  • Like nethack, this is one of those games you can play in a terminal or with a gui tileset
  • Apparently the fedora builds are borked according to their table
  • I had forgotten why CDDA never grabbed me, and it’s the spreadsheet of customization for literally everything.
  • I don’t want to create your game for you, I just want to play it.
  • So I started with the defaults and was immediately swarmed by 7 zombies.


Riot music

  • More royalty free music is always nice. Thanks riot!
  • It’s a bunch of ambient chill music if you’re into that kind of stuff.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Wildermyth
Devel: Worldwalker Games, LLC
Engine: Custom (libgdx [Java])
Price: £19.39 / $24.99 / $28.99

Wazzat: Wildermyth follows heroes over their whole careers, from their pitchfork days to their powerful primes, and on into old age and memory. It’s a party-based procedural storytelling RPG where tactical combat and story decisions will alter your world and reshape your cast of characters.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Fullscreen only works on Monitor 1.
  • Windowed popped right over to the correct monitor.
  • Outside of that everything worked.

Fun?

  • You drastically underestimated my inability to play these games.
  • I took the time to set up my 3 characters, do all the stats nonsense and made them look like some people who do a podcast.
  • Then I got myself killed in the tutorial.
  • The game wiped all of my guys and said start again from scratch fuck-o.
  • That, right there, is when I would have tapped that refund button.
  • For the sake of the review I did another run with default whatevers.
  • You click, wait, click, then get punished or rewarded by babby RN Jesus.
  • Plenty of story and art to go along with this one and it you ever wanted medieval Paper Mario, it has you covered.
  • Production wise the team did a fantastic job.
  • Except for the next buttons.
  • Yall motherfuc*ers put them all over the place.
  • Turn-based is not my jam, never has been, and probably never will be.
  • That said, they slipped in online multiplayer so I might drag one of the two yahoos into a game to see how long they can put up with me.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB
  • Holds 60
  • The art style reminds me of your average early 2000s webcomic
  • One thing it does do is use the paper doll style of it to actually show your ridiculous looking character in the dialogue bits
  • The soundtrack is generic medieval tootling
  • Dualshock 4 worked, but I ended up playing with keyboard and mouse

Fun?

  • Remember Massive chalice? It was this nifty strategy game from double fine that had your characters grow old and die as time went on, so you needed to selectively breed your heroes to make sure all your units will have the best stats and classes
  • It was a pretty fun idea with a mediocre implementation. Worldwalker decided to take another crack at it
  • The end result is pretty good. Realistically, I’d say it’s only marginally better, but that’s still not a bad thing
  • The combat is grid based, x-com style. Everything plays as you expect if you’ve done one of these grid based tactical jammies before. Be careful, cuz the ai don’t fuck around
  • One minor gripe I had was that all of your units kind of look the same (you know the BUckley-esque style) so I ended up clicking on the wrong square while moving a bunch
  • I like the map exploration and settlement building aspect. It reminded me about of FInal Fantasy Tactics A2, and I love that game so any reminder is a good welcome
  • Since it’s a roguelike, the levels are all randomly generated. It seems though like they have a couple existing tiles that they mix and match, so the maps tend to seem samey
  • The character stuff is fun too. You can play matchmaker with your dudes or pit them against each other for a variety of benefits and fun conversations
  • It’s a pretty solid tactical roguelike. Plus it’s got online multiplayer so that’s neat. You can have multiple people run the same group of resources

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launched out of the box.
  • Locked at 60 at 2560×1440, which means the VSync tickbox in the options is a lie
  • DualSense worked out of the box!
  • Even Java can handle the DualSense now, very nice.
  • There’s some weirdness with playing with the controller, you’re much better off with the mouse and keyboard.

Fun?

  • It is fun and I do like the procedurally generated content which keeps all the events feeling pretty fresh as you progress.
  • It makes use of the XCom: Enemy Unknown / Shadowgrounds videogames ruleset in a more traditional fantasy medieval-ish RPG setting.
  • Simple as it may look it does a very good job of telling a fantastic, completely random, story.
  • I haven’t played far enough yet but as your characters get older or just die from some unfortunate circumstance, you keep playing in the same world.
  • And you can find the evidence of what you previously did with those older characters.
  • It’s really well done!
  • Now, if you fix the issue with the move/attack cursor starting on the same relative coordinates as it was on the last battle and start where the character is, when using the controller, you’ve got yourself a very good sit back and play on the TV box experience.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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