LinuxGameCast Weekly 304: You Wouldn’t Flatpak A Car

War Thunder takes the Vulkan challenge! Steam brings us group chats, minimal GOG Galaxy daemons and open source Need for Speed 3 goodness. All this, plus your hate mail!

Special tanks to:
Yosef B (latest patreon)
Wintercel (latest patreon)

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Wincons & controllers
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1656643072593941317
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements/detail/1656643648103541416

Added Generic Gamepad support for over 100 popular game controllers but we’re not telling you which ones.
You can import those ICO files now and use em I steam. Cuz windows needs to use non-svg icons for some dumb reason
- The issue is more on the Developer side not setting the icon properly in the Linux depot.

Fake McFakeface
https://twitter.com/SteamDB/status/1007532765670203392

Until your game is branded “legit” achievements won’t count for profiles, the game itself won’t count for the public game count number, no coupons for it (because people really care about those, especially for a $1 asset flip), and of course you won’t get trading cards either.
This was posted in the private Steamworks group, it can only be seen by developers.
Read “Nobody’s allowed to scam our users but us!”
Oh Geez! Only a hundred achievements. Whatever will our poor players do?!?!

Steamcord
https://steamcommunity.com/updates/chatupdate

Discord already ate your lunch, son.
Discord ate lunch, had coffee and took a shit before VALVe could figure out how to use a fork.
This is what happens when you are on top with no real competition.
Yeah, you get lazy.
I was going to explain how small, hungry companies are able to innovate but I don’t feel like it right now #VennTime
What would be hilarious though is if the Audio quality here was better than that of discord
It’s still a wee buggy. I’ve had the embedded chromium crash a few times

Crouching Valve
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/11/17451484/steam-china-announced-valve-perfect-world

And everyone will still VPN out of China.
Yeah, the catalogue is probably gonna be heavily restricted unless you VPN out

Hidden Linux
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3kkmw/steam-on-windows-xp-valve-new-features

Why do I sense this and the China’s thing are somehow related
^
Yeah, I can’t brain exactly what the connection is but one definitely has something to do with the other.
Now, if only 1% would switch to Linux it would greatly boost OS numbers.

Steam: Game Updates

Vulkan & The Thun-der
https://steamcommunity.com/games/236390/announcements/detail/1667902016150326424
https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/402831-v177-and-20fps-and-black-blotches-on-ground/&do=findComment&comment=7613484

A gang of game updates including one not mentioned, Vulkan.
^ Instruction in second link.
If I lock the config file I can get it to launch the Vulkan render but it’s not playable because the screen goes black if the game is in focus.

Steam: New Games

Wizard Smackdown
https://store.steampowered.com/app/861960/Master_Pyrox_Wizard_Smackdown/

What’s this? Online multiplayer?
My god, I’ve seemed to stumble into a parallel universe where multiplayer game devs have figured out this will sell more copies of the game
Looks like an isometric 3D Lethal League.

StoneShard
https://store.steampowered.com/app/869760/Stoneshard_Prologue/

Its an alpha for an actual roguelike that establishes the gameplay and mechanics
Cheap as free

News:

Good Old Comet
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/comet_galaxy_client_for_linux
https://gitlab.com/Yepoleb/comet

I’m not entirely sure what this does.
- Galaxy has a multiplayer/stats thing like steam.
- This lets games outside of galaxy hook into that
Can’t say I’m particularly excited for this one.
Especially since it only currently supports the Stardew Valley multiplayer beta.

Vulcanized Lupus
https://plus.google.com/+LutrisNet/posts/3CovHbE62Ln
https://lutris.net/games/?page=1&q=DXVK&sort-by-popularity=on&search-installers=on

Frenchy dun added a list of games on lutris bundled with dxvk.
Funnily enough, all of these a big AAA games that people usually resort to wine or dual booting to run. What a coinky-dink
Yup, it’s official, Lutris does a better job of making games run on Linux than Virtual Programming ever did.
- We’ve said for a while that VP would need to find new work when DX11 /w WINE became a thing.
- I didn’t expect it to come in the form of DXVK.

You mum runs Windows 10!
https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-voice-chat-software-for-linux-gaming/

Discord, mumble and teamspeak
Yeah, that’s pretty much all the low effort stuff
You could.be a crazy person and run your own sip/xmpp/webrtc solution but who the fuck does that?
Send in some feedback and let us know your preferred method of screaming disparaging remarks about each other mother.

WHAR games
https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/8dux0v/why_do_i_see_so_few_linux_games_made_with_unreal/

Oh, someone broke out the “Linux users are pirates” argument.
Can someone point me to this mythical pirated software trove for Linux games?
It’s not TPB.
Speaking of piracy!
Another one of these threads.
- Queue the uninformed masses making declarative,authoritative statements. Brb, getting popcorn
I like how quickly delusion creeps up and a Windows user claims Windows has no issues.

BLUI (RTheren)
https://opensource.com/article/18/6/blui-game-development-plugin
https://github.com/AaronShea/BLUI

Create user interface (UI) components using web-based programming like HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
It also provides full support for the open source Chromium Embedded Framework.
Oh, look! It’s a UI system for Electron developers.
Once again, frontend devs want to apply the hammer of java script to engines

WinePAK
https://winepak.org/

If you insist on shipping your “Linux port” using WINE this is the way to do it.
Certainly lowers the bar for entry for wine noobs
Gonna have to contend with devs not knowing how to fuck around in wine tho.

Open NFS3
https://github.com/AmrikSadhra/OpenNFS3

Not in a playable state but I want me some of this.
An attempt to recreate the original Need for Speed 3, unpacking it’s original data files into a modern scratch build engine.
You will need the original game databits.

SCUMMy blue:
https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180612/

Empty raises a very good point.
Two weeks ago we covered that they wouldn’t be supporting Linux cuz it was too hard
Last I checked, scummvm ran perfectly fine regardless of distro.
Where does this say anything about it coming to Linux?
What’s going to happen is that SCUMMVM will no longer work on Linux, because Cyan thinks it’s too hard.

CHAIRQUISITION:

Game: Portarius
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/747050/Portarius/
Devel: Dmitry Poznukhov
Engine: cocos2d-x
Price: £5.19 / US$6.99 / CA$7.99

Wazzat: Open a portal and begin your journey! Teleport rocks, water and your spaceship. Immerse in handcrafted colorful worlds, solve puzzles and be the first at the center of the Earth.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys

QA:

Venn: (Ubuntu)

Does It Launch:

It will hang and peg a core @ 100% and freeze if you Alt+Tab while in a level.
No options in-game other than sound and fullscreen.

Performance @ 1080:

Graphics:

Control:

Jordan: (Fedora) |

Does It Launch:

The alt-tab thing. She is real

Performance @ 1080:

Graphics:

Control:

Click on shit!
Mouse clicks register out of sync with movement sometimes

Pedro: (Solus) |

Does It Launch:

It forgets if you set it to fullscreen or windowed unless you edit the config file
It crashes on the 5th level of the second stage, reliably.

Performance @ 1080:

Graphics:

Control:

It was clearly made for a touchscreen but it works as expected
The physics freak out sometimes.
You can shoot yourself and boulders through supposedly solid parts of levels.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:

Fun?

Venn:

That’s not how portals work.
If you are going to copy the running man logo from Portal you might as well yoink the Left/Right Portal excretion mechanic.
This might make more sense with a touchscreen (which it was clearly designed for) but dragging the gerbil around quickly becomes tiresome.
I gave this critter 50+ minutes to charm me and it failed, hard.
If you are going to do a physics game you might want to nail that bit down before you ship.
$6.99 for a mobile game that should be free is a bit too much to ask.

Jordan:

My roommate walked in while I was playing this and asked me what it was
The best explanation I could come up with was that someone sought to rip off portal, but with the least amount of effort possible
Honestly, I’m not digging the core mechanic. Forcing me to alternate portals is not good design brad
Yeah, I can see this being a mobile game. Not a very good one, but about par for what you’d see on the play store
Honestly, the puzzles aren’t particularly hard, just annoying and time consuming given the controls

Pedro:

In this game’s portals slow thing comes in, speedy thing comes out.
It’s also clearly designed for a touchscreen.
I like puzzle games but this one didn’t really do it for me.
Especially since it started crashing 15 levels in, whenever you die the game dies.

Fun Score:

Hate Mail:

Systems
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?wwYIcUL

I Didn’t
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?InNL923

I did not
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?t5bFQeR