Linux Game Cast 533: No Frank November

Emulating Proton Experimental on Arm64, AMD announces Radeon RX 7900 GPUs, Intel ARC firmware drama, speeding up Steam Big Picture (beta), and hipster-pixel roguelike survival mining done right.

Special thanks to:
Jalaud (new patron)
Byatcko (new patron)
Dspec12 (new patron)
Treesloth (Twitch sub)

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:08 LGC Trackmania server
05:25 Pedro microphone drop
STEAM NEWS
07:37 Over 100 languages for Steam games
09:21 Steam Big Picture (beta) acceleration
NEW GAMES
12:07 Space Tail
14:37 Skate Rift
16:47 Machine Gun Fury
GAME UPDATES
20:19 Sonority 1.5
NEWS
27:12 AMD 7900 XTXXT announcement
33:57 Intel ARC firmware drama
40:45 Super Tux Kart 1.4 with Vulkan
43:25 Heroic games launcher 2.5.0 Beta 2
46:51 FEX EMU 2211 runs Proton on ARM
REVIEW
50:57 Dome Keeper
EMAIL
01:06:21 Mekazoo

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

O meu hovercraft está cheio de steam

Big shout out to all the Steam translators who are effectively doing it for the occasional free game and coupons.
You can set a primary language for and secondary fallback languages if your primary isn’t available
Search by language is now a thing, and it’ll also affect your discovery queue

Big acceleration

Significantly less CPU use now.
Guess we know what was happening there.
Heeeey! A mention to the Steam Controller even if just the fix for the icons for the bumpers.
I wouldn’t mind Steam taking another crack at the Controlla.
UI is still a wee chuggy for me
- It does start a bit herky jerky but it smooths out after a few seconds for me.
- Some optimization still needed.
Quit big picture button works

Steam: New Games

Space Tail

Dog of War.
You can do doge rolls.
What’s with the Windows only demos?
I’m not calling this game out in particular but that’s hella common.
- Probably just an afterthought people don’t have
Big thanks to Longterm Games for sending us keys.

Skate Rift

First person skate game, WHAR VR integration?
- For the 3.5 linux users who have it?
OpenGL on windows and linux eh?
Pretty reasonably priced a fuck around and chill out simulator.
This looks more like Skatemania vs Tony Hawk.
No keyboard support, period.

Machine Gun Fury

Go Jimbo!
- The iconic trio of Suzy Uzi, Gunner Jimbo and Mini-Gun Floyd
Looks like a pretty decent contra clone and it’s got a demo
Who remembers the arcade game Guerrilla War?
It’s that minus the co-op and a bit of Contra tossed in.
Could be fun if you could play with someone else.

Steam: Game Updates

Sonority 1.5

Less left to guesswork on the tutorial.
Disk space and performance improvements, people like that Deck!
And ultra high quality for those folks who wanna take advantage of that XTX

News:

AMD announcement

They didn’t even compare it to the 4080.
That’s more than a little worrying.
Much like everything, wait for the reviews.
Worst case scenario, the 6900XTs will be a bit cheaper second hand.
AV1 encoding is there so now we wait for Tubes and Twitch to flip the switch.
AMD and Nvidia really want $1K to be the new norm for top-tier GPUs.
Let’s hope Intel is not chasing the low end of last gen cards next go round.
Coming to a scalper near you this December
24GB of vram is pretty spicy though
899 and 999 USD respectively is still a wee too rich for my blood
Guess we’re waiting for the digits on the 7800 and 7700
Will there be an XFX ITX XTX or will it forever be ATX +

Intel Inside GPU saga

Get. Absolutely. FKD. Intel.
That’s the most Intel thing I’ve seen in recent memory.
Can you imagine AMD pulling something like this with PSP?
I have to imagine this was an oversight, right?
Not a single tech tuber brought this up.
Not surprising, but certainly disappointing
You could maybe give them the benefit of the doubt for being the first release. Maybe they’ll drop the req for battlemage?
Maybe intel was hoping to blackmail AMD into licensing that tech for future mobos/cpus?
Otherwise this is a pretty sizable knife stabbed into Intel’s graphics.
This should be in big red letters on the front of the box.
I’ll take our price locked duopoly before I support this level of outright nonsense.
If you picked up an Arc out of curiosity, RMA it.
Ok, so you don’t need an Intel CPU to update the firmware but you do need to be on X86 if you want to work at all.
The Ars Technica article has been updated now to reflect Intel’s statement.
If Intel’s statement is accurate, then the issue on Linux may just be a limitation of how fwupd implemented it or just poor wording on the git page.
Though I can’t imagine this kind of news will make the top people at Intel feel like keeping this dGPU thing around for long.

Super Vulkan Kart

https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-code/blob/1.4/CHANGELOG.md

Drag & drop resolution.
Vulkan graphics are stuck on fugly for the time being.
Took a bit, that one.

Heroic 2.5.0 Beta 2

Fixed issue with the gamepad losing focus when navigating to other pages
- Ah, so it’s usable on the deck now!
Mostly fixes leading up to the release, but two more themes and some smoothing out of cloud saves

FEX-2211

Things like this give me hope for our ARMy future
The only Rosetta-like bit of tech that has any future of ever having decent performance.
There are some pretty cool things in this release. Better segmented registered support improved 32 bit benchmarks by about 4%, which is not much but it adds up
Arm kernels running 48-bit address spaces can now run proton experimental
- Apparently this was just borked period and older proton working was purely coincidental
Still laying the groundwork for AVX emulation

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Dome Keeper
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Devel: Bippinbits
Engine: Godot
Price: £17.99 / $17.99 / $20.99

Wazzat: Defend against waves of alien attackers in this innovative roguelike survival miner. Dig for resources and choose from powerful upgrade paths. Is there enough time to mine a little deeper and get back to defend before the monsters attack your dome?

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys on Curator Connect

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

It work.

Fun?

Who liked Dune II?
If resource management with combat and skill trees tossed in is your jam you’re going to love Dome Keeper.
It’s an addictive game loop that consists of mining and tower defense.
Then you have to contend with the ever ticking baddie countdown timer.
That’s where the hard choices are.
The more resources you try to recover at one time the slower you putter upwards.
Do you need all the resources right now, like to the point of letting your dome get smacked around?
Do you need all the resources to heal the base and it’s a race against the clock?
Mechanics like that can add some real tension to an otherwise monotonous game loop.
I do like that you are forced to upgrade in order to survive.
The upgrades are well balanced for the most part.
The elevator gives you hand-free collection of resources but it’s sloooooow.
You can get a digging buddy but he’s a narcoleptic that only goes forward.
There is even a teleport that is a wee on the fussy side when it comes to placement.
Managing all that while constantly popping up top to fight off baddies is fun but…
Yall need to add a save state because some of us got shit to do.
And I don’t know if it’s intended (I guess it is) but I was offered an item to keep for my next run after getting killed to death.
Yeah, that only sticks for the current session?
Because I had shit to do and came back for run #2 and it was gone.
Also, an option to slow down the monster nanny bar a bit would be most welcome.
Dome Keeper falls squarely into the “need something to do simulator” camp but it’s not a sit back & relax experience.
It’s more of a “do you like tracking 4 or 5 things in real time while doing two other things” sim.
It keeps you busy instead of being busy work.
I don’t know how many times I will some back to it since I have to start at square one.
That’s said, there is something awfully therapeutic about stripmining.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB
Your options are full screen or drag a resolution
Performs well @UHD, but it is a pixel game after all
Controls are reasonably mapped.
The Soundtrack is some pretty well designed beep boops

Fun?

Like pedro, I fully expected to hate this game, but I gotta say it’s a pretty solid gameplay loop and it got me hooked
Dig around for stuff to upgrade your dome, drill and dude so you can die less quickly when monsters come a knockin’ on your dome
It’s pretty simple, that doesn’t stop it from being effective
Also some pretty good game design, making you choose between hauling your heavy ass-loot for some much needed upgrades and repairs and making it to the dome so you can avoid the monsters taking advantage of your absence
I’m not the biggest fan of making you spend your precious early resources on basic stuff like knowing how close the monsters are or how much health you have
But if you are a dwarf and like diggy hole, this game offers plenty of timed diggy diggy

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches out of the box on PC and on the Deck
Vsyncs correctly to your refresh rate by default
Very smooth space exploration-y type music for the quiet bits and an action horror blend for when the shadow monsters attack the titular Dome you are attempting to keep.
I really like the soundtrack
The graphics are hipster-pixel but not terrible, they’re perfectly serviceable.
And both the DualShock/DualSense controllers and Deck controls work perfect out of the box, though the symbols seem to be Xbox/Deck only.

Fun?

I expected to not like it quite as much as I did
You look at the trailer and you go “Oh, yeah! It’s one of those games that gives you nowhere near enough time to explore and makes you come back to fight every couple of minutes.”
And that is correct but they doubled down on the need to come back to the dome.
Your space faring explorer person can’t carry a lot of iron/water/cobalt at once at the start of each run.
So the need to come back quickly to pew pew the enemies lines up perfectly with your weight limit.
Sometimes you’ll need to drop one or two bits to pick up some speed but, instead of feeling like a detriment, it feels like it complements the sense of dread that the monsters might break through if you’re not there.
I really expected to hate the primary loop, but I don’t!
It seems really well paced to emphasize exactly the kind of gameplay they’re after.
And it doesn’t hold your hand!
You’re literally dropped on the map and left to figure things out for yourself with no text on screen for the actual game portion.
And it doesn’t really punish you as hard as other roguelikes do.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro: