Another week has dragged on and here we are, the weekend. It's time to go over a few little bits and find out what our readers have been playing this week.
For me, I've been playing rather a lot of DRAG, the fancy new racer from Orontes Games. As pretty as it is and how smooth the performance is, the game itself might be the most frustrated I've been with a racing game—ever. Not the kind of frustration to put me off because of technical issues, more at my own inability to keep the damn car from sliding about everywhere and then smashing into a tiny little tree and losing a precious wheel.
Have you ever had a game truly give you stress-sweats? It's not just because it's ridiculously warm in the GOL office, DRAG is nail-biting edge of your seat tough. It took me over 4 hours to beat the first set of time trials on the "Wood" medal (the lowest). 4 hours, split across a few levels that take ~30 seconds to beat most. Who set these crazy times? Orontes we need words. Challenging physics aside, DRAG is a great entry into the racing genre that I hope goes on to become a success. It's been a while since I was properly excited to see a racing game evolve and DRAG has such an impressive start. I did at least get a few good runs in like this on video.
Now how about a little round-up of some interesting recent news?
As for game engines, the cross-platform and open source Godot Engine is changing how it will provide rendering options with Godot 4.0 when it gains Vulkan support. Instead of a high-end and a low-end renderer, they will instead have a single renderer that is efficient for multiple uses. You can read more about that here. Additionally, Godot is getting a Volumetric fog implementation which is merged in ready for release (shots below).
Additionally, a normal Fog system is also back in for Godot 4.0 that's less complex than the system in the 3.x series that should look good with "less effort". The Godot team is also looking for help funding to hire more developers which you can do so on Patreon. If you're a game developer reading, I do urge you to look into using Godot.
This week we also had the KDE August 2020 application updates bringing with it improvements to the Dolphin file manager with lots of usability improvements, like improvements to how it cuts the filenames when they're too long and a new "Copy Location" option. This Copy Location ability was also added to Konsole, KDE's terminal app and there's plenty more updates across KDE apps. Digikam especially got a big upgrade with Digikam 7.0.0 with much better facial recognition.
Something very concerning is what's happening over at Mozilla. There's been some conflicting reports but they're definitely changing and letting go of 250 staff members. MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), practically one of the go-to places for reading up on web tech and standards also had its team gutted and they're trying to find a way forwards. Hopefully it's not all as bad as it sounds. It's alarming since they make Firefox, and it would be really bad if we ended up with just Chromium sticking around. Open source still sure, but Google pretty firmly control it. The somewhat good news, is that Mozilla has now managed to sign a new deal with Google for funding, which makes up the majority of their incoming monies.
Deals Reminder:
- Killing Floor Humble Bundle
- Humble Store - Racing Games Sale
- Dying Light - 66% off (Steam) - just had a new DLC
- The Traditional Roguelikes Bundle (Steam) - save on Caves of Qud, Sword of the Stars and more
- PAYDAY 2 (Steam) big anniversary sale - 50% off
- GOG have a sale on Automation games, with some great Zachtronics in there like Opus Magnum
Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately and what are you clicking on this weekend?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I dug out the very first PC game my parents bought for me: The Settlers 2.Oof. Way to make me feel old, man. I was in my 20s when the first one came out, and I still kind of think of the sequel as “the new one”. Great games, though.
I'm having frequent complete system freezes that require a hard reset and nothing I've tried so far is helping. Different drives, entirely different distros, updated the BIOS, tested RAM, and still freezing. Sooo damn frustrating.
Power supply is the next item on your checklist.
20 whole minutes of play time. On thew supposedly accessible mode. I'll think go back to Strider, something that's difficult but at least makes sense.
Last edited by jarhead_h on 16 August 2020 at 12:01 am UTC
BloodaxeNOR Aug 16, 2020
Still learning Star Ruler 2. It's such a fun game, I'm sad it didn't get more attention, especially with it being open source. Even weirder it doesn't seem to appear in repos.
Star Ruler 2 is opensource? That's awesome!
I've been playing DRAG, and it's been great fun! Playing online is very fun, but there are some weird lagspikes every now and then that seem connected to server performance.
Still learning Star Ruler 2. It's such a fun game, I'm sad it didn't get more attention, especially with it being open source. Even weirder it doesn't seem to appear in repos.
Star Ruler 2 is opensource? That's awesome!
Yeah, they devs Opensourced it when the Studio closed up shop. It includes everything but the music. The source and instructions to compile are here. I had install make and cmake and a few other misc dependencies (I'm on a very minimal OpenSuse install and had nothing for builds installed at all).
It was painless to build. Here's the link Star Ruler 2 From Blind Mind Studio
So far a lot of fun, but pretty hard
inlinuxdude Aug 16, 2020
Also trying out Synergia, which was given to me. It's...not that great to be honest. It reads like Ghost In the Shell fanfiction, and it's pretty clear that few if any of the devs have really done much serious writing. Most of it feels like a first draft, with awkward dialogue that often goes nowhere, a reliance on genre tropes and worldbuilding done by just telling you stuff, and the occasional continuity error. I kinda see what they're going for, but the execution is very flawed. That said, it's about the same quality of writing I see in most Visual Novels I've tried, so maybe it's good in that sense?
slaapliedje Aug 16, 2020
Ha, my save is out in the farm land area. I can't recall if there is a way back.I loaded up Dying Light again to try out the Hellraid DLC but couldn't even figure out how to get to it...I finally found how to do it… You have to select "Play" in the main menu, then "Play the campaign", then "Play", and you should be in the tower or at least in the map of the original game where you can go to the tower. Once in the tower there is an arcade machine in a room on the first floor which gives access to Hellraid.
I promised myself I wouldn't play anytging else until I beat Witcher 2.... eventually I will try this!
Last edited by toojays on 16 August 2020 at 5:33 am UTC
I've bought DRAG to support the developers who don't ingore Linux despite I don't like racing games. I like its graphics but cannot get used to vehicle behaviour. It either goes forward when I want to turn, or drifts too much when slightly push B. All I could get was a couple of bronze awards.
Few old games with Proton: Neighbours from Hell, Bejeweled 3, Worms Armageddon. They all run excellent, no issues.
Speaking of Humble Choice, Hello Neighbor. To be honest, I don't like it at all. Too scripted, too bad controls, just a PC version of mobile spooky games which are popular among children these days. If I wanted to play a FPP hide'n'seek game, I'd rather play Alien Isolation. So I did. But it crashes every time I start a new game despite runs ok when I load my old save or start DLC. I'm going to try Proton for it. (Update: it started fine with Proton, the performance is the same, ~150 FPS.)
These games distract me from playing Final Fantasy IX. It runs fine with Proton, but Moguri Mod (a mod with HD textures enhanced with machine learning) is glitchy, so I'm playing the unmodified version. It has some improvements upon the PS1 version, like speeding up the gameplay without speeding up the game timer - helpful for some mini-games.
Last edited by ageres on 16 August 2020 at 7:05 am UTC
furaxhornyx Aug 16, 2020
I'm having frequent complete system freezes that require a hard reset and nothing I've tried so far is helping. Different drives, entirely different distros, updated the BIOS, tested RAM, and still freezing. Sooo damn frustrating.
Power supply is the next item on your checklist.
In addition to CatKiller suggestion, you may also want to try setting a fixed voltage for your CPU, closest to the "auto" setting. I remember having to do that on "cheap" motherboard, and setting a fixed value solved the problems for me. Might be worth a try. Also, check the CPU temperature, in these hot days ; you may want to try underclocking the CPU a little, and see if it improves stability.
As for me, this week I tried again to make a Windows VM work for music making. After a lot of trouble installing all Windows 7 updates from all those years, I found out that my motherboard makes it difficult to passthrough my USB audio card. So, I may end up buying a dedicated PCI USB controller to make it easier. In any case, I am making a lot of notes on what to look for for my future PC upgrade
So, I gave up for now and I (finally) went back to Wizard of Legend. I had not play for a long time, so it was nice to see all the new stuff (and boss !) they added to the game. What was less nice it that my saved game was wiped, so, time to unlock everything one more time I guess
Played Dota 2 for the first time
Still 100%-ing Death Stranding
I'm having frequent complete system freezes that require a hard reset and nothing I've tried so far is helping. Different drives, entirely different distros, updated the BIOS, tested RAM, and still freezing. Sooo damn frustrating.
Power supply is the next item on your checklist.
In addition to CatKiller suggestion, you may also want to try setting a fixed voltage for your CPU, closest to the "auto" setting. I remember having to do that on "cheap" motherboard, and setting a fixed value solved the problems for me. Might be worth a try. Also, check the CPU temperature, in these hot days ; you may want to try underclocking the CPU a little, and see if it improves stability.
More likely this is the infamous Ryzen power bug that affects Ryzen 1xxx and 2xxx processors. If these freezes or restarts happen when CPU is doing very little or idling, you're probably affected. In the kernel.log you should see something like this at the time of the incident:
Jun 19 19:31:21 Kassad kernel: [ 0.116004] mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
Jun 19 19:31:21 Kassad kernel: [ 0.116004] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check: 0 Bank 5: bea0000000000108
Jun 19 19:31:21 Kassad kernel: [ 0.116004] mce: [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 ADDR 1ffffae6eb6a6 MISC d012000100000000 SYND 4d000000 IPID 500b000000000
Jun 19 19:31:21 Kassad kernel: [ 0.116004] mce: [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 2:800f11 TIME 1592584272 SOCKET 0 APIC 2 microcode 8001138
The solution is to find in EFI setting "Power supply idle control", usually it's somewhere in the advanced settings, depends on the mobo manufacturer. You need to change the setting from Auto to Typical Current Idle.
WendishBovine Aug 16, 2020
I have played the Total War series on and off ever since Rome as a kid but I never managed to get into because, frankly, I just sucked. But the variety of factions and cool stuff in TW2 kept me engaged long enough to learn a thing or two, which lead me to enjoy the genre much more.
So I also grabbed Total War Troy from the Epic Games store while it was free, and I can say I'm enjoying it more than I would have not having played TW2 and getting better at it. It runs surprisingly well on my laptop too, I had reservations on how it will work through Lutris but I encountered absolutely no issues which is great.
I just did a big upgrade of my computer and decided to try out a bunch of the flashy AAA games in Proton. I'm having frequent complete system freezes that require a hard reset and nothing I've tried so far is helping. Different drives, entirely different distros, updated the BIOS, tested RAM, and still freezing. Sooo damn frustrating.
Check your PSU, maybe it is underpowered when the GPU and the CPU are working at 100%, which is the case for AAA titles
Been learning Marduk. Got all the achievements now by competing in a recent tournament on Friday. Won that one with GiGas.
* Killing Floor - Steam
Picked it up at the HB and so did my friends. Just messed around with settings for. Suppose to play a round tonight.
* Sundered - GOG
I'm in love with this game. Very rare for an sp game to grab me like this kne has.
* Mortal Kombat 11 - Stadia
Friday participated and a tournament with some friends and strangers and I came in 3rd place with my custom Johnny Cage. Will do another tonight with Jax.
Last edited by Mezron on 16 August 2020 at 3:07 pm UTC
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