Linux Game Cast 561: Pedro Pull and Peel

1200p Steam Decks! AMD announces openSIL firmware, Codeweavers gets a new boss, Valve is getting sued, and vkd3d-proton outperforms Windows.

Special thanks to:
Northranger – 12 month resub


Listen:

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
STEAM UPDATES
05:34 Immersion Corp sues Valve
10:07 Valve launches 90 minute demos
16:16 Steam drops Google
19:20 vkd3d-proton update
21:58 1200p Steam Deck
NEW GAMES
25:44 Wee Tanks
27:04 Chicken Fight
NEWS
35:00 16GB 4060Ti
39:56 AMD open-source firmware
43:44 Alpakka firmware update
47:26 New boss for Codeweavers
REVIEW
51:14 Dungeon Drafters
HATE MAIL
01:02:42 Game trailers
01:05:02 2D vs 3D games


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Ready to rumble

  • Immersion Corporation has a patent on mobile wiggle technology.
  • Sony and MS pay them royalties.
  • They filed an injunction to stop sales of the Deck and Index.
  • A suit against Microsoft and Sony in the early 2000s resulted in Microsoft buying 10% of Immersion.
  • Sony took the company on and lost.
  • Member PlayStation 3 Dualshocks launching without rumble?
  • Valve technically uses a slightly newer version of haptics which may or may not be encumbered by that patent.
  • Does this mean the Deck is a success?
  • One one hand, Valve knew this patent-troll existed.
  • OTOH, there should be some time limit on this stuff.
  • Waiting until a product becomes popular before going after it is extra dirty.


Gone in 90 minutes

  • Saves companies from making a demo and will (in theory) cut down on refunds.
  • Plus having to deal with people screeching when they get cut off for abusing refunds.
  • At least this puts the mechanism in place for SteamPass.
  • Demos may have had the advantage of not having to download the full 100GB+ game.
    • Sometimes the demo is just the full game with a demo key
  • Though this certainly saves having to then download the full game when the demo is over and you want to play more.
  • I might worry that something like this might have a knock on effect where the first 90 minutes of the game are heavily qad and the rest is ignored.
  • But they already pretty much do this
  • I wonder how invasive the DRM is for this.


Future of traffic on Steam

  • I never gave much thought about what they used for analytics.
  • Kinda assumed they were in-house.
  • “We intentionally don’t collect or store demographic information about users such as age, gender, or race.”
    • That certainly explains why Steam keeps asking me about my birth date with every other game.
  • The article brings up that the version of analytics being used by valve is getting killed by google and they don’t wanna move to their new product
    • Especially cuz Google will probably kill that one in short order too


vkd3d-proton

  • This is a chonky release
  • The DLLs are being split up to be more consistent with Microsoft’s DX12
  • A lot of memory and CPU improvements especially on first run.
  • Improved interoperability with dxvk including better implementation of 11on12
  • Vulkan 1.3 is the minimum version supported.
  • “Our microbenchmark for single descriptor copies are now significantly faster than native D3D12 drivers on both RADV and NVIDIA.”
    • That’s neat.
  • The new native swapchain can support Linux native surfaces because native.
  • Listing individual games is becoming impractical at this point. Hah!
  • You can always get the latest by opting into the bleeding edge beta in Proton Experimental.


HD Deck

  • Bonus pixels for your Deck.
  • Y no OLED?
    • That was surprising.
    • Costing maybe?
  • Estimated price $99 USD.
  • Neat to start seeing some high quality aftermarket steam deck parts
  • This will probably kill the battery tho

Steam: New Games

Wee Tanks

  • Big thanks to Lennard from Studio Kit for the keys, chairs will be thrown in the coming weeks.
  • There’s online multiplayer, because apparently tank game devs know what’s up.
  • This is basically tank commander on steroids
  • Will run on Centos 7
  • It has a map editor too. Good for making sure there’s no shortage of levels.
  • It launches.
  • We will kick the treads in the aftershowzen.


Chicken Fight

  • Duck Game but with a different kind of fowl?
  • Super Smash Bawk?

News:

$499 Tie

  • $399 8GB or $499 for the one you want.
  • The 4060 is missing memory digits.
    • Likely 8 or 6
    • 3.5 if they’re nasty
  • There is a world where I would consider $399 for a 12GB, but 8?
  • These will be announced on the 24’th.
  • Same day the review embargo nopes for the 8GB RX 7600.
  • 500usd for a 4060, even a 16Gb one is too much
  • AMD, make the 7600 16GB for fk all reason.
  • Then sell it for $350.


Open firmware

  • AMD has finally decided to do what they’ve done with GPU Open technologies and will be releasing an opensauce motherboard firmware.
  • In theory this would let you have coreboot or any other UEFI replacement on a reasonably modern AM* motherboard.
  • This is a good step for the long term. Some Heavy hitters like google and AWS are working on this too
  • Companies are really starting to realise that open source gets shit done quickly in a way that private software development can’t


Alpakka 89

  • Speaking of firmware
  • The glyph stick and daisy wheel typing methods are no longer in beta
  • You can now set per profile configs for these.
  • Double-press on the home button now acts as the home button on most modern controllers.
  • They give the example of using it to invoke Steam Deck key shortcuts.
  • Having in-memory configs from newer versions no longer causes issues when downgrading the firmware.


Codeweavers

  • In an era of mass layoffs and brutal corporate profiteering stuff like this is great to see
  • Jeremy white is stepping down and instead of selling the business off to some rando is going to move the company to an employee owned trust
  • Code weavers transitioning to an employee owned business means that they aren’t gonna be overly beholden to whatever crazy scheme IBM or whatever and try to push x86 on power64 or whatever.
  • They’re not fully employee owned yet but they are moving to make the employee trust the sole shareholder.
  • Who is going to replace Ulrich as DOD?
  • Jeremy is going to take a stab at retiring and maybe mending a fence.
  • Protip: Don’t start a podcast.
  • 50+ employees.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Dungeon Drafters
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1824580/Dungeon_Drafters/
Devel: Manalith Studios
Engine: Unity
Price: £20.99 / $24.99 / $32.50

Wazzat: Dungeon Drafters is a mystery dungeon adventure set in a world where magic is cards, and cards are magic. Explore ancient ruins, loot rare cards and employ clever combos to defeat your foes and build the legendary spell deck that could save the world.

Mandatory Disclosure: The publisher, DANGEN Entertainment sent us keys on Curator Connect



Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB in a Window
  • The tileset is cutesy and gets their furry filled fantasy realm across. The enemy designs aren’t bad either
  • Super funky soundtrack. It’s got some brass and I like me some of that
  • Controls are pretty basic for a deckbuilder
  • The tutorial is kind of a wall of text

Fun?

  • Like pedro, I too was a bit confused
  • IF this is a deckbuilder, where are all of my offensive cards? I picked the monk and I wanted to start punching shit!
  • AHA! You see this game decided to take a page out of the into the breach book
  • All the enemies have predictable attack patterns and you know what they’re going to do before they do it
  • Your cards are there to weasel you and them into optimal positions so you can whack them with your weapon
  • Cuz it’s not just a deckbuilder, it’s also a grid based roguelike
  • And honestly I found it to be a bit middling at both
  • I can see where the soft locks mentioned are. There are certain points where enemies can just charm you so that you can’t attack them, and if you have no way to indirectly damage them then you’re kinda screwed
  • There are a few interactions like this that make the pacing of the game kinda chuggy
  • I will praise the actual mechanics themselves. They seem pretty well thought out
  • It can also get kinda grindy cuz you only keep money and packs from successful runs


Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box on the desktop and Deck
  • FerPS limiter builtin and everything with the usual suspects.
  • Controller also works exactly as intended.
  • The default mapping is questionable but you can rebind everything.
  • And I ended up assigning the left trackpad on the deck to mouse mode.
  • I much rather have the freedom to hover over the enemies and pick the characters like that.
  • I swear I’ve heard some of those sound effects before.
  • Not complaining, they just sound very… videogamey.
  • And the graphics are perfectly serviceable.

Fun?

  • I was worried
  • When Dungeon Drafters released the reception was very mixed.
  • And this is basically a mish mash of a bunch of genres I enjoy.
  • Dungeon Drafters I’d describe as the combination of Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and Magic: The Gathering.
  • The reviews complained about freezes and “soft-locks” a lot.
  • I haven’t run into any freezes and the “soft-locks” I encountered were my own fault for not checking where the enemy that roots you in place is going to shoot.
  • If anything, my complaints are a bit more esoteric.
  • As a roguelike, enemy animations take way too long and shit drags out.
  • Probably why there’s a game speed slider which goes all the way to 175%.
  • As a deck builder, in which your ability to do damage is tied to your cards, having the “Battle Mage” class start with 20 cards which deal no damage what-so-ever of a 40 card deck made me question my choice of class.
  • Turns out, the others are worse.
  • But that is literally me complaining the game doesn’t play exactly to my expectations.
  • Which that’s true of literally every game.
  • And I like what I’ve played so far.

Verdict:

Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

Trailers

2D

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