M.2 mods shorten the life of Steam Decks, Crypt of the NecroDancer gets its first update in 5 years, Unity lays off 4% of their workforce, Xonotic 0.8.5 brings the pretty, and we celebrate 25 years of Simutrans. Then Inscryption faces, the Chairqasition.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:54 M.2 Steam Deck MODs
08:50 Valve silently downgrades the Steam Deck
12:33 Steam Deck client beta update
14:10 SteamOS 3.3 beta update
17:10 GE Proton fixes Fall Guys
20:10 Fadeout Underground
22:50 Vermintide EAC woes
26:30 Crypt of the NecroDancer update
32:59 Unity lays off 4% of their workforce
37:49 Bridging the X & Wayland gap
42:29 Wine 7.12
45:08 Xonotic gets pretty
46:38 25 years of Simutrans
48:15 Review: Inscryption
58:56 Email
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- If you were thinking of doing the M.2 2242 mod, don’t.
- You’d actually be restricting the airflow across the charging IC, and that’s the big hotspot if you’re charging while playing.
- Yeah, messing with the heat transfer in tightly packaged systems like this isn’t usually advisable unless you’re sticking a mini 212 on the back.
- Are you in the market for shorter battery life and potential thermal runaway?
- A fun and wacky MOD that “will significantly shorten the life of your Deck.” ??
- Some 256GB and 512GB models will ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD.
- Betting this came down to availability of parts.
- But don’t stealth change hardware specs.
- Shouldn’t make much of a/any difference in terms of loading times or even OS boot.
- I have yet to see a game pull more than 100MB/s continuously for any amount of time.
- You really want that burst speed and 2GB/s of maximum speed should still be plenty.
- It is still a shit thing to do without a proper announcement!
- Unfortunate, but I guess that’s what you gotta do to preserve whatever profitability margin the steam deck actually has.
- Small-ish updates to go along with the new SteamOS
- Korean, Japanese, and Chinese keyboard variants
- Fixed a few crashes
- They added a proper force quit for linux native games
- Gyro and button chords have been added to the steam input configurator
- Oh, a built-in controller driver that takes effect when Steam isn’t running in desktop mode.
- Probably just the old XPad driver with the correct bindings for all the buttons.
- New mesa/radv
- No longer need to disable Wifi power saving in Dev Mode to stop the constant wlan disconnect-reconnect.
- No longer burns CPU cycles for echo cancellation if you’re not actually using the mics
- Some better support for external displays and capture cards
- I guess steam deck streaming is a thing now
- It disabled esync and fsync to prevent random crashes with Fall Guys.
- It’s always some random shite like that, right?
- Got a few spite-crashes in the menu.
- 7.24 also released with improved ultra-wide support
- Also lets you create your own FSR resolution
- Handy guide for setting and customizing your own FSR resolutions. So far you can only set one at a time though
Steam: New Games
- Team Furries 2?
- The dropdown menu for resolution selection is empty.
- Thus concludes my review.
Steam: Game Updates
- They clicked on boxes, but it didn’t work.
- Was this the same person who wrote the EAC fanfic?
- They really don’t want to do it.
- I wish they’d just come out and say: “We don’t like Linux and we don’t want our game to work on that OS.”
- No no no.
- They don’t like the Steam Deck and hate money.
- It would make it so much easier.
- You know what? I believe these guys when they say that it didn’t work out of the box. That was bound to happen
- What they don’t want to do is devote development effort to fixing it cuz the people they have who know what they’re doing are working on the new game.
- But like I dunno, maybe fixing it in this situation would identify the issue long term so your future games can work on proton with EAC? HMMMMMMMM
- The best you can hope for is having a developer flip the bits and see if it works.
- Thing is for older titles, most people already have the game, they just want to play it on their Steam Deck.
- Not going to get a bunch of new sales so they’re not going to put in the effort.
- Bard mode.
- The Deck is now bringing games back to life
- Damn this is a big update
- I guess their new game is using the same base as this, so they’ve done and fixed it up good
- Minimum linux system requirements got bumped to ubuntu 18.04
News:
- The company confirmed to Protocol that it would be laying off around 4% of its staff.
- Employees are receiving severance pay, as well as 30 days to find jobs internally.
- Last year, Unity purchased the digital effects studio Weta—founded by film director Peter Jackson and known for its work on the Avatar and Lord of the Rings films—for $1.62 billion.
- The ouch is that the CEO told employees last week there would be no layoffs.
- That’s shady as fuuuuuuck
- A bunch of the cuts seem to be centred around the AI and Engineering departments
- Approximately 300-400 people have got the axe
- Seems like unity was trying really hard to diversify and secure some additional revenue streams via breaking into Movie FX, hence the weta purchase
- They’re struggling to compete or at least secure that sweet sweet infinite growth shareholders and board members seem to believe is possible
- This will allow distros to drop the Xorg server but still ship X11-only desktops like Xfce and Mate.
- It might, but I will be looking for a Desktop that does not require a compatibility layer when the time comes.
- Bonus Soda: it also probably bridges the gap to run a bunch of X11 specific tools in Wayland.
- A lot of this has to do with improving Xwayland’s ability to run in a rootful mode
- faking device/cursor grab for fullscreen applications like desktops
- Desktop integration for setting arbitrary resolutions
- The ability to specify fixed geometry instead of having a surface equal to the area of all monitors
- Host grab support (shift-alt to release)
- The ability for the compositor to kill the main wayland window in rootful mode
- I think the internal VKD3D update is probably the big one.
- And maybe the Star Citizen crash fixes
- Quake 3 map compatibility.
- Several official maps have been significantly updated and old clients will have issues with these maps on current servers, or vice versa.
- Yeah, it is still Xonotic.
- Might look bit fancier, I can’t tell.
- The default bot skill is now 8 instead of 1. Somebody’s gonna click through that and get a not fun surprise
- Dedicated duels
- Freeze tag got an overhaul too
- Interactive timeline and all:
- https://simutrans.github.io/
- 25 years is a long time to keep a community going, though it is the kind of game that lends itself to that.
- Went open source in 2007, put in the debian repos in 2008
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Inscryption
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1092790/Inscryption/
Devel: Daniel Mullins Games
Engine: Unity
Price: £16.79 / $19.99 / $22.79
Wazzat: Inscryption is an inky black card-based odyssey that blends the deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror into a blood-laced smoothie. Darker still are the secrets inscrybed upon the cards…
Mandatory Disclosure: Daniel Mullins sent us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB.
- Windowed & fullscreen with resolution options.
- OpenGL powered… how retro.
- Getting somewhere between 90 & 140 at UHD.
- No option for limiting framerate so the GPU is always maxed out for fk all reason.
- Unless the options menu plays into the game it should be nominated for an unnecessary bullshit award.
- Can’t. Rebind. Controls.
- This is some extra nonsense since you could have a leanback experience with just the mouse but nope, have to bring the keyboard along to tap W and S.
Fun?
- Do you enjoy killing squirrels?
- First act opened strong for a card game.
- You get cards, pliers, bones, fans, and bottles.
- Then you do the typical card game thing.
- Granted, one of the cards gives you hints and that was neat.
- You can get up and walk about the cabin but it’s Myst movement.
- Unfortunately the story / card game ratio fell out of whack around the 50 minute mark.
- Then again, I only showed up for the ZOMG Pony Island flavoured shenanigans.
- I was expecting bizarre brain-scratching indie horror nonsense in the guise of a deckbuilder.
- Nope, Inscryption is a card game first, so you best like that bit.
- Strongly suggest downloading the demo.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- Hold 60@ UHD
- Controls are point and click, with some light wasding for the escape room segments
- Card stats are power and health, monsters have costs enumerated on them, and without spoiling too much there are few different ways to summon monsters
- You also get some single use items to help you out if you feel you’re not using your teeth and such
Fun?
- The design philosophy of Inscryption is “here is a basic little card game you can play against a computer. Once you understand the rules it’s your job to break the game wide open”
- And cheese you must if you want to survive
- An example of mine was my first soul card, “Pinchy fucker”. With a 1 cost, 4 power + the mantis fork ability he would end any match at turn 1
- Funnily enough, the first couple runs through the game have a cheese guard on the bosses. If you take them out in one turn, they’ll just throw out a shit ton of high power high health monster to just ruin your day
- Stinky squirrels were a favourite strategy of mine until I discovered infinite squirrels. Then my hand got a little too big
- So full disclosure, I’m a dirty cheater who watched Jesse Cox play through this game last year, and as such I’m aware of all the spoilery stuff. Suffice to say, the plot is fantastic and weird, and the game within the game is pretty wacky. You can look for the write up on your own if you want to learn about Hitler’s Yugioh deck
- It doesn’t fucking matter though, the card games are too so good. It feels great to just create these massively overpowered combos and just blow through opponents.
- Once you’re done with the main campaign I highly recommend Casey’s mod.
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launched out of the box
- No VSync, that I could find.
- So the FerPS were all over the place on the desktop
- On the Deck it respected the refresh rate but that’s because VALVe made it default to Proton
- Though on the Deck it just emulates mouse and keyboard with the analogs and trackpads, so it’s less than ideal there too.
- Great atmosphere it creates, everything is exaggerated and a little stilted.
- Good creepy!
Fun?
- Speaking of, I didn’t really like Pony Island.
- I didn’t like the 4th wall breaking and I generally tend to lose interest in the game when that happens hamfistedly
- Undertale comes to mind, and even Superhot for an example of doing it exceptionally badly.
- Inscryption however thus far as show very little sign of such breakery.
- And that’s good because I’m basically playing a creepy Slay the Spire and I fucking love it!
- There’s definitely other stuff going on
- There’s the escape room type of situation where you can go around the cabin solving other puzzles to get more cards, or items you can use
- There’s a lot to uncover here and I’m going to have to play some more to find out exactly what the deal is.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
