I've got the Steam version, and though I hadn't tried to play it much before the beta on this system, I've got the (apparently) Mono-related bug with termcap.

FYI, if anyone else has got the whole really-quick-black-screen-then-crash bug when trying to start from Steam, I've been able to manually start it outside of Steam by adding TERM=xterm to the beginning, e.g.:

TERM=xterm ./StardewValley.bin.x86_64

I tried switching my launch options in Steam to: 'TERM=xterm %command%' but that didn't make a difference. Maybe it's calling some other script that overwrites TERM?

However, playing with my g/f on her new farm (fresh start with both of us on the beta - her on Xubuntu 18.04, and myself on Gentoo), she was totally fine, even launching from Steam, but I would crash to desktop every half hour or so. Thankfully, I could quickly relaunch and reconnect just fine (LAN), and my character woke up in their bed, teleported from wherever they were, with all their inventory and such intact.

At one point, the game itself froze on my end completely, rather than CtD, but I could Alt-Tab out, kill it and restart it.

It's a Beta, I get it, so I'm not really complaining, just figured I'd report my experience. :)

It was still loads of fun to team up in the caves and murder a bunch of monsters, back-to-back (playing with a controller feels a lot easier for me, since there's a bit of a disconnect between what you click on and where you swing - it's based around the last angle you were moving at), or let her, the vastly more experienced player, run around town doing all the errands while I'd stick at home, chopping wood and busting rocks to gather starting materials.

One other thing we found out, particularly because my lumberjacking-and-rock-busting drains energy quite quickly, is that one player (even the host) can go to bed, say 'yes I want to sleep for the night', and their energy will slowly start to refill while the other people are still up and playing. The day will roll over only when all players are in bed, but if someone (me) is burning energy fast, you can have a mid-day nap while your friends are up and about in town, get half an energy bar (or more) back, then go chop some more. :D Cheesing it a little, maybe, but it helps give us something to do. I got into a routine of having 3 or even 4 naps during the day, so I could be a tree-munching machine in between.

Definitely worth braving the crashes, as long as the host is stable, and lots of fun even with just 2 people - I can imagine a full team of 5 would be pretty awesome.

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At least they give you the option to change it, even if the defaults are the exact opposite of what they should be.

How about defaulting everyone to completely private, and then a nice little ad on their page or whatever going 'hey, you can show off your game library and/or wishlists if you change these new settings we introduced!', so people can opt-in?

Nah, that would actually be doing the right thing, and we can't have that...

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A bunch of people are asking me "What is it I don't like?" - short answer: I'm not into rogue-likes. Long answer...

Yahtzee can be a bit... polarizing in his reviews, but he kind of hits where I got disappointed with the idea about half-way through his earlier review (warning: foul language, very fast-talking):
View video on youtube.com

He actually likes it, in the end, but as a rogue-like. I'm not into rogue-likes, that's all. :) Quake evokes constant motion and freedom, where a mistake could just mean a Quickload or worse, restart of the specific level you're on. Strafe, as a rogue-like, sounds like it has a really heavy emphasis on self-preservation so you don't have to fully restart the game because of a dumb mistake (or worse, a horrible glitch).

Procedurally generated levels sound great on paper, but I find that any sort of 3D procedural generation tends to get very stale and repetitive, very fast... and then the layouts can end up nonsensical. One of the great things about the games that Strafe tries to evoke is their extremely well-polished, memorable level designs, with tuned difficulty curves over the course of a campaign. Levels that you can memorize, you can look for secrets in, so when you remember where that BFG is and grab it early, you can have that sense of accomplishment as you blow everything to smithereens without so much as a second thought.

Rogue-likes tend to have you praying to the RNG gods for something that makes your run actually playable, and if watching other people play various ones (like Binding of Issac, especially), you tend to either rapidly turn into an overpowered demi-god, or get completely shafted, with very little in-between. Personally, that's not my cup of tea. But if that's the kind of thing you're into - the kind of thing you can stream for people with really good replay value and surprises every time you play, I'm sure this totally fits the bill.

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I can totally appreciate that they have a Linux version of this finally (wasn't it a stretch goal from their Kickstarter or something wayyy back?), but yeah - the vibe you get from casually watching trailers for this is 'omg modern Quake'. Kind of like how Ion Maiden is very obviously not just 'a new game set in an updated BUILD engine', but a new game that deliberately hearkens back to 3D Realms titles like Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood.

Then I started looking a little deeper, and it's very much not what I'd expect from a typical 'modern retro' Quake-esque shooter. Maybe some of the raw in-game mechanics are similar, and definitely the art style, but it's otherwise overarchingly a very different style of game. A style of game that, unfortunately, is really not my thing, personally, which is unfortunate because I loved these guys' marketing style, and I want to want this game.

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My whole thing here was whether the controller/joystick input issues were ever fixed or not; last time I tried, it's trying to map everything to a virtual Xbox 360 controller or something, using an external config file that needs hand editing. Most of the buttons on my HOTAS beyond a certain point (Saitek X52 Pro) just wouldn't register, and 'fire guns' and 'yaw right' were double-mapped on the right trigger if trying to play with an actual 360 controller, making flying a helicopter... interesting.

If the input issues are all sorted, then awesome - this is literally the only thing holding me back from playing this on Linux. On Windows, I can have a wheel+pedals combo (Logitech G27) hooked up for driving ground vehicles like Jeeps, my HOTAS for flying planes and choppers, and still have working mouse+keyboard for infantry actions, all at the same time, with no conflicts and no dead buttons.

I'll see if I can test this again at some point soon and report back. :)

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So I did grab this, and... holy hell, there's actually slowdown still. Vsync off, 60fps cap, but it stutters in places and seems to drop to ~30fps. On an i7-4790K + GTX980 in OpenGL mode, knocked Anisotropic down to 4x. Whaaaaa? Something's not right there. :p

Also, while the *first* screenshot through the Steam overlay I took was fine, the second caused the game to lock up, music still running away. Early Access indeed, I guess. Will definitely have to come back to it and see, but, semi-spoilery easter egg - this looks familiar, doesn't it?

Spoiler, click me

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I like how the system requirements listed on Steam are... just stupidly way higher than I think they actually are.

Does this *really* need 2GB RAM and a 1GB video card?

Hmmmm. ;p

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Oh neat, on the audio front:

• Added sidechain/ducking support to the compressor filter.
• Added surround sound audio output support
• Added new audio meters to allow the ability to see the audio levels of each audio channel

Understanding the Mixer [External Link]

The audio engineer in me is super excited, especially considering I just spent a bunch of time messing with my standalone digital mixer (Behringer X32) and mics just last night doing quality and level checks... this would've made things a lot friendlier. :p

Now to wait for the ebuild to land and upgrade.

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I did set up an RTMP-based 4-up setup one time, using the RTMP plugin for nginx on my home server running FreeBSD. It's not as good as a system with a proper capture card, but it was flexible enough to let me do things with friends running Windows in addition to my Linux systems (and even doing something questionable, pulling my remote friends' Twitch streams back into OBS for rebroadcast).

The spare machine I had with hardware encoding that was running OBS as the final master was my old mid-2012 Macbook Pro, and for whatever reason, OBS just kept crashing. :(

One day I'll have the budget to build a proper stream head PC and stick something like a Magewell capture card in there to do this all properly... that'd be an interesting article if you know anyone else who's already done it? ;)

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I actually bought into this with a 4-pack to support it almost a year ago it seems, now. Even did some streaming.

They give you access to their Slack, and I did help them test a couple regressions with the Linux builds. The server on Windows has a decent enough GUI for setting all the options, at which point you could copy the config files it generates over to the Linux version of the dedicated server, but the real-time management (e.g. viewing a list of and potentially banning users) wasn't really there.

Unfortunately, the client side bugs drove my friends away 'until it's on Steam and more stable', so this is good to see.

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