I’m exhausted. Will try again tomorrow
The Stream Deck Be Mine, Yo.
The hardest part was trying to get it out of the mail box, the compartment my parcel was being stored in has a dirty or rusted lock. Had to use some WD40 and elbow grease to claim my new prized possession. I have it all set up for a future stream, those are my scenes and I also have a soundboard I put together. I’ll be adding more profiles and filling more buttons as the need rises. Unfortunately at this time there isn’t much support on the Linux side… But I have seen a toolkit developed for anyone else who has an interest in making this work in a Tux friendly environment. Until then this will have to be a Windows exclusive device. I would of liked to have done a stream today, but I was hella tired. I set this up, played Fallout 4 and at some point woke up in bed when I smelled dinner. Today was a rough day…
You can use this for more than just streaming too. I plan on programming it to use Shotcut keyboard shortcuts to make things a bit easier while editing, and perhaps make a default profile that launches programs. Between this and my G510 I’ll have macros for days. I’d like to do another stream soon, though tomorrow I won’t have much time. If I do stream it’ll definitely be a surprise to everyone including me.
Got my game on today
Spent the earlier part of the morning going through my closet; it didn’t take me very long as things were already well sorted, then I had my stitches removed AND even got a phone call from my doctor telling me that I’m fine. That’s great news for me and bad for everyone else. 😛
I opted to play Hard Reset Redux in Mint today just to see if I could crash the game, made it to the 2nd level with no glitches or anything. It would still be nice if they made a native version considering the Shadow Warrior Linux Port runs quite decently given the beefy hardware. But it is nice to play the Windows version using Proton with impressive results. :happy:
I also tried a bit of Dishonored and a couple Sonic games; Dishonored works fine though it seems to pause while loading certain scenes. Sonic Generations however tried to rape my ear drums with corrupted audio, as well as possessing my controller to do weird voodoo bullshit, Mania worked fine, but the sound was a slowed down and distorted.
I’m going to be looking into getting another NVMe drive for my laptop, with how often I’ve been using Linux lately I’d like to dualboot it on my laptop and see how it performs on different hardware.
Last but not least I installed Borderlands 2 onto my laptop, thinking I’ll play it during lunch tomorrow. It’s a good thing I tested it out a bit, because for whatever reason it crashed like a drunken sailor numerous times. I think lowering PhysX may have fixed the problem, but considering that it has a 970m GPU in it that would be rather strange… I guess tomorrow will be my live test. I’ll be working full shifts every day this week, so my laptop is going to get some good usage. :happy:
Sunday Evening Open Thread
I had a good 12 hour rest, an excellent breakfast and managed to get some tidying done today. I cleaned up a few of my drawers (giggity) and got the bedding done in record time, then I worked on the video from yesterday’s stream. It seems while I was recording my mumble audio didn’t make it through, resulting in me downloading my stream and taking the audio from that and fixing things up… I combined two failures of mine and made something work! Amazing! It’s pretty much done, but I think I’ll hold onto it for the time being. I think if I might do some more tidying tomorrow, closet is in need of a fix up and I have some surfaces that need the dust knocked off of them. I also need to set some time aside to do a little online shopping. :v: I did manage to play a little bit of Bioshock Infinite, can’t be all work and no play… I’ve finished the game before but wanted to try it under Linux. It has some minor bugs but works fine for the most part. I want to do a livestream of Infinite at some point; Yutram and I have built a legacy around the the Lutece twins not long after making that one video where I redubbed random characters you guys suggested.
But for now I think I’ll lay on my clean bedding in watermelon PJ’s and try to have a good rest, as good as last night’s.
Someday I’ll get it right
I made time to do a livestream tonight across YouTube and Twitch. The good news is I didn’t have any recording issues, and the stream stayed up the entire time. The bad news is for some strange reason the quality was fuzzy. It turns out my stream didn’t downscale for whatever reason, so I’ll have to double check that next time. Sorry! If you want to watch it still you can view it here, but I have a higher quality local recording I plan to pick over hopefully not in the too distant future.
Speaking of the future; I’ve ordered an Elgato Stream Deck to make things like transitions easier during livestreams. I have a plethora of ideas already set aside for it to make my streams a little more spicy. :v:
The more you read, the better it gets.
This article tops anything I would have to say about today:
Along with any dirty jokes, though, anti-profanity software is notorious for censoring lots of stuff it shouldn’t — and quite a few real names. As Natalie Weiner’s tweet took off, it became an amazing thread of Schmucks, Cummings, Dickmans and Dikshits who could commiserate with her. For them, a digital identity will almost always be hard work.
Goodnight. :trollface:
Yakuza 0 Linux test
I’ve been wanting to check out Yakuza 0 for awhile now, and figured why not try it and see how well it performs with via Proton? Performance wise its a nice steady 60fps with everything turned up with only a few dips during cutscenes and once running through the streets of Kamurocho. There were no graphical glitches , but I did kind of run into a wall in game play. As I tried to perform a rush combo the game crashes instantly to desktop. I’ve tried changing a couple settings but it fails to progress. I’ve even tried rolling back to the non beta branch of Proton, but that only causes the game to not load at all. Perhaps this will remedy itself in future releases. Still, this kinda felt like a tease to me. Everything was going so well until I had to right click. :v: Of course right clicking itself isn’t an issue, but something about performing that combo causes Yakuza to commit Seppuku. :morty:
I’ll have to give this game a go on my Windows side, if it performs this well graphically under Linux I imagine it’ll be just fine under Win 10. Seems to be really well optimized. :happy:
Linux Continues To Make Big Headlines
I know I’ve been talking about Linux lately, with the latest install, Steam’s Proton,, Vulkan among other things, but I’m not alone. Even someone at Forbes has been getting on the bandwagon. This is the second article I’ve seen there, and this time he interviewed the owner of Gaming On Linux, another website that I read quite frequently. They discuss the myths, pros and cons of using Linux vs Windows and its a really interesting read.
So how many games are actually available to play on Linux today? “That’s a little tricky, considering the amount of different stores that actually sell Linux games like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble Store and so on,” Dawe says. “Take Steam as an example, specifically looking at just games for Linux it shows me right now there’s 4,800 whereas Windows has 23,882. So on Steam specifically, we have about 20% of the library, which is incredible when a few years ago that was a big fat zero.”
In the last five years I too have seen a multitude of changes. I still remember when I made it into the Steam Linux Beta (I still wear my official TF2 Linux shirts with pride), I remember when there were only a few GoldSource games in my library and not much else, there was no way to really record your gameplay… but it was a starting point. As things progressed we soon found more and more games being ported, game recording programs such as SimpleScreenRecorder came onto the scene and eventually OBS started developing for more than just Windows; known back then as OBS Multi-platform before being known as OBS Studio as it is today, and now we have programs like PlayOnLinux and Lutris for us to play and use our non steam games. Wine has made great improvements over the years, we have DXVK now for running DirectX 11 and 12 via Vulkan, proper audio and video software to showcase our games just as we can under Windows. It isn’t perfect, and they even say that in the article, but Windows wasn’t always the godly OS for gaming. There was once a time when Direct X sucked, and eventually when it did improve they ignored PC users for several years in favor of their precious XBox.
The unofficial Steam Play Compatibility website has been tracking the testing of every Windows game now playable on Steam for Linux. To date, more than 3200 titles have been tested. Of those, nearly 1300 have received “Platinum” status, meaning they not only launch with the simple click of the “Install” button on Steam, but they also have Windows-level performance and framerates.
If you go with a distro like Mint, Ubuntu or a few others they make it really painless for you to get set up compared to how it used to be. This isn’t the case for everything under Linux, after all I did have to research what PPA to download my graphics drivers from, fortunately that information has become easier to find.
I’m seriously considering doing some video tutorials for people who might be interested in playing games on Linux, and Linux videos in general on top of the other videos I crank out. More people need to know that an alternative to Windows might be waiting for them, or at the very least to try dualbooting between Windows and your Linux distro of choice to see how you’ll fare under it. As I’ve stated quite a few times I’ve been staying more in Linux lately, in fact I only went into Windows once this week to do some Photoshop and play a couple games that don’t quite run well under Linux. Am I ready to ditch Windows 10? Not even close, but with the way things are going we may get there someday, or at least scare Microsoft enough to pull their heads out of their asses and make another Operating System that’s on par with WinXP or 7. :trollface:
SteamPlay testing 9/3/18
Here’s today’s roundup of games tested under Proton using some more modern game titles:
- Quantum Break: Worked until I tried to talk to one of the NPC’s on campus, then it Quantum Broke my machine and I had to restart. Frame rate was extremely low despite setting to the lowest settings.
- Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Other than some small strange facial glitches the game ran perfectly with no performance impact whatsoever on the highest settings. Praise Vulkan!
Wolfenstein II was most of my prime focus for today, felt good to blast nazi’s again AND on a different platform! I’m surprised it hasn’t been whitelisted yet. For me this runs better than DOOM 2016 (which would be perfect if I could figure out how to get the damned mouse to function). I wish Quantum Break worked just as well… I played that under Windows 10 last night and I think I’ll have fun with that one. I think I’ll save that game for another post though, it was a lot to take in despite only having played it for an hour.
Adobe narrows their OS scope
This is one of the reasons why I don’t like subscription model software:
We want to give you advance notice that upcoming versions of the Adobe video and audio tools will require Windows 10 (version 1709, or higher) or macOS 10.12 (or higher) to run. This applies to the next major releases of Adobe Media Encoder, After Effects, Audition, Character Animator, Prelude, and Premiere Pro.
Performance and stability are top priorities for all of our users. Running our apps on current versions of the Mac and Windows operating systems helps provide an optimal experience with our tools.
So basically if you’re on an older operating system and you still want to use Adobe CC Services you’ll have to pay a monthly fee for out of date software… Not that it matters to me. There are other pay and Open Source options that will do the trick in most cases, especially if you’re looking for encoders and video editors. This isn’t the early 90’s/mid 2000’s where Adobe was king, programs like Shotcut, Sony Vegas, and a few others are good substitutes. In fact I’ve been using Shotcut for over a year now, and only had to delve into Premiere Pro once to keyframe something (though I used CS6 instead of CC). All that I really use that’s adobe these days is Photoshop CS6, which will probably be my last version.