LinuxGameCast Weekly 255 – Grain Of Sandy Salt

Steam drops the mother of all ban hammers! Vega support lands in Kernel 4.12, Hitman flirts with Vulkan, and the Source engine goes to the birds. Then Day of Infamy faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Foxy

Steam News:

Steam UI and other updates coming soon™
http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-slideshow-teases-an-upcoming-steam-ui-update/

Ok there is western europe, where is eastern?
Is this why i have been getting hardware surveys alot latly?
If they’re going to be partnering with streamers and influencers, what kind of arrangement is this going to be?
Are we going to be seeing a lot more paid promotion from the TBs and Pedro’s Man Crush?

28 000+ vac bans
https://steamdb.info/stats/bans//

Highest ever in Steam history?
40,000 in one day! Thats alot of bots
Nice of them to wait until after the sale… wait.
Going to be a whole lot of “it was my brother logged into my account and here’s a letter from my dad to prove it” posts on r/Steam.
Unless Valve wants to release a blog post, we’ll probably never know the true reason why
So let’s fire up the wheel of booga booga and go full alex jones on this

CS:GO Chicken
https://gamerant.com/counter-strike-mod-chicken-fight/

Oh cock.
You mean i can’t shoot them
The PETA approved version of cock fighting
Well, we should wait for this mod to get some traction, otherwise we’d be guilty of counting our chickens before they hatch
Also some news about another bad egg

Rocket PAtch
https://www.rocketleague.com/news/patch-notes-v1-35-anniversary-update/

It still launches ¯\_(⌣̯̀ ⌣́)_/¯
Once they launch workshop for trails and explosions, i’ll be very very happy
Still no tux topper

HitVulkan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PNTXDqrePw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqalQSAdxb8

It’s not official but nice to see that they are tinkering with it.
- Indeed. It’ll be nice when they start working with vulkan from scratch-ish on these ports
Wonder if it works /w Shadow of Hordor?
- SPOILER: It don’t.
<value name=”UseVulkan” type=”integer”>1</value>
- –show-performance
It “works” but I see why they have not made it public.
Only seeing 45% GPU usage and it’s a stutter fest.
“I play video games!”….sorry
It does look like its a little more efficient, only using what it needs to use

Gary’s Zoo
http://store.steampowered.com/app/622040/Zooicide/

Just as janky as GMod
It has kangaroos, thats a plus
From the Makers of Who’s Your Daddy
Flying Gorilla Limbs would make an awesome band name

Crap they caught me
http://store.steampowered.com/app/405240/Hairy_Little_Buggers/

A more crass version of Dwarf Fortress
Based on the GlibcOS requirements, I’ll assume they’re using FNA

Brain Freeze
http://store.steampowered.com/app/445020/Frozen_Synapse_2/

Never played the original frozen synapse, even though I got it in a bundle years ago
This’un deigns to add more procedural generation and an big open world
Seems pretty interesting. I might just check it out

Know your flags gentlemen
http://store.steampowered.com/app/652340/Flagsplosion/

My guess one of those automatically accepted greenlight games

News:

Vega
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1707.0/00325.html

Wicked-early “support” if you can call header files support.
Well its somthing and thats alot coming from AMD
I suppose it’s good for people who want to run a lot of displays off the open sauce driver
Disappointing for everything else

Vulkan in main branch
https://rpcs3.net/blog/2017/07/03/progress-report-june-2017/

Dante’s inferno works? Im done, laterz
Creepy video aside, you have to admit, Alot of progress was made solely by Vulkan and LLVM
Dumb code of the month goes to?
- No 1080@60 for you
- Come back when you do 59.94
Vulkan support has been enabled in the linuxes now
They’re also working on a PS3 OS shim, enabled via low level emulation, ostensibly through LLVM

Date at midnight
https://github.com/REGoth-project/REGoth

Fairly impressive so far
Dev seems to have a sense of humour
What worries me is this is the new thing, old game won’t run, Reimplement the engine!

BotWars
https://github.com/hansonry/botwars

So they provide a JSON api, and you write code to play the game for you.
- I suppose you could also write a UI for it and play it that way, if you were so inclined
Very tight appeal, but maybe a natural evolution of the whole cookie clicker genre
So you have mulitple ‘bots’ on your machine that you do not directly control, and they all battle it out on the server?
The missing features list is a big ol’ pile of nope

ChooChoo
http://bit-shift.io/trains-and-things.php?i=1

“because your OS shouldn’t be a barrier to playing. Except for Mac as we don’t have one in the office”
It looks like a game targeted at boring people
But hey, giving Godot some love

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Day of Infamy
Webzone: Day_of_Infamy
Devel: New World Interactive
Engine: Source Engine
Price: $19.99

Wazzat: The creators of Insurgency present the next installment of their successful FPS platform with Day of Infamy. Featuring tactical close-quarters WWII combat across a wide range of multiplayer and coop scenarios.

Mandatory Disclosure: We were sent keys.

Makes with the working

V-

How did you make something using the Source engine run so poorly?
I mean, this thing is borderline fugly (we’re talking Wolfenstein ET level) and i’ve seen it touch 30 a few times @ 1080.
I can run HL2 @ 2160 and never see it dip below 100.
Had a few random crashes to desktop but nothing inexcusable.
I will however ding it a Chair for the FK mothering load times.
Yeah, that business is only being done on a single thread for some bizarre moon reason.
It makes Deus Hex load times seem reasonable.

J-

Thar be some bugs
Thar also be some serious load times.

M-

Uses straight openGL so no issues
small crash initially, making steam not think I was playing even though I was playing for an hour
Holy load times batman
Bonus points for dedicated australian servers, not oceana, not asia, FUCKIN SYDNEY!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

It looka-like-a-game built with the source engine.
And by that I mean it looks like something straight out of 2004.
I’m not saying it’s arse ugly or lazily done but wicked-dated is wicked-dated.

J-

Foxy first discovered that the canadians in this game are all possessed by the void spirit
Other than that, it looks like a source 2 mod
They have some generic trumpety-war-themed menu music
Everything else in game is just what’s actually happening

M-

its not going to win any awards for the shinys
Argh My eyes!!!! http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=116936
however maybe by design as I was getting ~150fps with everything turned up and 2x AA
This is more of a game of sounds than visuals
No music but its absense adds to the tension especially in games with few players
constant player chatter but in a good way, you can only hear in earshot, everyone does not have magical radios
never heard so many fuck’s and shits

Total-

Control

V-

WASD shooter, nothing to report.

J-

You definitely want to check the keymaps before you start playing. Some of the controls, like going prone or deploying a bipod aren’t immediately intuitive

M-

standard FPS fair for Keyboard and gerbal
And fuck me there is alot of controls, and simple they are not
says enable controller, but all I could do was move and nothing else with the PS4 controller

Total-

FUN

V-

Sorry lads, but this is (if i’m being kind) a reskinned Insurgency.
However Day of Infamy does introduce something new and bizarre.
Fast-paced action with near insta-kill weapons.
Yeah, that doesn’t exactly make for an authentic WWII simulation.
The only way I could enjoy that business would be hella-legit permadeath.
I tried to learn the basics via matchmaking but that system is noted doge shite.
Filled with campers, bots, and players WAY above my paygrade.
I even tried a few of the classes but at the end of the day Day of Infamy failed to bring anything new to the table.
It’s hard to recommend something that looks, feels, and plays like a MOD for Insurgency.

J-

“Realistic” shooters don’t really do it for me.
I like my shooters in the quake/counter strike vein
While there are a bunch of different modes in this game other than run around and kill people, it basically boils down to pretty much the same thing:
- Attempt to capture point, die, wait for respawn
The closes thing I had to fun was using the flamethrower guy and barbecuing whichever poor sod walked in front of me
All the other classes tend to get you killed pretty quickly, what with the “realistic recoil”
I feel maybe coordinating with friends over voice chat would improve the fun of the game, but bots and randos don’t really do it for me

M-

Im am really in 2 minds about this game
It has moments of real fun, then times where it ends up really shit and annoying
It really lacks polish and tightening
I have found out that this game was originally a mod, then made into a game….cash grab maybe?
Where is the Tobruk map, if you put aussies in your game you better give us a map
However generally the aussie representation is pretty good, kinda had a mad max effect at the beginning but it got better

“Find the camper” the game
I have lost count of how many points i captured by sitting in a corner
Even won one by laying down in the back of a truck
However this is the first time in a very long time i have had to think laterally instead if going in fullsteam ahead guns blazing
By that i mean i have found myself instinctively doing flanking maneuvers
You need 2 people to call in fire runs, bombing runs and resupplies
And these are really cool and where in most games you order it in then EXPLOSIONS! But in this you can hear the planes diving down and scares the crap out of you
All the game modes ate just variations of “capture the point”
All sounds good, however there is BIG flaw….map selection
I have played well over 2 hours and only seen 3 maps
At the end of the battle everyone picks the next map and guess what, everyone only picks the map they know they can win on
This leads to each battle being the same over and over which is boring
This also allows player who play it alot make it impossible to win against
I would normally call this 4 chairs for fun, however with the map selection and unfair nature this creates i can only give it 2 chairs