Linux Game Cast 486: Surly Access

Valve reveals an exclusive case for the Steam Deck, 12GB Nvidia 2060 benchmarks, resurrecting LEGO® Universe with open-source, and a working DayZ launcher for Linux.

Special thanks to:
Bradleypariah  (gift from the wishzone)


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:25 Steam removes game over DMCA claim
10:15 Exclusive Steam Deck case
12:55 7 Days to Die Aplha 20
15:15 Blasphemous free DLC update
18:15 Neverwinter Nights pathfinding & render updates
25:35 GTX 2060 12GB benchmarks
30:35 DayZ Linux launcher with MOD support
33:35 GNOME input latency
37:29 LEGO Universe MMO server remake
41:15 WINE 7
44:14 Review: Drox Operative 2
56:20 Emails


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steam nukes thieves

  • How did they manage to get anything based on ARK to function?
  • Apparently someone from the ARK team went over to Angela Game
  • There’s a lot of suspiciously similar content/systems to ARK
  • Once they looked at the sauce, it was a very clear copypasta. Didn’t even change the
  • variable names.
  • They have a “we’re innocent” response on their webzone.
  • Steam was the only place they sold the game.
  • Outside of YT people don’t really go through the trouble of filing bogus DMCA claims.
  • This was presented to Valve on 1st December who swiftly delisted the game on Steam on 3rd December.
  • This thing launched in EA this november so it’s not like they were pulling a Nintendo.
  • Part of me wants to believe Steam requires some damnable proof before smashing the nope button.


512 Decks

  • Out of all things to make exclusive.
  • The 512GB model comes shipped in a carrying case.
  • The outer Steam Deck logo is a different color, the zipper pulls are different, and the case’s interior fabric is different.
  • All that PLUS a separate drawstring pouch for the power cord, and a microfiber cleaning cloth.
  • Basically, wait a few months and yoink one from Aliexpress for $5.
  • Why can’t they be like Apple and just charge $15 for the cleaning cloth

Steam: Game Updates

Seven days Alpha 20 Experimental

  • Is this the last holdout in the perpetual Early Access category?
  • Eight years later and they are still pumping out the updates.
  • They’ve improved modding support and twitch integration along with animations.
  • Over 200 new whatever the hell POI’s are.
  • All that , plus a robotic companion drone to carry yo shite.
  • I think so, and it doesn’t look like it’s any closer to being “finished” – Whatever the hell that means.
  • There is a lot of new stuff in this patch, so it’s not like they’re not doing anything.
  • Still, in the live service era, you might as well slap a 1.0 on it
  • It’s what the cool kids are doing


Wounds of Eventide

  • I’m not opposed to taking pages out of the hollow knight playbook
  • If you’re pretty far in the game you may have gone past much of the new content
  • Good!
  • That means I can finally do my second playthrough without feeling like I might miss something if I progress too far.
  • I started the second playthrough twice already, and both times when the new content drops happened I was already too far along to get it.
  • This would have been the third time!
  • Fixed grammar errors in the lore descriptions and items’ names because some dork complained about it.


Never Pathfinding Nights

  • I played some more NWN when they added the fancy new textures.
  • I noticed the pathfinding was very b0rked.
  • My wizard’s familiar went halfway around the map to disable a trap on a door it had a straight line of sight and movement to.
  • Coming from a TTRPG background, all this talk of Neverwinter NIghts and Pathfinding gets a little confusing
  • Get some JSON array functions in your scripting engine cuz why not.

News:

2060 Super Duper XL

  • This is a FSM damned mining card plain and simple.
  • No announcement from Nvidia.
  • Hashes like a mother.
  • Slower than a 2060 Cape edition.
  • Expect pricing to be between $5/700 because fk you that’s why.
  • I want to believe miners will go for these and not the 30 series but that’s not going to happen and you wanna know why?
  • Something every other tech show predicting that will happen is forgetting something, ROI.
  • Nobody is going to pay medium dollar for these already outdated cards in a few years.


DayZ Linux launcher

  • Huh, so the launcher is borked in proton, but the game itself isn’t
  • So they made their own launcher with blackjack (bash) and hookers (hookers)
  • You need the Steam Battleye Runtime
  • Another example of a kernel vm.attribute that needs to be increased, to run Windows games.
  • First it was the sheer amount of file descriptors needed because of esync spawning a new thread for each job and now you need to tell the kernel to allow a process to map even more RAM than it used to.
  • These are the interesting tidbits that are making Linux Gaming better.


GNOME Input Latency

  • Apparently this is an interim step as there will be better handling of input in wayland proper. Eventually…
  • Not limiting the input count to whatever your compositor is syncing to is pretty much why by default fullscreen windows would not be composited in the olden days.
  • Or why to this day KDE will nuke its compositor if you start a video game/media player by default.
  • Looks like GNOME is finally doing something about it after years of people complaining that they either get tearing or input latency, unless they have an NVidia card.


Dark LEGOs

  • Congrats to the darkflame Universe team on hitting 1.0
  • Open sourcing it is a fantastic way to celebrate it.
  • This is really cool and I’m glad to see it.
  • This game was nuked after two years so it never had much of a playerbase.
  • At this point I’m not touching a MMO unless there is some kind of guarantee the server code will be made public when the project nopes.
  • Yes, I just said I won’t be playing a MMO ever.
  • You still need the OG client files, there’s a few people out there hosting them.
  • Seems to be a small scale server, with the devs here heavily discouraging mass deployment.
  • I’m sure someone will make a proper mass server like they did for Need for Speed World and Rusty Hearts.
  • I look forward to it


WINE 7

  • They even fixed the “51915 character just run to the left and everything” bug.
  • Which if you ask me is impressive!
  • Also fixed a stack overflow on a porny visual novel!
  • Everything on the unix/linux side has been moved over to the syscall dispatch interface, which should help in the long term with anti-cheat compatibility\
  • What’s the over/under on proton-ge-7.0 releasing just after we finish recording?

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Drox Operative 2
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1305310/Drox_Operative_2/
Devel: Soldak Entertainment
Engine: Custom
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79

Wazzat: Drox Operative 2 is a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy, and co-op multiplayer for Windows and Linux.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • On a technical level everything worked out of the box.
  • Game audio needs adjusting because you’re clipping out of the box on the title screen.

Fun?

  • Fly around, blow shit up, manage some spreadsheets.
  • Did I miss anything?
  • Drox Operative 2 has an interesting mechanic that forces the player to constantly fight a miniboss while playing.
  • While there is no official name for this miniboss I have named him, the game’s UI.
  • It’s a crowded popup information over.. Hang on, let me click on this new giant green question mark.. Load.
  • I could never fully decipher the interface and nothing in the game enticed me to.
  • I spent 50 minutes clicking around and blowing shit up.
  • It’s not my jam but if you’re a fan of Drox Operative it has more of that.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Holy tiny window batman!
  • I had a full resolution list unlike Pedro
  • The controller rumbles. So much
  • You have the option at the beginning of mouse or keyboard movement. No way in game to change that once it’s set
    • Allow basic mouse move in the UI Options.
      • Well aren’t I fuckin’ blind
  • The graphics are pretty simple. I though the soundtrack was surprisingly bumping.
  • I guess we’re just stuck with electro as space music. Unfortunate

Fun?

  • I actually enjoyed it quite a bit
  • It’s just spaceship diablo and I guess I’m into it
  • It’s pretty sandboxy. Lots of factions to maneuver around, lots of fog of war and secrets to uncover
  • You got six win conditions and 3 lose conditions, so there are lots of ways you can attack things
  • Plus since every playthrough is randomized, there’s quite a bit to keep it fresh
  • Sometimes you try to be a nice guy to a species, give them the benefit of the doubt cuz they’ll probably make strong allies and then wipe them out cuz they don’t know a good deal when they see it
  • At one point i looked up at the clock and realized that about 90 minutes had passed
  • I figure this would actually be pretty fun with multiplayer. Unfortunately playing over the network requires everybody to do some port forwarding and a direct connection
    • They don’t even let you do DNS, you gotta punch in the IP
  • Still, the single player is more than enough to tickle my pickle. It’s a fun little fuck around simulator


Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launches out of the box
  • The resolution choices seem to be 1024×768 or 6400×2160 for me.
  • Had to track down the config file: ~/.local/share/DroxOperative2/User/user.cfg
  • There’s a tickbox for “Sync to screen”, but it doesn’t seem to do anything.
  • Hence the 150-400 FerPS you can see on the gameplay footage.
  • You could probably play this with just the mouse, but using WASD or the cursor keys for movement seems to be the preferred method.
  • There’s some weird upbeat music which doesn’t really fit the space theme terribly well.
  • But the lasers go pew and missiles go woosh.

Fun?

  • I don’t know if this will be fun if you’ve never played a Soldak game.
  • If you have, and it doesn’t matter which one you’ve tried, this is more of that with a space theme.
  • Whether you played Din’s Curse/Legacy, Zombasite, or the previous Drox Operative, you already know what your feelings are towards Drox Operative 2.
  • You have a scenario which you can configure to your liking, and you have a multitude of ways to solve it.
  • Do you want to eradicate all the other races in the sector? Do you want to get them all to work together and help you as the titular Drox Operative to reach the win scenario? Do you want to fuel the war between the different races and sit back as they drain their resources and run out of credits and spaceships? These are all viable options.
  • And if you’ve explored all the different options Din’s Legacy offered and would like a change of scenery, why not play more of it but in space?
  • If it weren’t for the resolution cock up, I’d give it 4 chairs.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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