Linux Game Cast 498: Exsquarimental

Valve releases Steam Deck recovery images! Destiny 2 threatens to ban Linux gamers, Vkd3d-proton gives Elden Ring a speed boost, hackers leak NVIDIA source code.


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:49 Steam Deck recovery images
09:19 Steam Deck controller drift
11:39 Destiny 2 bans Linux gamers
15:09 Proton GE is GE Proton
17:41 vkd3d Elden Ring speed boosts
19:59 Ball Game: Round based racer
24:09 Going West on Deck
32:09 Hackers release Nvidia source code
39:19 DXVK 1.10 synchronization
41:49 Win32 is the stable Linux userland
46:49 Darkmod 2.10 gets god rays
49:39 Transistor based NEW emulation
52:49 Review: Guntech 2
01:04:00 Emails


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Deck recovery

  • And people are already digging through it
    • Rtheren was gnawing through it like quite the eager beaver in discord
  • The big revelation is that steam’s KDE theme is called vapor.
  • Please note that this image is made for Steam Deck and isn’t SteamOS 3 yet.
  • Great way to challenge the Linux community, Lawrence.
  • I tried booting it on the Ryzen laptop, it didn’t.


PAINC!

  • Thankfully steam input lets you set custom deadzones
  • Am I going crazy or has joystick production just ate shit in the quality department in the past couple of years?
  • Does the Switch not have a deadzone calibration thingy?
    • Yes and it sucks
  • Looks like it was an update that removed the deadzone entirely or made it significantly smaller.
  • Either way, they’ve pushed out another update and now the media/twitter are throwing all the shade at Nintendo.
  • In the meantime Nintendo is abusing the DMCA to take down emulator videos, again.


Deck of Destiny

  • At least they are being upfront about it.
  • Destiny 2 on Deck =’s banhammer.
  • Goddammit bungie, I wanna like your shit but then you pull stuff like this
  • Can’t collect data on people as effectively when you’re not running your spyware at kernel level.
  • No data, no money, no Linux.
  • But by all means, keep telling people it’s because Linux is full of “bad actors”.


GE 7.1

  • New naming convention, who dis
  • GE is now a fork of proton experimental instead of wine-staging so all the gamescope and input stuff are included by default
  • Pedro can play Onion Rings online now
  • Unity is less crashy
  • Woooo, Elden Ring pushing GE to get EAC working on ProtonGE!
  • Now that there’s controller and gamescope parity as well, this is just Proton with MFPlat


Vkd3d-proton

  • Elder ring enhancements.
  • Reduced CPU overhead for descriptor copy ops.
  • Don’t know what that is but it’s sound dope.
  • Pipeline library rewrite + shader model 6.6.
  • The current experimental (bleeding edge) has this version.
  • It reduces the herky jerks while walking around a bit
  • But my 1080 can still only barely muster 32 FerPS at 2560×1440

Steam: New Games

Ball Game

  • Speedrunners 3D on a budget?
  • 15 person multiplayer is pretty compelling
  • The screenshots give me a headache
  • I booped around in the playtest, it’s, rough.

Steam: Game Updates

Going West Patch 1.11.11.11.11.0

  • That might actually be an excuse to play through it for the third time.
  • I still haven’t tried one of the horses.
  • The macOS version is already fully compatible, in that it correctly does not run on Steam Deck
    • *slow clap*
  • Still one of the best RPGs on steam. I would absolutely play this again on the toilet. And then reach into that toilet to pull out an enchanted stinky ring

News:

DLSS Hax

  • Am I alone in thinking that Nvidida is the kind of company that would put out a hit on someone?
  • I don’t understand what the benefit of going public is for le hacker/s.
    • Power move, create a little bit of turmoil, see if NVidia cave a little bit.
      • There were some claims of a reverse ransomware attack.
  • It’s still NVidia, don’t think they’d put a hit out now since it’d be pretty sus, but they might make current market prices MSRP going forward because of “bad actors actions in recent past”
  • Well, Friday has come and gone.
  • I’ve seen not a peep of nvidia source code.


DXVK 1.10

  • The little blurb about D3D11_USAGE_DYNAMIC is like the most civil and high level backhanded explanation of why some games are straight up doing it wrong.
  • Love it!
  • GPU synchronization power utilization improvements will be nice on the deck once that gets pushed out
  • They fixed some aggressive thread synchronization behaviour that should help CPU bound games w/ dx9 and dx11


Win32 4 Lyfe

  • As it turns out, you can get more old Windows games running on Linux than old Linux games.
  • Heck you can get more old Windows games running on Linux than on Windows itself.
  • Operating systems suck!
  • I still maintain that this will be a long term problem for linux gaming in the future as we’re basically turning win32 into java
  • Wine can never hope to get full API completeness because a) the windows division at microsoft doesn’t want that to happen and b) as mentioned in the previous story, some developers just plain do it wrong
  • When will Windows not be compatible with Windows?


Darkmod 2.10

  • Someone finally fixed the load times!
  • They have quite the write up on it and it’s an emotional roller coaster.
  • I guess it’s because of the laptop I had at the time, but when playing Doom 3 originally it didn’t feel like the load time was that egregious.
    • Just stay away from the trolleys in coop
  • There’s now support for subtitles for almost everything in the game
  • Drag is less loud
  • One of the levels even has a fully implemented lady thief.
  • tdm_updater is obsolete and will NOT work to upgrade to TDM 2.10.
  • New mission management GUI + stability fixes.
  • Entity limits increased, like, 100K increased.
  • Oh gawd, rays.
  • Full female vocal set.


SistorNES

  • Still needs to be ported to linux
  • Transistor level emulation of the NES is neat, and by the dude who wrote the OG NES emulator too. I smell something of an obsession
  • This is nuts but I still love it.
  • I’d also like it if peeps out there have the chops and the time, to do this for all the older micros.
  • Your Spectrums and your Commodores, all emulated at that low a level.
  • Ideally also being able to run at native speed, but that can come later.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Guntech 2
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1885140/Guntech_2/
Devel: Jani Penttinen
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79

Wazzat: Guntech 2 is a return of the good old “cave flyer” shoot ’em ups genre. It’s a twin-stick shooter influenced by such classics as Thrust, Oids, Geometry Wars, and Asteroids. You can play in single-player, or couch co-op with up to 4 players!

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launches.
  • No windowed mode or resolution settings.
  • You have effects and music followed by on/off.
  • Have to use the keyboard to navigate the menu when no controller is present despite having a pointer on screen.
  • Picked up the xclone OOTB.
  • Can’t rebind controls in-game because Steam virt controller.

Fun?

  • The original Guntech was one of the launch titles for the Atari VCS.
  • Random fact that I ran across.
  • Anyone remember the VCS?
  • Guntech 2 is your standard 2.5D twin-stick top-down shooty pew pew.
  • I’m not a fan of how the ship flys and really not a fan of losing shield when I bump into walls.
  • I enjoy physics puzzles and top-down shooters but mixing the two, na.
  • My brain isn’t smart enough for that.
  • Also, the choose your own direction shooting mixed with “this one fires in the direction your ship is pointed” can go play in traffic.
  • I got to the first boss, the one that you can’t attack from behind.
  • First time legit bullet hell kicked in and I was murdered rather quickly.
  • Cheesed it from the bottom left of the screen but na.
  • That’s when I learned the weapons have a kickback and while a good attention to detail it’s extra suck for precise movement.
  • And for me I think that’s the kicker, precise movement.
  • Having to factor in forward/back momentum while shooting & dodging didn’t really do it for me.
  • At $20 this is a hard sell.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB
  • It’s programmer art, but it’s pretty decent looking programmer art
  • I dig the soundtrack. Decent guitar noodling
  • Tank controls? Really?
  • Your other option is the really floaty analog stick controls and that’ll just get you murderized
  • Keyboard is a little better, but not by much

Fun?

  • Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and say I did not have fun playing this game
  • Twin stick isn’t my genre on the best of days and this just ups the multiplier by having the fuckiest control scheme
  • I don’t wanna give Jani too much shit, cuz this seems to be his passion project.
  • He’s been hacking away at this type of game since the atari ST days
  • And far from me to yuck someone else’s yum, but this is definitely a yuck from me
  • Like venn said, especially at $20


Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launched out of the box
  • It holds 144 at 2560×1440
  • Which is good because it doesn’t really offer any graphical settings beyond the Unity presets
  • What’s that you’d like to disable Motion Blur and Chromatic Aberration? HAHA! No.
  • So smeary blurry graphics is all you’re getting.
  • You can’t change the controls that I could find, but they do have the arrow keys bound
  • And both xinput and dinput controllers seem to work just fine, if you don’t mind XBox/GabeGear prompts.
  • And you’re gonna wanna keep the mouse at hand if you’re playing with the controller, more on that after this message from your mom.

Fun?

  • Remember Retrobooster?
  • Playing Guntech 2 makes me want to go back and give Retrobooster an extra chair.
  • Guntech 2 does much of the same, fly your spaceship into walls, pew pew the enemies, and land haphazardly near the dudes to “rescue” them.
  • There’s the repulsor devices and tractor devices which alter the physics of your flight and you have a limited time to get through the level.
  • Standard stuff for the genre.
  • The thing that Retrobooster did better than Guntech is in the feedback
  • Flying around in low gravity is supposed to feel floaty, that’s kinda the whole shtick in fact, but Retrobooster did it better by making good use of sound and tiny little visual clues and screen shakes to indicate impact, either from the projectiles or from your ship ramming nose first into the wall.
  • The feedback in Guntech is… well, I don’t want to resort to name calling, but the word piddly describes it perfectly.
  • It’s so barely there it’s basically non-existent.
  • Except for the bosses, the bosses and their big models will flash white when you hit them.
  • And since they take up most of the screen, I genuinely hope you’re not of the photosensitive persuasion.
  • Guntech 2 is not a bad gamel, it just doesn’t feel good to play.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Windows on Deck

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