Linux Game Cast 571: A Shouty Shirt

The open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA is (almost) ready! Valve is headed to Gamescom, OpenMW gets a little foggy, and the ESRB wants to scan kids’ faces to enforce game ratings.

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Dressing Frank
01:21 Venn buys a MAC
03:36 Prepping for Barbenheimer
04:00 Portal Reloaded adventures
05:28 Car accessory update
07:23 Valve at Gamescom
08:39 Remembering Xfire
09:31 Half-Life Crab Shift
09:38 G-Man Snap
10:21 New stat system for SteamWorks
12:24 Better discovery for Steam games
13:38 Mr. Run and Jump
16:01 Rightfully Beary Arms
17:49 Keys in emails
18:06 WrestleQuest
19:10 Pedro don’t wrestle
20:14 Stealth wrestling fans
20:53 WWE litigation
22:41 Whisker Squadron: Survivor
23:25 The structural integrity of cat helmets
25:27 Nvidia open-source Vulkan drivers
27:18 Kepler is HOW OLD!?
30:45 Amazon Prime games with Heroic Launcher
31:02 Netflix resolutions on Linux
32:41 Venn vs Flatpaks
34:29 Building Ardour from source
35:38 OpenMW 48
38:27 Modding in OpenMW
39:31 Do you even Elder Scroll?
40:30 Browser MMO Enion Online
41:40 Pedro defends npm
42:59 ESRB facial recognition
44:14 Teaching kids about facial recognition
47:28 Solutions for underage gaming?
52:24 Ruby Mech Souls
53:13 Best kind of mech?
55:52 And now we’re talking about TEKKEN
57:43 Email: Getting into Linux
01:00:29 Old Linux was different
01:05:04 The Hackentosh way
01:06:13 Apple EW
01:09:13 Credits

Steam: News

HL3 Confirmed

https://www.xfire.com/valve-not-announcing-half-life-3-gamescom-august/

Relive the events of HL1 from the perspective of a Headcrab.
According to a report, the Gamescom companion app confirms Valve is one of the many publishers attending the event next month.
Probably Steam Deck related.
- Is this where they finally announce the steamOS release.
  - HL3 would be more believable.
Or project Citadel.
Ricochet 2!
Come on Ricochet 2!
The xfire name sure gets around these days.
Most likely Counter Strike 2 as the article speculates.
That is the one game we know for a fact is coming.

Steamy traffic tools

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3687933234141224747

RIP Google Analytics.
Steam’s UTM System will give developers info on One-Day Conversion Tracking, Geographic breakdown, Visitor device categoryVisitor device category, and New vs Returning users.
If you’re a Steam partner you can already see these at https://partner.steamgames.com/pub/navstatsoverview

Steam: New Games

Mr. Run and Jump

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2132540/Mr_Run_and_Jump/

First ATARI Linux title?
- 29th: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux&publisher=Atari+&ndl=1
Looks like VVVVVvvVVvVVv + Celeste and a lethal dose of glowsticks.
The movement looks slick as well.
That price is detached from reality.
Mr. Run and Jump, not to be confused with Jumpman
Celeste and Meatboy on the vaporwave a e s t h e t i c

Rightfully Beary Arms

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1928030/Rightfully_Beary_Arms/

That’s a neat twist on the roguelike improvement mechanism
Your enemies get stronger, but you get to pick how they get strong and hopefully try to match your strengths to their new weaknesses and vise versa
Enter the Gungeon with more 3D.

WrestleQuest

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1867510/WrestleQuest/

Pro wrestling and JRPGs seem like a chocolate peanut butter situation
Wrestling is already pretty much IRL anime
Got lots of classic rasslers like our lord and saviour macho man, DsngJoe’s best friend Jake the Snake, and Andrei the Giant
I still don’t like wrestling
And making it a traditional JRPG of sorts isn’t really changing my opinion.
It’s a JRPG but with wrastlin aaaaaand… that’s about it?
What’s the overlap with JRPG and Wrestling fans?
There is a large fanbase for both.

Whisker Squadron: Survivor

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2140100/Whisker_Squadron_Survivor/

Makes me want to race the sun for some odd reason.
Kitty Kat Starfox. Very vapourwave
It’s got a linux demo
This is the prelude to Whisker Squadron proper which is coming in 2024.
They describe it as “a more streamlined corridor shooter with roguelite survival elements, featuring the same cast of feline pilots”.
The game of theirs I really want to play is Cats Fly Helicopters
I really liked Race the Sun.
That demo needs some work.
- Yeah, the tutorial is some long stretches of nothing

News:

NVK in Mesa

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/next-step-for-nvk-merging-into-mesa.html

It’s almost here you guys!
Not quite vulkan 1.2 just yet
Not quite enough for DXVK or Zink either
Still requires the new nouveau kernel api that’s still under development
That was really quick.
They do say it’s not going to be on par with RadV, but it doesn’t have to be.
This and an easier way to install NVidia Open to use the proprietary blobs for Cuda would make the NVidia driver installation BS infinitely better.
After 13 months of work by a gang of people the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware is ready to land in MESA.
It’s not at feature parity with RADV but a solid foundation is in place.
This will have a hard requirement on a new nouveau kernel API.
NVK currently supports Turing (GTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later.
Support as far back as Kepler (RTX 6XX and RTX 7XX) is planned.

‘Boa Hancock’

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.9.0

Widevine is now available through heroic so you can watch yout 720P netflix
Prime gaming integration is nice. We all forget that amazon tosses us free games every once in a while and it’s good to have a convenient way to fetch them
Also includes proton and steamdeck compatibility info on the game pages
You can use the Steam Runtime with the flatpak now,

Open MW

https://openmw.org/2023/openmw-0-48-0-released/

Not bad for a project that started with DLang and Ogre.
Clever person figured that reversing the z-buffer rendering would make it so distant objects would be far less likely to z-fight.
The distance clipping fog is no longer a square around your character and blends much better into the distance.
Rain now causes ripples in the water like in the original Morrowind when you cranked up the graphics.
Soft particle rendering, animation re-works… there’s a lot!

Enion Online

https://github.com/ertugrulcetin/enion

Browser based Team PVP MMO
Kinda gives me roblox meets WoW vibes
Maybe it’s the color palette, but that screenshot gives me Lego vibes.
I want to play with it but npm? Na.

Face verification

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-esrb-wants-to-start-using-facial-recognition-to-check-peoples-ages/

I’m very glad phrenology is making a comeback, although maybe my deviant skull shape has something to do with that.
Giving kids direct motivation to learn the exceptionally easy task of cracking facial rec is probably a good idea.
I like how this type of invasive bullshit is being sold as “won’t you please think of the children” while collecting photos of children and sending it to their servers.
Irony is fucking dead.

Hate Mail:

7 years

https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?dT77Mm7