The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming

Sunday Summer Evening Open Thread

We’ve been experiencing a heatwave of sorts for the last couple of days. I’ve been taking my gaming laptop to that magical place called outside. Replaced the Mint partition with Manjaro, configured it to my liking. I have to say I was expecting a minor headache getting the NVidia proprietary drivers to run, but it was extremely painless thanks to instructions at their wiki and a simple duckduckgo search could offer. Then once it was ready enough for my liking I began plugging games into it. Mostly some of the old school Tomb Raiders, and for the hell of it I loaded a Linux native game… that was produced by Microsoft. O_o

I’ve progressed much further into Dust: An Elysian Tail, even managed to get a few achievements! I keep meaning to finish this game, but by the time I pick it up again the saves are far gone. Fortunately this looks like a game the Steam Cloud doesn’t completely screw over. I finished playing on my laptop when things cooled off enough and continued my adventure on my desktop from the exact same point. I love it when things work out like that.

Food/Drink

Breakfast Quinoa

Ever have one of those mornings where you just throw everything and the kitchen sink into a pan and make a breakfast? (or any meal time). I came home from work yesterday morning and made some quinoa with some chicken broth, a scrambled egg, Italian spices and seasonings, a tomato, a clove of garlic and an onion. I also grated some Parmesan and sprinkled on some goat cheese I originally intended for something else. It made about two helpings, and I had no shame in eating all of it! I’ve been under-eating for the past week and things finally caught up with me.

Gaming

Serious Sam: The Friendly Encounter

Hai guys

One of my favorite things to do at the start of Second Encounter (Fusion Beta 2017) is to lure enemies into the lake. They don’t know how to swim, and eventually they’ll explode into blood or pretty flowers and fruit depending on how you have the game set… that’s usually how it goes anyway, with the exception of this fellow.

Dat ass

I tried to entice him to go after me, but all he wanted to do was stand around,. I did manage to knock him into the water thanks to another Gnaar and strategic placement.

Of course, the Gnaar wasn’t the only one being friendly with me. I made my way through the canyon and ran across this guy, standing around not doing his fucking job of trying to kill me!

 

Gaming

Resident Evil 2 Plays Peachy Under Linux

I played RE2 a little bit under Linux last night, and surprisingly it runs almost as if it was natively released for the platform. I turned up everything I could, making sure to utilize as much of the GPU as possible, and it didn’t crash once. I always like seeing newer titles with few flaws working under Proton/Linux.

I’ve been experimenting with OBS recordings, as it appears that unlike the Windows version of OBS I’m able to record games that use the Vulkan API. I tested it earlier with DOOM, and while it did record it did also overload the encoder. I didn’t have time to test Resident Evil 2 and other games running through Vulkan, but now that I have a fully loaded OBS to record with under Linux I’ll have to do some more science.

Computing / Gaming / Hobbies

Goodbye Mint, Hello Manjaro

With the new PC build in place I felt it was a good excuse to upgrade my Linux install, though I couldn’t decide between upgrading to a newer version of Mint or venturing out to try another distro. I contemplated trying Solus OS, but found it to be a little too heavy for my liking. I’ve heard Fedora is getting better on the gaming front, but that distro still leaves a sour taste in my mouth… CentOS for gaming is also too much of a pain to setup for gaming (but it is excellent for running this website!), so I finally settled on the latest version of Manjaro Linux.

This was surprisingly easy to setup. Usually when I setup Linux there are at least two different repositories that I have to install in order to get some of my favorite programs (or having to compile them from source myself). But right out of the box this came installed with the latest open source mesa drivers, Vulkan, controller drivers, and Steam is even preinstalled! I still recommend updating your software/drivers after any OS installation.

I couldn’t find OBS on the package manager, but it was easy to grab via snapd. This version of OBS comes with all kinds of plugins already pre-installed, most of which are handy for livestreaming, and my personal favorite; the VAAPI plugin for recording with AMD GPU’s. Now I record my gameplay directly from the GPU just as I can under Windows. I’ve known about this plugin for quite awhile, but never got around to compiling it for OBS under Mint or CentOS. I did some test recordings with Sonic Mania and Crash Bandicoot using Proton, and the quality is on par with my Windows install. This will make it easier for me to do comparison recordings between Win 10 and Manjaro.

I’m happy to finally see Linux get this kind of attention! This has definitely come a long way since the days of having to gather up like 12 different repos and getting stuck in dependency hell in order to get half of these things to work properly. Now 97% of the stuff I use everyday runs outside of Windows… stunning.

All in an Overlord's day / Computing / Hardware / Hobbies

I Basically Have A New Desktop Now

I’ve been busy getting my system put back together. Finally have the 3900x installed onto the new motherboard (ASRock x570 Taichi). Now I’m rocking two NVMe drives, two SSD’s and six 7200rpm server grade mechanical drives. I still have some things to refine under Windows 10, but I’m pretty much all setup under Linux (Manjaro this time).

Should have everything back up to 100% by tomorrow!

Are you fucking serious?1

Konami Is Building Gaming PC’s?

I shit you not:

In a nutshell: Konami, the one-time video gaming giant behind the likes of Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid, has entered the PC manufacturing business. Konami Amusements, a subsidiary of Konami Holdings Corporation, is now accepting orders for the first three Arespear gaming PCs.

I guess my only remaining question would be if they come with a free pachinko game?