It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

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Kayma
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Kayma » Wed Nov 23, 2016 7:54 pm

Esperath wrote:Steam Sale ongoing, now with award nominations.

My current nominations:

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zaratustra wrote::(


Eversion probably a good contender for "Whoaaaaaah dude", "I thought it was cool before it won an award", and/or "Best Capitalism Simulator"

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zaratustra
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby zaratustra » Thu Nov 24, 2016 5:44 am

I'd go with "Villain Most In Need Of A Hug" but those are good too

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Esperath
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Esperath » Thu Nov 24, 2016 10:12 am

Villain Most in Need of a Fuckbug
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Mothra
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Mothra » Thu Nov 24, 2016 11:19 am

Bug fuck us... everyone!

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nosimpleway
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Nov 24, 2016 1:02 pm

You can't hug with nuclear giant spindly black bloodsoaked arms (that pop out of pits and screech and murder you)

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Thad
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 30, 2016 10:57 am

Went ahead and bought a Steam Controller, because obviously there aren't already enough fucking controllers all over my house.

Previous comments on the Steam Controller: Brent, Grath.

My initial impressions from firing it up with Stardew Valley:
1. Man, the touchpads are really sensitive. I wish I could adjust that. There's a Calibration screen but it gives me a scary warning that I should only use it if I'm experiencing performance issues, which I'm not. (Guess I can probably adjust it in Settings, huh? Like any other trackpad?)

2. The placement of the face buttons is terrible. This thing's clearly designed with the intention that you use the 6 buttons on the top and back of it, but that presents a problem in a game where you want Accept, Cancel, Action, Page Left, Page Right, and Menu buttons and don't want to give up your left and right click buttons.

3. Its utility in Stardew Valley really just calls attention to Stardew Valley's kind of bad and half-assed controller support. I really should be able to navigate a menu using right, left, up, and down to move to the adjacent menu item instead of moving a damn mouse pointer, you guys.

It's interesting, though, and I figure I may as well try it out on other keyboard-and-mouse games to see how it goes. Civ, Cities, maybe XCOM or something.

And I'll probably keep using it in Stardew. I like it better than playing with the PS4 controller in principle, and I feel like with some time I can configure it into something that works better.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Dec 30, 2016 2:25 pm

Ignore any warnings against tweaking the settings. The settings require HEAVY tweaking befote the thing ever becomes halfway useful.

Experiment with the gyroscope a lot and practice using the gyroscope and touchpad in combination. It starts to feel alllmost like a pleasant alternative to a mouse once you've got that figured out.

Still need to mess with it for Overwatch, but Overwatch has its own frustrating issues with anything that's not a real mouse+keyboard.

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Esperath
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Esperath » Sat Dec 31, 2016 3:42 am

do you have a good desktop config? the default is a piece of crap.
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Sun Jan 01, 2017 2:04 pm

Brentai wrote:Ignore any warnings against tweaking the settings. The settings require HEAVY tweaking befote the thing ever becomes halfway useful.


Yeah, I definitely got that impression right away, but I'm still working on the "tweak them to what?" question.

I've found a pretty decent set of presets for Stardew (oh hey, touchpad sensitivity is adjustable!), but the face-button placement is still godawful. I keep hitting B or Y when I mean to hit A.

Using the shoulder/back buttons would be better, but again, there's a dilemma there, and that's that there aren't enough of them to replace the mouse buttons and the face buttons. (A does the same as left-click and X does the same as right-click, but context matters; the face buttons interact with your character's location, while the mouse buttons interact with the pointer's location. ...actually, maybe I should look into this a little more, because I know I've used the face buttons to place things in my house somewhere other than right in front of me. This might be workable.)

Brentai wrote:Experiment with the gyroscope a lot and practice using the gyroscope and touchpad in combination. It starts to feel alllmost like a pleasant alternative to a mouse once you've got that figured out.


I could see the gyroscope being useful in racing games and FPS's, but I'm not as sure how I'd use it in a top-down 2D game like this. Maybe to replace the shoulder buttons to scroll through items? I dunno, the triggers are already too fiddly (the last control scheme I tried had them on "hair trigger", which, no; I guess I gotta figure out what all these sensitivity settings mean. Or just swap the bumpers with the triggers, which probably makes more sense.)

And I find myself not using the left touchpad at all. Most configs map it to the number keys, which is a smart idea in theory; it's basically a radial menu, the equivalent of using the D-pad to select items in the Arkham games. But the very important difference is visual feedback; when I select an item with the D-pad in an Arkham game, there is an icon showing me which item I'm selecting, when I inevitably forget which of the dozen different bat-gadgets is assigned to which direction. With the Steam Controller, I just get a set of numbers, and I have to look at my item bar to remember which item corresponds to which number (and, unlike the Arkham games, the order frequently changes); it doesn't save time, it takes longer than just moving through items with the shoulder buttons.

There has to be some useful feature I can figure out for the left touchpad, I just haven't worked out what yet.

(It'd be useful to work as a scroll wheel to go through long menus, but that's so special-case as to make it almost as useless as not using it at all.)

I haven't tried it with anything else yet. I picked up Civ6 and Cities: Skylines, which both seem like ripe examples for testing whether it really makes sense to use this thing for keyboard/mouse games, but so far I've only played them with actual keyboard/mouse.

(I'm shocked by what a resource hog Cities is; I was not expecting that. It runs fine on my Chromebook if I turn all the settings down, for values of "fine" where I get done playing and realize my laptop has gotten shockingly hot and used up most of its battery. Guess if I want to play it on the Chromebook I'll have to stream it from the desktop in my office. Or break out the higher-powered but larger Windows laptop I mostly don't use; as it is I'm already using that one for Civ6, since the Linux port isn't out yet.)

I also suspect that any change of the SV controls will confuse the heck out of my nephew, who spent yesterday morning playing it. (It's really not appropriate for him; his reading level is just about enough that when I say "Switch to your hoe; it's in slot 4" he's likelier to recognize a number "4" than a tiny icon of a hoe. But he wanted to play it because he wants to be like me; poor deluded kid.)

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nosimpleway
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Jan 02, 2017 12:53 am

Cities Skylines was pretty good and then they released a series of expansions best described as "What if we made things really annoying and everything was hard to see?"

so if there's a way to shut off the rain and snow and day/night cycle you're probably not missing much and it might make things easier on your system to not put a filter over the entire game constantly.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Mon Jan 02, 2017 1:02 pm

Esperath wrote:do you have a good desktop config? the default is a piece of crap.


It sure is.

Some of the button mappings make sense as defaults for games (mapping the Start button to Esc, for instance) but make no sense for navigating Windows.

So far I've made it about 1000% more useful just by mapping the right pad click to a left mouse click (yes, this means there are two buttons for left-click; I'm not really that concerned about the redundancy) and the Start button to Start+Tab (which opens a list of open programs).

I'd like to set either the bumpers or the back buttons to cycle through open programs, but that seems to be too complex a set of keystrokes to map. (I've got it as far as "On press, hold Alt and Shift; on release, press Tab; on your next press, press Tab again," but haven't figured out how to get from there to "keep Alt and Shift pressed and use a button-press as Tab, and keep that mapping until Enter is pressed".)

nosimpleway wrote:Cities Skylines was pretty good and then they released a series of expansions best described as "What if we made things really annoying and everything was hard to see?"

so if there's a way to shut off the rain and snow and day/night cycle you're probably not missing much and it might make things easier on your system to not put a filter over the entire game constantly.


I'm not running any expansions, but I can look into how to turn off the overlays.

Meanwhile, I've discovered Civ 6 runs about as well on my Windows laptop as Cities does on my Linux one. It seems like a weird move for games of that sort to leave behind low-spec hardware, but I guess it hasn't hurt sales any.

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Bal
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Bal » Mon Jan 02, 2017 2:15 pm

Civ has always run like shit, basically no matter what kind of computer you have. A better computer just pushes the shit show back a hundred turns or so. SimCity also ran like hot garbage once you had the simulation anything like complex, and Skylines is no better, and in some ways worse because you can actually crank the settings in that game pretty high.

Really, any game with a complicated sim running is going to bog down eventually. Even Dwarf Fortress runs like shit eventually.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Mon Jan 02, 2017 2:44 pm

I'm talking about graphics requirements and you know it; don't be tedious.

My recollection is that Civ5 ran fine on my Chromebook, though maybe I'm misremembering. It definitely ran fine on the Windows laptop.

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Bal
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Bal » Mon Jan 02, 2017 10:45 pm

Actually, I didn't know it. I saw a post complaining about performance, that's it.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:47 pm

Valve releases beta Linux client with support for Windows games, using a compatibility layer called Photon, based on WINE and DXVK.

(And it turns out that the people who thought Valve had been secretly funding DXVK this whole time were right.)

The following titles are now officially supported on Linux, by Valve:

Beat Saber
Bejeweled 2 Deluxe
Doki Doki Literature Club!
DOOM
DOOM II: Hell on Earth
DOOM VFR
Fallout Shelter
FATE
FINAL FANTASY VI
Geometry Dash
Google Earth VR
Into The Breach
Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012
Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013
Mount & Blade
Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword
NieR: Automata
PAYDAY: The Heist
QUAKE
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Star Wars: Battlefront 2
Tekken 7
The Last Remnant
Tropico 4
Ultimate Doom
Warhammer® 40,000: Dawn of War® - Dark Crusade
Warhammer® 40,000: Dawn of War® - Soulstorm


(And yes it's fucking sad that the original Doom, Doom 2, and Quake all have native Linux versions and have for years, but Valve doesn't have permission to use them and is instead running the DOS versions inside DOSBox inside WINE.)

No other games are officially supported at this time, but people have been testing various games and have hammered out a compatibility sheet. I'll probably contribute, in my tradition of spending more time setting up games than actually playing them.

I'm kinda torn on the "Should I buy NieR now?" question, because on the one hand I'm eager to show the Japanese wing of SE that no really you guys there is a demand for your games on Linux (the Eidos wing has already gotten the message and has been quite good with Linux ports), but on the other hand I don't want to support Denuvo. I feel much the same about Sega and Sonic Mania.

Fortunately, there's an easy solution to that dilemma, and it's "play the fucking games I already own and don't buy new ones."

Maybe I'll finally be able to finish Deus Ex: HR.

I'm pretty excited about this, because I have a buttload of Windows-only games and, given that dual-booting has proven to be too much of a hassle for me to finish Witcher 3, setting shit up in WINE is definitely too much of a hassle. I may spend more time setting up games than playing them, but even I have limits.

So a one-click solution provided by Valve is great.

Unfortunately, I haven't heard anything yet about being able to use the "Install non-Steam game" feature and use Proton with that. That's too bad, because I've got a lot of Windows-only games in my GOG library.

Course, Proton is open-source and there are bound to be other implementations. I don't expect GOG to offer decent Linux support, sadly, but maybe Lutris will add support for it.

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MarsDragon
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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby MarsDragon » Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:54 pm

That's really cool!

...too bad my Linux system is as underpowered as my Windows system and my real computer that I should be getting soon runs Windows.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Aug 23, 2018 2:38 am

NieR Automata's PC port is kind of weak anyway, in case you happen to have a PS4 that I'm unaware of.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Thu Aug 23, 2018 9:51 am

No PS4, no.

And I think this was probably clear from context, but since I didn't actually say it: games bought on Linux and played in Photon are going to be logged as Linux sales, so Valve is using this as a pitch for Linux/SteamOS support.

The spreadsheet says FF12 works, even though it's not officially supported, so I could always buy that if I wanted an SE game. And fingers crossed that DQ11 works.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Thad » Thu Aug 23, 2018 11:54 am

Also, here's a bit I haven't seen get much attention:

Q: I'm a developer; I wasn't planning on targeting Linux, how can I best leverage the new Steam Play?

We recommend you target Vulkan natively in order to offer the best possible performance on all platforms, or at least offer it as an option if possible. It's also a good idea to avoid any invasive third-party DRM middleware, as they sometimes prevent compatibility features from working as intended.


Now, you know me -- I consider anything short of going completely DRM-free to be a half-measure.

But as half-measures go? That right there is the biggest seller of PC games telling publishers that they shouldn't use Denuvo and that it's bad for their business. That's kind of a big deal.

I don't expect it to make much difference right away -- but Valve's going to be collecting data to back up its case.

Even going toward a model where games still use Denuvo but then remove it after the launch window would be a step in the right direction.

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Re: It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

Postby Büge » Thu Aug 23, 2018 1:12 pm

Wow, Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 AND 2013?
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