Every article tag can be clicked to get a list of all articles in that category. Every article tag also has an RSS feed! You can customize an RSS feed too!
Latest Comments by toojays
The dev of "Marble It Up!" had intriguing words to say about the native vs Steam Play argument for a Linux version
30 May 2019 at 10:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

Steam Play has changed things for me, for sure. I only ever used WINE for a couple of older games before, amd frankly found it a PITA. But Steam Play is a breeze, I'm happy to buy a game just for Steam Play if it has good reports on ProtonDB.

So far I've spent maybe $100 more on games this year than I otherwise would have because of this - highlights have been Into the Breach, Obra Dinn, Unavowed, Witcher 3.

Quake II RTX to release June 6th, first 3 levels free for everyone and source code will be up too
27 May 2019 at 10:13 am UTC

Remembering the intro to Quake 2 still gives me shivers. I had two copies of Quake 2 back in the day (one came free with a 56k modem IIRC), hopefully I still have one of them. Otherwise I guess 3 levels will probably be enough for me anyway.

Get 'Gone Home' FREE in the Humble Trove plus other deals to look out for this weekend
28 April 2019 at 11:58 pm UTC Likes: 1

Aha, thanks tuubi!

In my browser the font size is set so high that the trailer video takes up my entire screen, and however they have it coded does not give any way to scroll the popup or give any indication what has gone wrong. When I shrink the font I can see the download button now.

Get 'Gone Home' FREE in the Humble Trove plus other deals to look out for this weekend
28 April 2019 at 5:19 pm UTC

I can't figure out where the download link for Gone Home is. When I click on the "Gone Home" picture on the Trove page it just pops up the trailer video. What am I missing?

Looks like Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 may be coming to Linux
28 March 2019 at 10:55 am UTC Likes: 1

I picked up the original last weekend when Humble had it on special. Got it running at 1440p under Proton with the unofficial patch. Unfortunately it locked up at the end of the tutorial and I hadn't saved it. Bummer. I don't have the time to invest in a proper playthrough right now, but it will go near the top of my backlog I reckon. I just wanted to play enough to register a count to the Linux stats, which I imagine may help inform whether Paradox release a Linux port of Bloodlines 2.

BTW, Humble have this much cheaper than Steam in AUD$ pricing: AUD$20 on Humble versus AUD$30 on Steam. That's unusual.

TerraTech, the open-world sandbox vehicle builder adds a co-op creative mode
25 February 2019 at 6:58 pm UTC

I bought this after playing it with my 3 year old this free weekend. It's the first game we've played where he can shoot a gun, which he thinks is awesome. I do the driving and he does the shooting (pew pew against lego cars, not violence against living things) and tells me what to build.

Details on how Slay the Spire sold on Linux plus some thoughts
4 February 2019 at 11:09 am UTC Likes: 4

Why were they surprised? What were they expecting, and why? These numbers are very close to the Steam hardware survey. Surely a very popular cross-platform game with low system requirements should more-or-less mirror the state of the market?

It is kinda sad when you try and figure out absolute numbers. Steamspy estimates Slay the Spire has sold 1-2M copies. So at 0.5% for Linux, that's only 5000 Linux players. Wow, it's almost as though they did the port just for me!

Another way to look at it is that the port (including QA & support) needs to cost less than about $35k (minimum sales price of $10, devs keep 70%, 5000 copies) for it to have paid for itself. I keep thinking I must have screwed up my arithmetic somewhere, those numbers are so low. But no. If someone only plans to sell 100,000 copies total, how do you justify the work to support the 500 buyers of a native Linux build? And yet something like 80/100 games in my library have native Linux versions. I guess we are dependent on the fact that people are doing these ports for love, despite non-existent business cases.


This is a great game though, highly recommended. It's also suitable for playing one-handled while cradling a sleeping baby, and on that basis I've spent more hours with this than any other game in the last few weeks (mostly at 4am :().

Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements, a new magical point and click adventure is out
1 February 2019 at 12:04 am UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: ShmerlMust be this: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/162
Which is already in allegro, so does AGS need to pull in an update or what? This has affected multiple AGS games lately.

AFAIK 256colour, who posted on that thread, was working on this game. So they should have the fix? Obviously not though. I think they preload their own version of allegro.

Quoting: ShmerlI just tried to start the game (GOG version) and it simply produces black screen and nothing else.

Looking at https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/510#issuecomment-451679883 it seems they dump the console output into a file called log.txt, maybe there are some clues there you could share. If it is using OpenGL, maybe try switching to the software renderer instead? See https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/OPTIONS.md for a list of options that can be set.

Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements, a new magical point and click adventure is out
31 January 2019 at 11:31 pm UTC

I was excited to see this come out, since based on some comments I've seen on github I believe this is the first AGS engine game to use the OpenGL renderer on Linux. They cherry-picked patches from my branch. Bummer that it didn't work well for you Liam. You could try switching to the software renderer and see if that gives you a better result.

Yes AGS has some horrible warts on Linux. That mouse lag issue is a common one (I recall seeing a fix for it in the steam forums for both Gemini Rue and Lamplight City, the two AGS games I have). There are some other quality of life issues that should be fixed without too much trouble (e.g. sound stuttering when you change the volume using media keys). Yes Allegro is archaic, but the real problem AFAICS is just that the AGS development community doesn't have contributors who are using Linux as their primary OS. If any readers are looking for a C++ gaming project to get involved with, my experience has been that AGS is open to contributors.

Quoting: GuestIndeed games made with AGS are always broken. Looks like these developers don’t bother to test their games...

The github link above shows a bug reported by these guys that we spent days debugging last Christmas/New Year. So we know they did some Linux testing at least.

BATTLETECH for Linux updated, releases Flashpoint expansion – some thoughts
28 November 2018 at 12:27 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: GuestThat it has grind to keep you away from enjoying battles with Battlemechs is just...well, it defeats the purpose. But I'll reserve how I feel about that until the day I actually play it for myself. If there's ever a big enough sale to convince me to even give it a go.
The "grind" doesn't keep you away from battles, it's just that you need to do the non-core mercenary contracts to gain enough XP to get your mechwarriors to be good enough to win the story missions.

I do find this kind of "filler" annoying for when you just want to follow the story, especially for a game that has a "skirmish" mode anyway. But this is pretty typical of modern games I guess, developers want to sell it as a 60 hour game rather than a 20 hour game.

I've been playing the Linux build for the last month or so. No problems, it's pretty enjoyable. But after 20 hours of gameplay I've only played maybe four story missions and ten or so side missions.