Linux Game Cast 508: Conversational Train of Horse

NVIDIA releases open-source GPU modules! Per-game performance profiles for Steam Deck, Duke Nukem Forever 2001 build leaks, RIP LHR, and the Heroic Games Launcher gets 50 shades of pretty.

Special thanks to:
Rtheren: Blinky pump for ThreadBooper

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
07:28 Valve is back in court
15:02 Per-game performance profiles for Steam Deck
17:19 Steam client update
20:02 Shell Shock v1.1
22:32 Armello drops native Linux support
38:03 NVIDIA open-source GPU kernel modules
48:45 NVIDIA LHR defeated
52:15 Duke Nukem 4 Ever 2001 leaked
56:02 Heroic theme launcher
59:02 Review: Trigon: Space Story
01:12:08 Emails

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Valve in court

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/class-action/valve-loses-bid-to-end-antitrust-case-over-steam-gaming-platform

Judge Cogenhaur changed his mind, saying that 30% was okay for competing against brick and mortar stores, but now that those are dead it shouldn’t be as high
Requiring developers to have the steam price be the price floor is pretty scummy, but they’re not the only ones doing it
I’m still ok with VALVe getting a lower share if the game doesn’t get forums, or a community hub at all, doesn’t get access to the Steamworks VPN, the game is forever in Proton limbo, so if you want it on the Deck you have to have a native port, no trading cards, no wishlist metrics, nothing except the store page and depots to upload the game to.
Oh and you don’t get to generate keys to sell on third party websites.
I’d really like to see some competition for VALVe, especially on Linux, but all we seem to get are billionaire assholes who hate Linux.
Reminder: The selling of your game at a lower price outside of Steam only applies to steam KEYS sold elsewhere.

New on Deck

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/news

Per app performance profiles for non steam stuff is nice, especially if you’re using your deck as a portable emulation station
There’s already been a fix for the update
And it might need another fix because some controller settings are completely inaccessible right now.
If you want to invert Y on the right analog stick in the Steam Input UI, that bit of the settings just doesn’t open.

Client update

Oooo we’re getting some intel XE specific fixes for steam overlay
Other than that it’s just the ol’ beta roundup
“Fixed adding non-Steam shortcuts with spaces in the path”
- Hey! That only took what? Nine years?!

Steam: Game Updates

Needlessly Over Promised Tank Updates

Methinks the shellshock team may have done fucked up by keeping the mobile version and the desktop version of the game on different dev tracks
You can finally get your tank on while using your phone.
That version 1.1 has been getting teased since January.
At least it’s $4.99 and not P2W with crossplay enabled.

Armello Multiplayer updates (foxy)

Multiplayer has been a bit busted in the game for a while.
They were doing a crossplay update and their provider dropped support for OSX/linux.
On Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Mac OSX and Linux, forming Parties and Private Multiplayer games are currently unavailable.
They have been radio silent about what has been going on.
But no longer!
The studio behind Armello has two new games nearing release and don’t want to get review bombed is really sorry and promises regular updates from now on.
The Linux build will be swapped out for Proton, OSX users can get wrecked.

News:

Snowball fight

Only turing and newer are supported.
There are plans to work on an upstream approach with the Linux kernel community and partners such as Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE.
This is not upstreamable in its current form.
LAPSUS$ Hackers got their wish.
- “After evaluating our position and Nvidia’s, we decided to add one more requirement.”
- “We request that Nvidia commits to completely Open Source (an distribute under a FOSS License) ther GPU drivers for Windows, macOS and Linux, from now on and forever.”
- “If this request is not met, on Friday we will release the complete Silicon, Graphics and Computer Chipset Files for all recent Nvidia GPUs.”
Gamescope kinda works, allegedly.
The not good enough crowd is out in force.
Don’t let Perfect be the enemy of Good.
This seems to be mostly them open sourcing the shim it uses to access all the shared nvidia code
Much of the functionality is still going to be in blobs, but this is certainly a start
The real target of this seems to be server and HPC functions and easing the deployments in those environments
Well, you can think of these open source drivers like AMDGPU the shim.
These could in theory be made to load either nouveau or the nvidia proprietary blob
Why anyone would want to is beyond me.
What I want to see is Gamescope, proper wayland support, and improved packaging across all distros for the NVidia drivers in general.
I don’t want excuses like the Graphics Driver PPA not packaging beta or Vulkan specific driver releases, I want one package which will allow me to pick which version of the blob/nouveau to load.
Anything that’ll get me away from the frankly stupid requirement to kill the X session to install NVidia drivers.
At the end of the day this will result in NVIDIA cards working (for the most part) OOTB.

515.43.04 BETA

Oh mah gawd we actually got VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier
- Apparently the performance is poo tho
- Member to check your /etc/modprobe.d for an nvidia file. The .run file adds drm.modeset=0 in the nouveau blacklist file
They’re deprecating the warning for IGNORE_CC_MISTMACH because when most people run into it they just set the flag and move on because minor compiler version differences won’t really mean much on a modern OS.
Does this fix Fall Guys?
- Nupe
Remember kids, if you’re on Pascal these drivers are much the same as the others.
Gamescope support is nice but sure took them a long time to shit that one out.

OHNOES

We had a good run.
Some are speculating this came from the Nvidia leak.
Yeah, calling LHR a band aid solution was a bit of an optimistic take
It was so unhackable NVidia themselves released a driver which broke it completely for the 3060.

Dn4E

https://www.apogeeent.com/devblog/dnf-truth

Remaking Duke 3D in UE5 would at least get me to play a bit of it.
It’s amazing that so little of the game was finished given the development time.
This is confirmed to be the real deal.
It is Unreal Engine 1, like the final game.
Leaking in June.
The editor works.

Theme launcher

Bonnie Tyler theme when?
Heroic now comes with 5 built-in themes.
Platform install selection.
Update notifications.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Trigon: Space Story
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1226510/Trigon_Space_Story/
Devel: Sernur.tech
Engine: Unity
Price: £16.99 / $19.99 / $25.99

Wazzat: Trigon: Space Story sees you take command of your very own spaceship. Carry out tactical battles, defend your vessel against space pirates, and escape from enemy territory. On your voyages, you’ll face a slew of tricky decisions in your quest to uncover the mystery of the galaxy.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys on Curator Connect. Jordan Bought his copy

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Getting around 103 ferps @ 1080p YOLO.
30 @ 2160p Medium / 60 @ low.
Not a whole lot in the way of fast moving action going on so if you can hit 30 you’re good.
Windowed and fullscreen options.
Rebindable keys.
Acceptably pretty.

Fun?

Ever wish FTL had a Survival mode à la Metro 2033?
I get that it’s part of rogue-like games but, damn.
First game I was killed in while trying to read.
My first run must have been a RNG pity fuck because I almost lasted 40 minutes.
Made it to the station, made it to the robot planet, got my little robot buddy, was cruising back and SS because fk you that’s why showed up and three shotted me.
This is on easy mode mind you.
I did two far, far less successful runs after that trying to wrap my head around things but death, she comes quick & swift.
Learned not to let the captain die because blamo.
This led to saving the captain at all costs… then dying.
Granted, I was a bit shit are running around and repairing the ship.
It does have a nice upgrade system for the guns / shields / etc.
Yeah, Trigon never closed the game loop with me.
It manages to piss me off a little bit.
BUT getting noped so quickly prevents me from being invested and or coming back.
All this said, I think the developers made the game they wanted to make.
All of this is by design, not by accident.
They had the foresight to release a demo so you can taste the nonsense before committing.
If you like the idea of FTL but the grinding starts at lvl 0 this might be worth a look?

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB
Holds 180+@1080P
Ran a little poo for me on the ol’ 1080TI @UHD
Pretty space backgrounds
I dunno, the expanse kinda ruined me with the vertically stacked ships. Seeing everyone standing on a long flat horizontal plane seems wrong now
The Music straight up reminds me of beast wars. And that’s not a bad thing

Fun?

It hard. A lot harder than FTL
Part of that is because of the new systems trigon introduces. Now you have to worry about hunger, morale and a captain who takes his run and goes to hell when he dies
Not to mention your upgrades are split across two currencies now: Scrap (which you can use upgrade or heal yourself) and credits (which you can use to buy stuff or bribe people with certain special dialogue options)
This is a key difference, cuz it means that you can’t upgrade stuff as quickly as you want because you might want to save your scrap for upgrading your weapons, but if there isn’t a station in sight, you might be stuck at precariously low health for a while
Your crew can level up and get new abilities too. I think that’s cool, cuz the upper end stuff gives you access to some of the more broken species abilities in FTL like free power
I managed to complete the second quest given to me so far, but I was so low on health that I got blowed up by the third quest mini boss
So a couple tips for staying alive I found semi-helpful:
- Target oxygen, shields, helm and weapons in that order. The enemy AI prioritizes oxygen, so it’ll send as many people to fix it as quickly as possible so take advantage of it
- Don’t bother upgrading shields at first. L2 shields in FTL can get yout through most of the game. L2 Shields in trigon give you 10 extra seconds of safety. If you can get 2+ plasma turrets, you’re golden. Hull laser ftw
- Wanted level doesn’t matter. Mine out areas for as much stuff as you can
While it has FTL’s bones, it is a very different beast. Some of the changes to the base formula are pretty neat, while others seem a little unnecessary. I like it

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

It launches out of the box
The framerate is capped at 60
Disabling the frame limiter and toggling Vsync usually bring that up to 144, in most other Unity games.
Not this one!
In most Unity games we’ve come across, toggling the frame cap or vsync applies immediately.
Here you have to cut them both off, quit the game, and restart it.
At very low I can actually get 144Hz at 2560×1440, putting it on Ultra would only let it get up to 70-80.
It also doesn’t make a difference if you lower the graphics from Ultra to Low
Outside of reduced particle effects, it doesn’t seem to change much visually.
I think there was music, I’ll be nice and say it was unintrusive.

Fun?

I liked FTL
Not as much as Jordan, but I liked what it did.
Trigon wants to be FTL and expand on it, which is not a problem at all conceptually.
The problem is how completely broken and unbalanced some ships are.
If you’re looking at the video version, you will probably see / have seen 2 of my crewmates getting teleported out of my ship and into the enemy’s.
I didn’t do that, they did that.
Then you destroy the ship and goodbye crewmates.
If they manage to grab your captain, it’s game over.
Now, If this happens at the start that’s fine. Not much time lost.
If that happens an hour into a run, you’ll be pissed.
While FTL was hard but fair, Trigon is not.
And RNGeesus will fuck you up the first chance it gets.