Linux Game Cast 537: It’s Got a Fk’n Scroll Wheel!

Valve is giving away a Deck a minute during The Game Awards! MESA adds support for RDNA 3, a 3D printable controller with a scroll wheel, openRGB vs Riot’s rootkit, and TF2 announces VScript.

Special thanks to:
Mfoxdogg: Game from whishlist 
Basil: 35x twitch resub
RTheren: Thermal nope box


Listen:

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:36 Botched Debian upgrade
02:10 Debian on the nanoPi
STEAM NEWS
05:14 Steam Deck Giveaway
08:21 Steam top releases
10:23 Steam turkey fryer
NEW GAMES
13:59 Memory Lost
15:51 Curse of Eternity
19:17 Jet Dancer
21:57 Amnesia The Bunker
GAME UPDATES
25:43 EndCycle vs
28:17 TF2 VScript
38:55 MESA RDNA 3
42:15 OpenRGB 0.8 vs rootkit
45:21 Sim City to Minecraft converter
48:01 Captain Blood source code released
50:59 Alpakka 3D printable controller
REVIEW
54:23 Starfighter Renegade
HATE MAIL
01:08:00 Roman number digits


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Deck a Minute

  • Giveaway eligibility requirements are:

    • in the US, CA, EU, or UK

    • have a non-limited Steam account in good standing

    • made a purchase on Steam in the past year.

    • ʇɹnoɔ lɐɹǝpǝɟ uᴉ ǝʌlɐΛ pǝns ʇou ǝʌɐɥ

  • If I win one I can’t send it to Australia as I’ll just give it to my little brother when I’m next in Portugal.

  • I guess next thursday’s stream is a watch along cuz I wanna win that deck.

  • Totally not going to, but it’s worth a shot.


Top Deck

  • I completely forgot about Torchlight infinite.

  • The live-service Torchlight that no one asked for and is riddled with micro-transactions.

  • I hope it fails massively.

  • Vampire Survivors still printing money.

  • I’m a little sad Dragonball Breakers has a bunch of problems. That seemed like a pretty cool concept

  • Strider’s favourite game Scorn made the list

  • Victoria 3 ( a paradox games joint) is the only native linux title for october


Gobble

  • Valve is still coming to grips with running actually popular hardware shipping.

  • This, ladies and gentlemen, is the prototype Steam Dip.

  • Someone actually RMA’d a turkey fryer to them though. I wonder what other kitchen appliances valve has received


Steam: New Games

Memory Lost: Chapter One

  • Isometric Messiah?

  • Linux requirements are: The steam deck

    • Not completely unreasonable

  • It’s cheap as free.

  • It gets about 25 ferps @ UHD on epic.

  • Controller support.


Curse of Eternity

  • Thank you I-Make-Da-Games for sending us keys!

  • The background music on the first trailer is way too loud.

  • VO on the second video is clipping at the beginning.

  • Look into peak vs true peak and set the later at -2dB.

  • Dark souls with WoW graphics

  • “Feat based Multiclassing” makes my D&D 3.5/4e playing ears perk up


Jet Dancer

  • The fish nets on the klunge shot screen look a lot like she’s just got hair on the top of her legs.

  • Like she got up to that point during hair removal and went: “Fuck it!”

  • Looks like it’s missing a couple of frames of animation.

  • It definitely looks like a genesis game

  • Has some adaptive difficulty options like giving you more powerups if you take more damage and letting you buy upgrades at the game over screen

  • The one negative review said the controls don’t make any sense


Amnesia: The Bunker

  • That sounds a lot like a roguelike

  • Coming in 2023 and no mention of Linux anywhere on the page or on the press release.

  • I remain hopeful.

  • It took them a bit to fix the native Linux version of Rebirth but they did

  • And this one seems to be made by Frictional themselves

  • Don’t let me down.

  • Are you ready to play That Game ™ again?

  • This time you have a gun!

  • A more open world amnesia sounds like a pretty neat idea

  • However I wonder how much of it is going to be groping around in the dark cuz you don’t have enough information to solve the puzzle cuz you walked past that one section


Steam: Game Updates

EndCycle VS 2.3

  • Memes! You fight with Vending Machines!

  • All this new content means that there’s a tournament coming up on Dec 11 to try and horribly abuse all of this new stuff

  • They buffed the couch


Team VScript 2

  • Apparently this VScript thing is so huge that it’s overshadowing the fact that VALVe pushed out an update for TF2.

  • Easier modding seems like nice touch to help breathe life into your dying game

  • I wonder if this will also make the bot problem worse?


News:

MESA 22.3.0

  • Good to see some Mali drivers updates

    • As the owner of a thing with a mali GPU, I am also excited by this

  • Initial RDNA 3 support and no, this does not guarantee the 7900XX_Sephiroth_XtX will work properly on release.

  • Give it a month or 6, unless you want to help with driver testing.

  • The Rust Implementation for OpenCL also gets mainlined, so if you wanna play around with that you got some dependencies to sort out

  • LibCLC is a new dep for Intel Ray tracing


OpenRGB 0.8

  • Switched from inpout32 to WinRing0 low level access library.

  • inpout32 is a great library, but Valorant’s garbage anti-cheat attacks it while it is fine with WinRing0.

  • Riot’s rootkit is a bit shit? Nah!

  • Dual Sense support and it works really well.


Simcraft

  • It’s C#, no idea how to build this under Linux.

  • .net?

    • .net core if it’s built in it or mono

  • .sln’s means Visual Studio (code)

  • Might work with .NETcore or Mono with a bit of luck.

  • This is just all kinds of neat. Taking shit out of one game and dropping it in anotehr

  • That was the metaverse pipe dream and look how much work it is to do just one thing for two games!


Yarrrrrrr

  • They canceled the game because reasons, damn.

  • Was supposed to be released in 2006, and given how Oblivion-y those screenshots look, I believe them.

  • Apparently you can find the leaked 1.0 version on the “local video store”

    • Which I guess you’ll need to even run the game

  • It would be cool if this can get necromanced back from the dead

    • More incentive for studios to dump their old code on github so it can be preserved!


Printable controller

  • Open software and some open hardware.

  • Uses a Pi Pico as the microcontroller.

  • Would not mind getting one of the press samples.

  • It’s got a fukkin’ scroll wheel!

  • Apparently the intention here is to mostly rely on the gyro for aminng so they give you a scroll wheel to fine tune and a little d-pad for everything else

  • Wireless and vibration coming spoon ™


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


Game: Starfighter Renegade
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1431890/Starfighter_Renegade/
Devel: Made of Dinosaurs
Engine: Unity

Price: £9.99 / $11.99 / $15.49

Wazzat: Fly into battle across multiple bite-size levels of exciting 3D aerial combat! Do you focus on taking out the alien fighters? Or rescue the stranded inhabitants before they’re abducted? What about the deadly terraforming virus sweeping the surface below?

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys on Curator Connect



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • 35, 35 well aimed clicks.

  • That’s what it takes to get from 2160p to 1080p in the fk mothering menu because it jumps around every time you click.

  • This is why we use dropdown menus or (at least) an apply button.

  • No vsync but 30fps option.

  • It’s fun watching the 3060 go full tilt and wind up the fans to display the game.

  • Not really.

  • Crunchy beep-boop soundtrack.

  • Xbox outta the box.

Fun?

  • You can fk right off with whateverthehell that bonus stage thing is between levels.

  • At least give me an option to skip it.

  • With that out of the way, Starfighter Renegade is serviceable.

  • It’s a love letter to the shooty pew pew 3D games of the 90s.

  • There was even an attempt to reproduce the hipster-pixel terrain.

  • But man, is it barebones.

  • You have guns, missiles, and boost.

  • Apply pew pew to the baddies and collect some peeps and return them to base if the notion strikes you.

  • Get upgrades, wash, rinse, repeat.

  • The AI is 90s level smart so cheesing the hell out of it doesn’t require much work and that’s important since you get a missile recharge every few minutes by flying over home base.

  • Then you boop three baddies with the missiles and pew around and repeat.

  • I didn’t find anything exhilarating about the combat.

  • Again, it’s serviceable.

  • For $11.99 you might be looking for a bit more in your hipster-polygon shooter.



Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB @ 1024×768

  • Gotta cycle through resolutions one at a time

  • There’s an option in the menu called “Play xylopsis” or xylophone or something

  • It takes you to an space invaders style arcade game that you can’t seem to escape without actually quitting the game

    • Which by the way has an entirely different fire button than the main game

  • The controls work out of the box. Sort of. They’re very sensitive on steam input. If you turn off steam input they’re a lot better. At least on the dualshock 4

  • They’re very sensitive on keyboard and mouse too

Fun?

  • It’s very slippery fighter combat

  • Also the guns kinda have smart bullets? As long as your reticule is red your regular bullets will just hone in on people. They miss often enough to fuck you over when you start to think they’re reliable

  • It’s kinda frenetic but it’s just okay. All of the pew pews kinda looked the same so I ended up getting deaded a bunch by crossfire

  • There’s a decent risk reward mechanic. If you win a game of chicken with an enemy you get a full heal. Assuming you don’t get noped by aforementioned crossfire

  • You can also switch up your loadout and a bunch of the secondary objectives will give you some new stuff. Mostly new pew pews

  • So they have these sonic 2 style in between levels where you’re at warp speed

  • The problem is that you move so fucking fast and the background is so seizuretastic that You can’t really tell wha the fuck is actually going on

  • Doesn’t really do it for me. It’s just ok



Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box, in a tiny window on the desktop

  • On the SteamDeck it’s properly proportioned

  • It creates a StupidLittleFolder™ in your home directory, -1 chair

  • On the desktop I made the mistake of enabling fullscreen in the Options.

  • Why is that a mistake? Because the game crashes when you start it in fullscreen.

  • After deleting the StupidLittleFolder™ and the unity prefs file, I was able to start the game without it immediately crashing.

  • Then, I made the assumption that “Hey! There’s an option to remap controls, they didn’t cock that up did they?”

  • Yeah, they did. Can’t rebind anything except the controller inputs.

  • So, no keyboard rebinding and only WASD is defined. -1 chair

  • Speaking of controller inputs, it seems to completely ignore Steam Input unless you’re using a Steam Deck or an XInput controller.

  • DualShock 4? DualSense? Can’t turn left or right.

  • They did say that they only tested the game on the Steam Deck, so I decided to try and see if these issues were present on the Deck.

  • Wouldn’t you know it!? Not only does it crash if you have the audacity to enable fullscreen, you have to drop into desktop mode to delete the StupidLittleFolder™ and the prefs file.

  • Pairing the DualSense to the Deck showed the exact same behavior.

  • And its sole option to limit framerate without editing the prefs file is to lock the game to 30FPS.

  • I can’t even.

Fun?

  • Well, it was fun to list the ways in which this game is fundamentally broken.

  • I would have sent them an email with these since they did say they only tested on the deck.

  • Except they didn’t test it on the Deck. They fired it up on the deck and made it sure it technically worked.

  • It’s also glaringly obvious that they didn’t even test the deck overlays properly because the game loses focus if you open one of them and the only way to get it back is to tap your greasy little finger on the screen to get it back.

  • This is supposed to be the fun segment but I couldn’t get over just how thoroughly non-QA’ed Starfighter Renegade is.

  • I’m sorry but if you really can’t be bothered, neither can I.


Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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