Valve launches Steam Deck verified! Half-Life 2 gets support for Vulkan and ultrawide monitors, Xwayland adds the Nvidia bits, the future of graphics with Zig, and Google wants to license zombie Stadia.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:08 New YouTube channel
08:54 Steam Deck game verification
14:59 Valve hiring Steam Deck testers
17:44 Steam client beta fixes Let’s Encrypt
20:09 Big Boy Boxing
24:14 Alisa is 3D hipster-polygons
26:09 Half-Life 2 ultrawide support and Vulkan
35:09 Xwayland prepared for Nvidia
39:39 Google Stadia for lease
44:19 Mach game engine & Zig
48:44 VKD3d-Proton 2.5 DLSS all the things
50:49 Julius 1.7.0
54:09 Focusrite solo review
58:14 Review: Aeon Drive
01:06:29 Emails
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Four categories of Deck compatibility
- VERIFIED
- PLAYABLE
- UNSUPPORTED
- UNKNOWN
- Keep in mind, this is for existing Linux titles as well as Proton.
- Gotta wonder how many native games are gonna end up in the “playable category”
- Or Unsupported.
- Steam Deck catching on has the potential of being a big bonus soda for the Linux porting industry, both of them.
- Wonder what the packin title for the Deck will be?
- Codename Gordon, obvs
- I am a big fan of the big badge of shame.
- I was just a bit disappointed to read it would only appear on the Deck view.
- Valve is hiring people to test games on the Deck.
- They are building a team to review the 50,000 titles on Steam.
- Will work 4 Deck.
- Wait… VALVe is hiring people to curate the Steam Store for the sake of a handheld gaming console?
- Alright, hold on! I need to try dividing by zero.
- I feel bad for the folks who sign up imagining they’re gonna be testing shit like god of war and end up having to review dragon the game and the other unity ghetto titles of yore
- The CA bundle got updated to better support letsencrypt. This is a good thing. Valve should not be making people pay for SSL
- That forced expiration of LetsEncrypt root CA X3 is still making waves.
- Soapbox Race World on Linux was very much affected, since it requires WINE Mono which still hasn’t been updated.
- This one has some GUI glitches.
Steam: New Games
- Pixel punch out. Big boy boxing. A lot of alliteration
- That animation, though.
- It looks good.
- I liked the OG punch out.
- Don’t know how well that formula holds in 2021.
- Gothic Lolita Resident evil 1
- Fixed camera? Tank controls? You got it baby
- Doesn’t work with the DS4 in steam input
Steam: Game Updates
- Opt into beta and -vulkan
- Prepare for monitor seasure.
- Likes to keep running in the background.
- Granted, I didn’t notice it until I went to shut down for the evening.
- At this point I will settle for a remaster.
- Are we actually gonna get a linux port of alien swarm?
- Fullscreen was having none of it, had to launch it with -window
- I too required -window. I guess valve is intending these to run in gamescope
- That would explain the bonkers fullscreen situation
News:
- And there it is.
- Just curious to see what the slap fight will look like when something breaks on either side.
- Itbegins.gif
- The bizarre post X moon future is almost here. I can’t wait and see what new horeshit arises to ensue another decade of X
- Third party nvidia steamdeck-ish console confirmed?
- Anyone feeling all brave and shit?
- It’s going to be interesting when the Steam compositor thingy rolls out.
- It didn’t work as a centralized service.
- Will it work when every studio has a streaming option… for their games.
- That said, Valve, use this until you finish developing the inhouse solution.
- Wonder if Feral had anything to do with the goddamnbatman in Stadia.
- That will probably be the way to salvage it.
- I do hope those other services spool up their backend, because the Google one might not be there for long.
- And so the dream of a unified storefront for all of these games quietly dies
- I can see this being successful as a value-added service to purchasing an actual copy of the game, but it’s a hard ask for a bunch of balkanized services to ask for individual fees
- Nerds like us, we love us some easy to cross-compile and truly multiplatform engine support.
- Most game developers love tons of money with as little time investment as possible.
- Hence why Unity has a ghetto as big as it does.
- Targeting WebGPU is a very good idea.
- Though my skepticism is flaring up again.
- The argument for WebGPU over vulkan is an interesting one. Sort of reminds me of using UFS as a cross platform filesystem
- The “web” in its name does belay it’s true potential as a cross platform graphics target
- Still, there is a lot of work to do. As of right now, we have a triangle.
- I think the network effect is going to play into the adoption of this tech. Right now there’s a lot of tribal knowledge about DX, so much so that even valve is trying to capitalize on that with dxvk
- Until we see unity or unreal target something like this, it’s gonna remain a cool side thing
- Pew pew rays are now implemented for both Nvidia and AMD
- They want feedback as now they gotta squash edge cases
- DLSS support
- Resizable BAR support can add 10-15% performance on some games. IF you don’t have it enabled in the BIOS, you only get 256MB of BAR
- I really want the 5900X to drop below £400, I want me some of that ReBAR.
- Adding joystick support for handhelds means that this could also be useful on the deck
- THe one linux fix is for SDL2 on wayland
- It’s a class-compliant USB interface.
- Plug in, receive bacon.
- Consider holding off on Kernel 5.14+ for the time being.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Aeon Drive
Devel: 2Awesome Studio
Engine: Unity
Price: £10.99 / $14.99 / $17.49
Wazzat: Rush through the cyberpunk landscapes of Neo Barcelona in Aeon Drive, an action-platformer with a speedrunning twist! Whether solo or in up to 4 player co-op, sprint and dash through many areas of the neon-infused city – and use your time and space-bending abilities to get ahead.
Mandatory Disclosure: 2Awesome Studio sent us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- I’ve spent my time playing it @ 1080p and as you might have guessed it didn’t have an issue on the 2060.
- That said, it will sometimes develop a case of the chuggies for fk or all reason.
- Xblox1X worked out of the box and detects even after the game has started.
- Nice little soundtrack and well done hipster pixel graphics.
Fun?
- Lady and gents, what we have here is a speed running sample pack.
- I was meh on it until Ultimore & Strider started posting scores.
- Had a fun time driving down times this week in our Discord.
- You run, jump, teleport, die.
- You can go for completing the level or take a stab at seeing how quickly you can complete a level.
- There are several routes through each level, some paths require a level of precision & bullshittery that’s beyond me.
- The developer showed up during my livestream and dropped some protips that should have been in the tutorial.
- …I think this recent update put them in the tutorial, you’re welcome.
- If you want to try your hand at speedrunning give it a look.
- The only thing holding me back from telling you to run out and buy is the lack of online co-op or PVP.
- Remote Play doesn’t cut it even under the best of conditions and getting a group of frenemies over to play isn’t as simple as it use to be because reasons.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- Holds 60@UHD, as most 2D games should on a 108ti
- Very slim on the options.
- DS4 works OOTB with steam input, but the wrong glyphs
- It’s voice acted. They do a decent job, I just kinda want to not hear them
Fun?
- Making me sit through all the squeaky voiced dialogue at the start of the level is the easiest way for you to make me hate your game
- Seriously, just start me at the level. Don’t punish me anymore than necessary
- Good thing that stops with a quickness
- Making me do precision platforming in a very tight time window is the second fastest way to make me hate your game
- Huh, this isn’t looking too good for Aeon drive.
- I think maybe if this genre appeals to you, it might be worth a look
- Not for me though
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- Holds 144 at 2560×1440
- DualShock 4 worked out of the box with the correct prompts, no Steam Input required.
- The graphics are fairly standard 16bit-ish era hipster pixels.
- The soundtrack is pretty bumping! I actually found myself head-bobbing for a few seconds until I died again.
Fun?
- No, not for me.
- I don’t mind the “if at first you don’t succeed, die, die, die again”
- I like Dark Souls after all.
- What puts me off it’s that it’s another action hipster pixel platformer with the added stress of making it through the levels in as perfect a way as you possibly can.
- You have 30seconds, maybe a bit more if you collect-a-thon all the time capsules, to enjoy the level and then it’s either start back from the beginning or quit back to the main menu.
- I don’t like speedrunning.
- I like to take my time with video games, and Aeon Drive is antithetical to my enjoyment of it.
- But this is a personal thing, though making it a hipster pixel action platformer didn’t help me much either.
- It’s not a bad game, at all! I just don’t like it.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
