Linux Game Cast 539: Pretty Princess Horsey

Valve answers questions about the future of Steam Deck, VKD3D gets a Vulkan performance bump, NVIDIA 4050 Ti rumours, home-brew cloud-gaming with qwantify, and Epic pulls the plug on Unreal Tournament.

Special thanks to:
Johnny – New Patron
Joe – Memoryram from the Wishzone
RTheren – Bots are Stupid x3
Mir – Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Moonspell

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:54 Witcher 3 Remastered on Linux
02:15 Fedora 37 upgrade
STEAM NEWS
05:30 Steam Deck 2 & controller?
13:24 Steam Winter Sale
15:22 Speeding up VKD3D
NEW GAMES
19:10 Bots Are Stupid
GAME UPDATES
21:16 Skullduggery Holiday Beta
NEWS
29:34 Nvidia 4060 Ti specs
36:30 Browser gaming with qwantify
40:36 3D graphics support for GO
42:26 Epic kills classic Unreal servers
REVIEW
47:24 Defect Process
HATE MAIL
59:08 A wheel that scrolls

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

The Deck 2

Griffais says that Valve is already testing additional concepts in the living room.
Hints at a Steam Cube? Steam foldable table tray?
Scrollwheel is a must.
Apparently they’re working on the steam version of pavucontrol
- Although having it tightly integrated into the overlay would be pretty convenient
Proper OLED screen means longer battery life, but the price is gonna pick up a bit.
I do want to see the Steam Controller 2.
They have rolled in a change to the geometry of the adhesive, making the battery easier to loosen.
Stuck some foam on the fan to STFU.
Valve is still working on making the Deck’s SteamOS 3 available for other manufacturers’ PCs, and it hopes they’ll carry the torch once that’s done.
Yes, months later we are all still waiting for SteamOS 3.
Looking into Bluetooth mics for the Deck.
Griffais and Yang say it’s still actively working on support for Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Fall Guys.

More Sale

On December 22nd at 10am you will be able to pick up It Takes Two for $15.99.
Yeah, I just bought a bunch of crap for the autumn sale. Shit better be dirt cheap
I will be keeping an eye on my wishlist.

VKD3D

The VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension is in the Nvidia Vulkan beta drivers.
This smoothed out swinging in Spooderman a bit.
Set your own frame pacing/input latency.
That’s a game changer even for people without high refresh rate screens.
And probably will make a lot of games a lot smoother playing on a certain handheld.
No resizable Bar 4 you if you have less than 4gb of vram
Arc bugs are slowly starting to get identified and fixed

Steam: New Games

Bots Are Stupid

Program your own platforming mechanics.
I’m not a programmer, I don’t necessarily enjoy programming, and I’m real tired of platforming for its own sake.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to enjoy this one.
Platforming, but with pseudo-assembly.
I wonder how literate you can get with the spacing and timing to have this not just devolve into pure trial and error
Rtheren bought us all copies so I guess we’ll have to take a deeper look at it

Steam: Game Updates

Skullduggery Holiday Beta

New beta for a new character.
Supposedly final art now and painful levels of detail for each and every move.
I guess giving out actual frame counts per move was a little too anal?
No more sketchy frames with Black Dahlia’s art.
Added COUNTER, STRIKE!
Tons of other fixes for fighting game nerds.
It’s good to see updates like this being pushed out even though the game only averages 200 players.

News:

Nvidia 4050Ti

NVidia still keeping that midrange locked at 8GB.
Gddr6 though.
At least the 4070 is rumored to have 12.
Still, it’s gotta compete with the 7900xt at it’s rumoured price point of 899
Still gonna need a new power supply and you’re still gonna need to plug your cables ALL THE WAY IN.
Yall fkd up making the 3060 12GB.
That caused AMD and Intel to go 12 & 16.
I’m not buying a 8Gb card, period.
I will upgrade to the 3080 Ti. Those are going for $600.
But the real swift kick in the dick is that I’m quite happy with the 3060.
The 1650 has overtaken the 1060 in the Steam Survey.
There is now a higher share of a lower performance card.
NVidia’s (and AMD’s) pricing scheme has caused the gaming GPU market to visibly regress.
Unless they release something at the $150 mark that’s any good, the 1650 is now the new default.

qwantify

We have stadia at home
DIY hotseat multiplayer streaming.
I don’t hate it.
NVidia GPU on the host recommended.
All of the links lead to a registration page
The pricing seems pretty reasonable for now.

Tetra 3D 0.11.0

3D graphics support for GO is progressing slowly
40% performance bump on triangles ain’t nothing to sneeze at
Indices > vertices
I was looking to see if there were any games which made use of this and/or the names of the samples used for the Gifs but was only able to find multiple Tetris clones called Tetra-something.
At least 2 different Tetris clones are called Tetra 3D, which were made by different people and are available on different platforms.

RIP UT

https://www.gametracker.com/search/ut/?

I had no idea Rock Band had an online component.
UT GOTY will be missed but those servers have been mostly empty for the last two decades.
I had a look at the actual press release looking for confirmation for my anti-Epic bias and Hatoful Boyfriend’s Linux version is being removed from sale.
I know it’s probably not because of Timmy’s inherent hate for the unknown and general disregard for Linux as a platform, rather because it was a one off export and never updated and probably doesn’t run properly anymore.
But still…
UT GOTY & Unreal Gold have been pulled from Steam as well.
Not available on the Epic store so there is that.
GOG has em.
Guess I gotta resort to using wine if I want to date some birds
Some dedicated server support for those games still exist, but good luck getting them running.
Also, epic, you can’t just give these games away for free if you’re not gonna sell them? Aren’t they supposed to be the free game company.

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

Game: Defect Process
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1136730/Defect_Process
Devel: Incoherent Software LLC
Engine: Custom (Haskell/SDL2)
Price: £6.69 / $7.99 / $10.49

Wazzat: Pure 2d action with a freestyle combat system

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys on Curator Connect – It is open-sauce: https://github.com/incoherentsoftware/defect-process

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Windowed and fullscreen worked.
My only complaint is the lack of resolution options in fullscreen.
Locked at 60.
Xbox controller picked up and everything was semi-logically mapped.
Really mellow background music for a beat ’em up.
It looks retro’ish.
Kinda like what I remember mega drive games looking like back in the 90s.
Nice design on the enemy characters.
The main booptagonist is a little on the bland side.

Fun?

Imagine if you took Guacamelee and stripped out the colourful graphics, story, and rock-solid fast-paced fighting mechanics.
What would you be left with?
My least favourite part of the game, that’s what.
Defect Process is a 2D battle arena game, on a budget.
Fortunately the areas are broken up with areas where you hit a ball, and jump on platforms.
Doing so gives you nuggets of currency that allows you to buy more health.
Yes, there are other upgrades to purchase but health always seemed the sound investment.
Now that could be due the staff + dash + shotty loadout I originally selected.
That juggle + shotty for crowd control is a little OP.
I tried some other combos but always came back to it.
Unfortunately this sucked some of the challenge out of the game and I felt I was only going through the motions.
All in all it’s serviceable and delivers exactly what it says on the tin.
I wouldn’t mind faster paced combat and better paths to chain combos along with a little story but that’s just me.
Unfortunately modding a game requires countless hours of hacking on the binaries.
Unless the source is available and that’s something Defect Process does right.
You can head right over to github, grab a copy of the source code and be amazed that someone wrote an engine in Haskell in 2022.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB
Holds 60@ 1080P
PS4 Controller works fine until it loses connectivity right before you can hit a button to avoid an incoming attack
The graphics displayed things and the sound files played their beeps and boops. All perfectly serviceable

Fun?

It’s not a bad little beat’em up
The controls are pretty snappy. I tried a hadoken as a laugh and lo and behold you can shoot energy balls
Gotta be careful though, once you attack you’re committed to it
The air juggle is kinda ridiculous. It’s super abusable to the point of making some fights laughable
The difficulty ramps up over time by adding more waves and more dudes that kinda turns it into a bullet hell
Like pedro, I too thought the gunplay was a bit weak. Except for the grenade launcher. That’s great for combos
The in-between level segments could use some work though. Some are clearly meant to be done multiple times (Ie the drop one) cuz depending on where you drop at first you may not hit anything
They just give you more money to buy weapons and moves
The only ones really worth your cash are more double jumps and health IMO. Or the grenade launcher if you didn’t have it
Switching up fighting styles is a nice feature, but I found I gravitated to sword more

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches out of the box
Holds 144 at 2560×1440 and 60 on the deck
Controllers work out of the box, SDL 2 at work
There’s definitely music and sound effects, I’d be hard pressed to point anything out about them
The graphics are also serviceable and convey what you need to progress very clearly

Fun?

Serviceable seems to be the operating principle in Defect Process.
Clearly the focus is on the combat, the melee combat specifically.
Each melee weapon has tons of hidden moves that you can only pull off with certain direction+button press combos.
There’s plenty of variety there to keep each run interesting.
The same cannot be said about the guns
They feel limited, in every way.
Low damage, limited ammo capacity, no variety of shots or combos, they’re just there.
The inspiration for the combat seems to come from fighting and Devil May Cry-style games, so I guess the guns are just there because DMC/Bayonetta had them so they have to be there for some reason.
They feel under-utilised at best and tacked on at worse.
The grenade launcher is the worst offender from what I’ve unlocked so far.
You get 1 piddly ass shot with the smallest radius/hitbox that I’ve seen in videogame grenade launchers to this day and you’re gonna have to pound 2 or 3 more enemies to get to fire another one.
Fuck. That!
But I don’t hate it, and the price is right!