Game developers share their thoughts on the Steam Deck, CodeWeavers is looking for a Linux QA gaming human, a new compatibility layer for the Glide API, and adding FSR support to SteamOS.
Special thanks to:
Phil8o (new pat)
Kraken (new pat)
Nubbn (inc pledge)
Aldius: Star Wars game
Game-mo-tron: Hook scale
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:34 Developers love Deck
11:27 SteamDB Deck verification system
13:37 Steam Beta cloud sync update
17:01 FSR for Game Scope
21:11 FutuSim
31:21 Nvidia Linux driver news
35:01 Google Stadia is now Google Stream
38:36 Zombie Glide for modern systems
41:26 CodeWeavers QA position
45:26 Flare RPG 1.13
47:21 Pixel Wheels 0.22.0
49:46 Review: Aquamarine
59:16 Emails
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Sekai Project dev brings up something people need to talk about, support.
- Others talk about how their games “just work”.
- Sometimes just work means slamming everything down to low.
- To be fair the two devices they released which they no longer support were marred in their share of controversy.
- The Areola Controlla was fairly divisive and ran up against someone’s now questionable patents.
- And the Steam Link basically undercut all of the Steam Machine third party hardware partners.
- And you could make the argument that the mobile app/linux software of the same name is still very much supported.
- If this was Google, I’d be worried about that.
- But even if they do drop support, you still have a fairly powerful portable Linux computer.
- I think for the most part people will be willing to overlook some of the PC compatibility shortcomings once people start getting emulators running on it
- This is what happens when you got several years of proton ramp up preceding your hardware launch and now have games on your platform. At least steam learned their mistake from last time
- That said, I think now would be a good time to start investing in better facilities for testing windows apps with WINE since we’re putting all our eggs in the proton basket.
- The Linus kid said he was going to use the Deck as his primary PC for a month.
- I guess the previous thing paid pretty well.
- There’s quite a few of them.
- Looking through the list of unsupported ones it’s all VR and Anti-Cheat except Persona 4 and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris.
- Rip games work. It’s now being replaced by the thumbs-up-o-meter
- Now you can cross reference, which is real handy
- The SteamDB search doesn’t really give a good method of parsing out the compatibility results. That’ll need to be improved
- Manual retry on failed cloud sync, display of the last sync time and better management of offline behavior
- This follows the announcement of sync on suspend last week and this stuff will probably be extra necessary now that there’s the possibility of save file juggling shenanigans
- Update sync failure / conflict dialogs
- People have only been complaining about that since they were introduced.
- Hell, for the short period I did some translations for Steam that dialog was one of the first I went looking for because the original Portuguese translation was shit
- To be fair, it was a pretty accurate translation because the original text was nigh-on incomprehensible.
- So is this why the FSR hack hasn’t made it to proton proper?
- That means small picture mode can give you HUD control of the CAS/upscaling settings without needing a damn novel’s worth of launch flags.
- That Joshie boi is at it again.
Steam: New Games
- Realistic future physics.
- Not a fan of sim racing myself but this might be someone’s jam.
- Check out dat ass on dat car!
- I feel like I shouldn’t stare when that thing is that THICC
- Yeah, the person who designed this might just be a carfucker
News:
- Just new card support if you’re on long lived
- Beta gets the nvidia-powerd rollout that previously plagued pedro’s DBUS queue
- Only works on Ampere + Intel comet lake or better
- Supposedly gets you a better power/performance ratio on laptops
- As foxy brought up in discord, no VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier so no gamescope.
- It will be ready in time for the Nvidia Deck.
- You know Nvidia is going to make a Nvintel powered… something.
- Heeeey, I can go back to the PPA.
- In fact, I did on Wednesday when the PPA peeps pushed it out.
- Updated nvidia-bug-report.sh to search the systemd journal for nvidia-powerd logs.
- October… That bug has been a thing since October.
- They definitely install
- I feel real bad for that one dude I had sushi with
- Confidence was never really there in the product from a market standpoint and it was kinda useless if you lived outside a city
- The peloton partnership is interesting. There’s definitely some potential market outside of gaming
- I am 100% shocked Googs has not pulled the plug on this.
- We knew this was coming with the Stadia powered goddamnbatman game on the ATT gaming beta, thingy.
- After nuking their game studio last year and the VP noping the hell out… I guess renting the hardware out is better than nothing.
- Pandemonium only for now.
- Dev is looking for a 3dFX card with which to test and deliver moar improvements.
- Built in Rust, because 2022.
- Gallium only, so you gotta be on radeon or have an IRIS GPU at the moment
- Minnesotans only.
- Listing “shower” in the perks section makes me wonder.
- BONUS: Small company. No strict policies or forms to fill out. You will get to know all of your coworkers.
- I don’t think that last one is as big a bonus as you think it is.
- At least not for people like me.
- Taking a stab at making things usable with a gamepad.
- It’s font month!
- SDL2 controller db support, hooray!
- Bonus of making it compliant with a certain input API based around boiling water.
- It’s still gray text on slightly different gray background
- RIP tar.gz, they’re just shipping an appimage now
- That seems acceptable
- Switching over to the sdl2 gamepad API rather than handling their own input with SDL joystick is gonna really simplify platform portability
- Bunch of new languages.
- Fixed the log jam.
- Fonts!
- “Congrats for this performance!”
- Feels a bit like a backhanded compliment.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Aquamarine
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1280750/Aquamarine/
Devel: Moebial Studios
Engine: Unity
Price: £11.39 / $14.99 / $17.49
Wazzat: A quiet survival adventure about perception and discovery in an alien ocean. Explore a planet reclaimed by nature. Cultivate new life to survive. Journey into unknown depths. Find your way home.
Mandatory Disclosure: Big thanks to the devs for sending keys on Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- The resolution options are a wee strange.
- High is fullscreen 2160p, medium is 1440 windowed, and low is 1080p windowed.
- You do get volume sliders for sound and a few other bits.
- Everything worked best I could tell.
- The art style has a hybrid ukiyo-e / pulp comic vibe going on. I can dig it.
- The soundtrack is on a mission to put a motherfucker to sleep.
Fun?
- Imagine being a planet, chilling out, doing planet things… then some rando crashes into you and names your planet ass Aquamarine.
- Yep, the planet is trying to kill you, aka, survival!
- This is a hidden object game with a isometric grid-based movement twist.
- Nanny bars, farming, grid-based movement, what’s not to love?
- Well, for one thing, permadeath.
- My ship ran out of moon beam healing crystals and my shit got reset.
- This was 30 minutes into clicking around the sea looking for a damn plant.
- Ya know what, fk that plant, fk the garden, and fk whoever thought up that pretentious arse-save system.
- Also, label the FSM damned buttons on the interface.
- That moon glyph nonsense is straight up hostile to players.
- If you’re a fan of the hidden object isometric grid-based permadeath survival genre give it a look?
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- The steam beta was generally fucking up and no input was working. Swapped back to stable and everything was gravy
- Not the game’s fault, just a note
- Clear labels. Your UI needs them
- Also, don’t make me click on text boxes to move to the next bit of dialogue. Just let me mash space or some shit
Fun?
- Holy fuck this game is so slow
- Never have I played an exploration game that is so determined to stop you from going places
- You got these really big, impressive hand drawn maps that you’d think are full of stuff to explore, but the grid you can move on ends
- There are a lot of systems that this game uses, and you get an explanation exactly once
- Seriously, I don’t want to decrypt stargate symbols, I just want to get to my minimap
- I really wanted to like this game. The vibe was neat and the art is super pretty
- But you fail to grab me in the first half hour of gameplay. That was your moment to tickle me with something
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- Holds 144 at 2560×1440
- It has a very relaxed soundtrack
- A very mellow art style in general
- Which contrasts rather sharply with the stressful situation your character person finds herself in.
Fun?
- No.
- I don’t want to rehash the show vs tell argument all that often, but in a game where the art style was clearly the focus, show me what’s happening instead of telling me!
- How do things happen? Oh, a text box shows up on screen…
- So you’re hiding the beautiful art and all actual gameplay for the sake of some text?
- Unfortunately for you game, I found myself having a better time watching someone else play it on Youtube than actually playing it myself.
- So it’s a game that despite the strong visual aspect, doesn’t actually show you much.
- Instead popping up a text box telling you what happened.
- It’s a game with very relaxed music, which constantly makes me stress about the energy levels.
- It’s a game with a story about a desperate struggle for survival on an alien planet, where every action is long winded and each “animation” and fade in/out is overlong and unnecessary.
- Aquamarine reminded me of Pavilion and that’s not a good thing.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
- I’m just saying watch out for Sierra lawyers. They got Microsoft money now
