Steam on Chromebooks is now a thing! NVIDIA is working on Gamescope, Steam Decks get opt-in feedback, and RIP RetroArch Playtest.
Special thanks to:
Aldius – Valheim
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:32 Steam on Chrome OS (alpha)
08:52 Proton experimental updates
10:57 Steam Deck opt-in feedback
15:52 ChimeraOS in Steam Deck
17:12 Amazing Steam UI consistency
19:47 Dracula’s Revenge
23:22 RIP RetroArch Playtest
31:07 Mysterious Intel announcement
35:17 Gamescope for Nvidia
38:37 DXVK 1.10.1
40:37 GPU screen recorder
45:02 Open Golf
46:56 Review: Hyperbolica
58:56 Email
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- It’s finally here! Kinda
- There’s actually a pretty decent selection of games that are verified
- If the iris mobile GPUs can actually do some decent punching, you could have an argument for a decent google gaming platform.
- Hopefully at least on par with the deck.
- That’s a list of $6/700 Chromebooks.
- Core i5 or i7 processors, and at least 8GB of RAM.
- Alpha means anything can break.
- I look forward to seeing if ChromeOS Flex runs this, since my Chromebook proper apparently is falling out of support in June and only has a Celeron.
- Fall in Labyrinth, King of Fighters XIII, Montaro, Metal Slug 2, Metal Slug 3, Double Dragon Trilogy, Baseball Stars 2, ATRI -My Dear Moments- are the new playable games
- Lots of random little fixes
- Update to the latest released vkd3d-proton
- It was more of a wording update since the bleeding-edge Proton Experimental is pulling directly from git, so that’s the one that’s actually running the current development version.
- They are not crowdsourcing the compatibility testing process.
- They are asking the crowd ™ if the system works and will alter things based on the feedback.
- There is a difference.
- I stopped Elden Crack since the battery was down to 10% after around 2 hours and it prompted me if I wished to contribute.
- I answered yes since I figured that’d be fair to ask of the Early Access Adopter crowd.
- Recaptcha for game compatibility isn’t a bad thing. That’s ultimately how you train these algorithms, so comparing against human control means they are actually trying
- They recommend a $800+ dollar Chromebook to use it.
- Feature parity with Windows! Woot!
- I gotta wonder what’s so special about the audio out here that everybody is having problems?
- This is not a collection of Steam over the years, nay.
- This is Steam in 2022.
- You can use them to carbon date when each UI element was last worked on.
- You can tell this person doesn’t have a Deck because there’s quite a few missing there.
- I guess there isn’t a consistency initiative at valve.
- Either that or the dudes in that pod are just collecting paychecks
- If it aint’ broke don’t fix it?
Steam: New Games
- Want some more OG Castlevania in your life after you played through all the bloodstained prequels and somehow got tired of listening to the excellent Rondo of Blood Soundtrack?
- Five bucks for levels + hard mode seems decent, and the reviews seem to really like it
- Apparently the soundtrack isn’t that great, but why fret when you can listen to rondo of blood again?
- Looks like a DOS port of Vania.
- They tacked on that mustache, damn.
- Any Potato Linux is recommended.
Steam: Game Updates
- Uh oh, they’re centralizing deployment of an appimage on steam.
- That’s a no no for some reason.
- Nice of them to include instructions for moving your bits.
- I guess the Playtest was working well enough that people didn’t really bother to get the full version.
News:
- Boy, we got a date for, something.
- Smartphone, IntelDeck, top-heavy lappy?
- I don’t look like a release date & pricing info for ARC.
- The main blocker is VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier but it is being worked
- Apparently between the nvidia driver and gamescope, there are more than 1024 file descriptors per vkfence, which exceeds the defaults of most systems
- That is exactly the default cap in quite a few distros.
- This can apparently be handled by a rewrite of gamescope’s vkfence subsystem or on the nvidia driver end
- Joshie already has something ready to push to see if it helps.
- I look forward to moving this box to Wayland and getting my gamescope on, outside of the GabeGear.
- Initial support for shared resources.
- Currently, only basic 2D texture sharing between D3D9 and D3D11 is supported when using DXVK for both APIs.
- Speed bump for Ass Creed 3 and BF.
- Fixed frame pacing issues on AMD with the latest GOW patch.
- Very performant screen recording on linux.
- Gotta patch your nvidia drivers if you don’t have a quadro or a tesla
- You’d think nvidia would throw out that limitation given general availability, but fuck that noise give us money
- The replay (and just recording in general) functionality being available without having to run full OBS in the background is probably the most welcome thing.
- Does not work when using gtk client side decorations (such as on Pop OS).
- No love for AMD, yet.
- There is a plugin to use NvFBC with OBS, it works.
- New nvenc is still in testing hell for OBS.
- Browser based GILF
- Linux & Android as well.
- Even has a nifty in game editor.
- Very simple mini-golf game built in C.
- Comes with some GLSL code for your shading purposes.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Hyperbolica
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1256230/Hyperbolica/
Devel: Code Parade
Engine: Unity
Price: £13.49 / $16.99 / $19.49
Wazzat: Hyperbolica is a whimsical Non-Euclidean adventure with mind-bending worlds full of games, puzzles, mazes, and secrets! Immerse yourself in reality-warping geometries where lines can never be parallel, horizons are curved, and space grows exponentially.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Clean bill of health on the working bits.
- As you might have guessed it can do 60 @ 2160p.
- Xclone picked up OOTB and the default keymap was sane.
- Options for windowed and fullscreen.
Fun?
- This is a cool game mechanic demo but that’s where I’m at.
- In my 59 minutes I have collected a map, walked in the woods, visited a cold wall, and failed to find the kitchen in a restaurant.
- Oh, I found a watch in a bottle at the beach as well.
- Aaaand was bounced from a museum because I was not on the guest list.
- I did spend some time bouncing on the trampoline.
- That’s where I’m at.
- 59 minutes in and waiting for the “oh shit” clever moment to kick in.
- It didn’t.
- I may be a simple ancient Greek mathematician from Alexandria but a game is supposed to, ya know, game.
- Hyperbolica might just be a wee advanced for my simple brain-meats because I don’t get it.
- I’ll stick with my smooth brain puzzle games like Superliminal.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- Holds 60@UHD on “maximum”, although there isn’t really a lot going on
- I swear every quirky physics indie game uses this exact same soundtrack
- Controls are wasd
Fun?
- The hyper sonic lion tamer gives me a headache
- I’m able to power through it eventually, but damn, it hurts my brain
- After wandering through a city for a while, I talked to an oracle who told me to find a farm
- I was then tasked with exterminating gophers. Which, to it’s credit, the game does give you the strategy. Unfortunately, it’s find a beeg gopher and fire until it decides to show it’s noggin again
- Rinse repeat 10 times
- I do appreciate the effort to do something innovative. The three maps and how they combine to orient your euclidian brain was interesting
- But oh god my brain. It physically hurts.
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- On the Steam Deck it holds 60FPS on the maximum preset at 1280×800
- Controller bindings are sensible and they work out of the box.
- Can’t really complain about the controller inputs but I can about the keyboard ones.
- On this box I tried playing it with mouse and keyboard to record the video.
- It’s WASD only (the directional arrows do nothing) and you can’t rebind the controls.
- Minus one chair right off the bat.
- The graphics are pretty simple and there’s not really any voice acting involved.
Fun?
- Meh.
- As a videogame, it’s pretty mediocre.
- It’s a bunch of fetch quests to make way for the overarching fetch quest.
- As a tech demo and proof of concept, it’s alright.
- Some of the puzzles actually do actually require you to make use of the hyperbolic, non-euclidean physics.
- But the thing that stuck out to me was how whenever I started moving my character in game, either on the Deck or on this box, my upper torso leaned back by itself to try and compensate.
- Kudos! Your video game directly impacted me in the real world.
- Unfortunately, the impact was just vertigo.
- I would give it two chairs but not allowing people to rebind controls in 2022 is beyond inexcusable.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
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