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Latest Comments by scaine
Children of Morta adds Linux support and a new animal charity DLC
24 August 2020 at 3:33 pm UTC Likes: 2

This has been on my wishlist for months. No more - just bought it. I'll give it a shot tonight.

Edit: Well, it's excellent. There's a beautifully presented story here, superb graphics and fluid, satisfying gameplay all tied into a progression tree throughout what looks like about 6 characters. The (excellent) narrator is seamless throughout gameplay too in a very Bastion-like way. The occasional interlude/scene-setter pops up in very Transistor-like way too. So Dead Mage is taking some great inspiration from Supergiant here.

Brilliant stuff. Very happy this has happened!

Fantastic 2D action-RPG 'Chronicon' has now released
24 August 2020 at 7:14 am UTC

Quoting: psycho_driver
Quoting: JuliusWorks fine here on Manjaro as well. Graphics take some time to get used to, but the game is a solid loot driven ARPG. The main problem is that it is way too easy. Even on legendary mode you can just walk through it at least with my character build. Maybe I got a strange unbalanced skill combination by accident?

I have a feeling it's just pretty easy, at least for a while. I started a berserker last night and so far can just face tank everything.

Unless something's changed in the past couple of months, the default "Normal" mode is pretty easy. However, "Heroic", the next level up doubles monster health and gives them a 50% damage boost. At this level, you'll have to start kiting some of the tougher monsters or die. Epic doubles it again, and Legendary doubles it to an 800% boost in monster health. Early game here can be a bit tedious, as every monster needs massive kiting until you unlock stronger spells/abilities/gear.

I play on Heroic only. It's a SUPERB game that I've sunk nearly 40 hours into. Big thanks to Liam for helping the dev sort the Linux launcher script, because that stopped me playing this for over a year (I was on Ubuntu 18.04 at the time, but only 18.10 and later were supported, until Liam noticed that the dev was calling static libraries instead of targeting the Steam runtime libraries).

Help GamingOnLinux beat Coronavirus, join us on Folding@home
24 August 2020 at 6:54 am UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: GuestI just noticed the team had reached the one billion points mark.

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680

Not only are you now 7th, but the top contributor accounts for over a quarter of that billion! Some incredible effort here. I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card. Time to start again, I reckon!

Linux gaming overlay MangoHud version 0.5.1 released
21 August 2020 at 3:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: dpanter
Quoting: scaineMangoHUD is pure aesthetics
Not so.
Displaying MangoHud is optional, it can now start hidden and be revealed with a single keypress. It can log detailed fps data and upload to flightlessmango.com. By the way, a Flatpak exists if you're into that sort of thing.

Sorry, I meant it's pure aesthetics for me. I don't really have any interest in benchmarking, beyond a vague finger-in-the-air, "is this smooth enough to play for more than 10 minutes". I get that lots of people love their 144Hz, or 120fps, or whatever. For me, I stop caring around the 45-50fps. 60 is a nice to have.

Quantum mechanics-based puzzle game The Long Gate launches in September
21 August 2020 at 1:37 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: callcifer
Quoteit's an attempt to blend aspects of The Witness and Talos Principle
I'm torn. I really, really loved The Talos Principle but was completely turned off by The Witness so now I don't know what to think about this game
The Witness was a bitter, bitter disappointment. After the inventiveness of Braid, I had such high hopes, only to see this repetitive, bland puzzler botched with obscure mechanics (mid-game mechanics at least... it's pretty simple at the start). The island is pretty... and that's about it.

Comparatively, the Talos Principle is a near-masterpiece. Wonderful immersion, stunning graphics, difficult, but intuitive puzzles and an engaging, if drawn out, plot structure. The inter-puzzle puzzles were glorious too. The only bit I didn't like was the spurious block-puzzles they threw into each level of the Tower. God those were tedious. You could almost complete them by trial and error, and in hindsight, they're oddly reminiscent of the entire Witness experience. I did at least two or possibly three puzzles in the Witness by total accident. Hadn't an actual scooby what was going on - press a button, hear a noise, see a lift-thingy move, try another, try another... try for about 20 minutes until magically I appear to have solved... something. Since all the buttons are now inactive, and presumably a new part of the island is available? Maybe? Who knows.

So yeah. In summary, Braid good. Witness shit.

I still fondly remember Zero Punctuation reviewing Braid and hoping it would be terrible, so that he could make a joke about Jonathon Blow's game both sucking and blowing. But he liked Braid. I wonder if he liked The Witness? Spoiler! He did not. But at least he got to use his aforementioned sucks and blows joke! Result!

Linux gaming overlay MangoHud version 0.5.1 released
21 August 2020 at 1:21 pm UTC

Quoting: pmadzik
Quoting: scaineI wonder if this will ever get deb/ppa support. I'm just not a fan of "locally" (i.e. non-managed) installed software. Such a cool project too.
My dirty hack for deb package:
In source dir (from git or tarball) after installing all required dependencies:
 
meson build/meson64 --libdir lib/mangohud/lib --prefix /usr -Dappend_libdir_mangohud=false -Dld_libdir_prefix=true

CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib32/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:" LLVM_CONFIG="/usr/bin/llvm-config32" meson build/meson32 --libdir lib/mangohud/lib32 --prefix /usr -Dappend_libdir_mangohud=false -Dld_libdir_prefix=true

DESTDIR="$PWD/build/release" ninja -C build/meson32 install

DESTDIR="$PWD/build/release" ninja -C build/meson64 install

cd build/release

tar cvzf ../../../MangoHud-0.5.1-bin.tar.gz . --owner=0 --group=0

cd ../../..

./tar2deb.sh MangoHud-0.5.1-bin.tar.gz mangohud 0.5.1-1

Last step execute shell script tar2deb.sh with such content:
 
#!/bin/bash
set -x

# $1 - tar.gz file
# $2 - package name
# $3 - version
# $4 - section
# $5 - architecture

control=$(mktemp -dt)
data=$(mktemp -dt)

tarfile="$1"
pkgname=$2
pkgver=$3
section=${4:-misc}
arch=${5:-amd64}

cat "$tarfile" | (cd $data; tar xvzf -)

size=$(du -s $data | cut -f1)

cat > $control/control <<EOF
Package: $pkgname
Section: $section
Priority: optional
Architecture: $arch
Version: $pkgver
Installed-Size: $size
Maintainer: $USER
Description: Deb-package made from $tarfile
 This package is made by tar2deb by $USER at
  $(date) from $tarfile
EOF

(cd $data; find -type f | xargs md5sum ) > $control/md5sums
(cd $control; tar cvzf control.tar.gz * --owner=0 --group=0)
cp $tarfile $control/data.tar.gz
echo 2.0 > $control/debian-binary

ar -cr ${pkgname}_${pkgver}_${arch}.deb $control/{debian-binary,control.tar.gz,data.tar.gz}

rm -rf $control
rm -rf $data
Nice - I guess that give me an uninstall, but I still don't get updated, of course, unless I go through that each time there's a new release. Definitely better to wait for that PPA mentioned in the github issues tracker, I think. MangoHUD is pure aesthetics. I don't need it for anything, other than to satisfy my curiosity of what's possible. Thanks though! Great to have options if I decide to give it a go.

Quantum mechanics-based puzzle game The Long Gate launches in September
20 August 2020 at 11:04 am UTC Likes: 2

Lovely atmosphere. It's giving me a weird Outer Wilds vibe too which is no bad thing. One month to wait, then!

Dino survival-horror 'Goner' gives some serious Jurassic Park vibes, coming to Linux PC
19 August 2020 at 12:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

"Death finds a way". Haha! Clever girl...

Love the bike scene too. This feels like "The Forest" had a baby with "Jurassic Park". Surely an essential purchase!

A Short Hike, probably 2019's most chilled game gets a boating update
19 August 2020 at 12:09 pm UTC Likes: 5

I very nearly resurrected my 2018 mini-series "Play It Now" for this title last year. But Liam had already written three articles on it, including a short review, so I dropped the idea. But yeah, in short, go play this now. It's fun, uplifing, engaging and great value.

Linux gaming overlay MangoHud version 0.5.1 released
19 August 2020 at 12:02 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: dpanter
Quoting: scaineI wonder if this will ever get deb/ppa support.
WIP, track the request here

Sounds like a hell of a journey! Although a lot of it about the licensing for Debian. Interesting that they're making Oibaf the dependency model for their deb/ppa work. I wonder if it's compatible with Kisak, or I have to switch PPAs when they have a build out?!

Thanks for the link regardless.