The Mind Of OverlordTomala

Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Technology

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.

All in an Overlord's day

IT’S ALIVE!!!!

I made it back from my surgery yesterday safe and sound. I would have posted yesterday but I was really out of it, not sure if it was due to the three hour drive or my body reacting to what happened, but I’m feeling a little more energetic today, managed to survive work today. My head still feels a little scattered, my brain is doing this thing where I can’t figure out what I want to focus on. My leg still feels a little stiff, can’t crouch too low or my stitches will pop. :zorak: Assuming I don’t fuck things up I’ll be taking them out a week and a half from now.

I did have a good time before my appointment though, saw a couple comedians perform and they were both fucking hilarious. Their names escape me at the moment, but I had a good time. I may of had to get ripped up but hey, at least booze burgers and comedy were involved. :v: I even managed to play a little bit of Skyrim in the hotel I was staying at, in fact this week I’ve only really played Skyrim… on my laptop. I’ve contemplated installing it on Linux, but I’m not entirely sure yet considering I use a custom mod manager to load all of my mods. That might remain Windows exclusive for now along with Fallout 4 and some others. I’ll have to get back into my Linux experiments next week. I’ve been staying under Mint but haven’t had a chance to really do much apart from chat, surf and listen to music.

I’m getting my stuff in line for tomorrow. Laptop and tablet are charged, need to swap out batteries in my controller, and I need to generate a shopping list… oh happy day. :rick: Not sure what I’ll be doing this weekend. I’ll be having company over and some kitchen destruction seems inevitable. There are some different things that I want to do, but not sure if I’ll have the time or energy for it this weekend. I think my leg wants me to take extra naps, it has gained sentience…. I’m afraid.

I guess I shouldn’t dwell on these things so close to bedtime, or I won’t have any energy tomorrow.

All in an Overlord's day / Blogospheric Naval Gazing

Evening Open Thread

I’ll be heading out of town tomorrow after getting off work. I have a doctor’s appointment a few hours away and it’s early in the morning on the 30th; rather than drive there in the middle of the night/early morning it seems more  practical to stay the night. If I don’t post anything tomorrow that’s why.

Anyways, had fun tweaking one of my co-workers chains today. He was telling me about Valve not knowing how to spend money properly, and then made some quip about how it’s to please shareholders. When I pointed out that Valve is a privately owned company he got really angry for some reason and called Gabe greedy. He made it sound like Gabe, and Valve/Steam in general are a horrible company on par with companies like EA, and how all they do is collect money and not contribute anything back to the community. After pointing out all of Valve’s latest projects (Proton, updating the Steam Chat UI, VR, etc) I finally figured out where he was coming from. He was only looking at Valve’s lack of games being brought to the table, to the point of being absolutely bitter about only releasing a card game that won’t even be free to play. Which yeah, I won’t argue I’d like to see Valve actually make something again… but to say they’re not doing anything. I also had to laugh because he was reciting his rants as though they were actual fact, like Valve having shareholders. In fact it seemed like the more Valve facts I brought up the more quiet his voice became. He didn’t know that Gabe used to work for Microsoft or how he went to Microsoft asking for them to help fund Valve to get them off the ground only to be laughed at, he didn’t know Valve’s approach to projects being based on employee interest, he didn’t know about the working at Valve survival guide, and the list goes on.

I’m not a Valve/Steam apologist, there are plenty of things wrong that Valve needs to strengthen upon such as the storefront or their customer support. But to say they’re doing fuckall isn’t true. He even tried to compare them to Bethesda in terms of being similar… in what sense? That they now have yet another client they want you to install to purchase games on? I like Bethesda as far as their games go, but as a company they are more closed off, Valve on the other hand is much more open… perhaps a little too open (again referencing their store). I also don’t remember Bethesda paying attention to other operating systems, designing their own hardware or actually continue to patch their games over a decade later, or helping with open source projects. I told him about Wine (the Windows compatibility layer for Linux) and the Wine Foundation, and he wanted to know if they were a legit foundation. It was really difficult not to facepalm at that statement.

The whole thing made for a fun conversation though. Definitely a good source of entertainment. :trollface:

Gaming1

I released my finger from the trigger…. on my sword

Carrying on from yesterdays mood I tested both Max Payne 1 and 2 under Linux, and I’m happy to say they work quite smoothly. Unlike Windows they were ready to play the moment they were installed with no tinkering with compatibility modes. I even played with some mods too:

My sword is a tool of justice,

I’ve played Max Payne 1 for an overall total of 93 minutes today, and 41 minutes for the sequel. I’m really impressed with how stable they are! They also maintained a good 60fps which isn’t too big of a surprise for such old games, but having this run under Linux with or without mods has been a nice experience.

I should probably update my list of games that I have working perfectly on Linux via Proton thus far:

  1. Hard Reset Redux
  2. Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
  3. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
  4. Max Payne 1
  5. Max Payne 2

I consider it perfect if it does the following:

  • If it launches
  • If there are no graphical glitches (or if there are they need to be on par with Windows)
  • Good framerate
  • Mod support (when applicable)
  • Can play multiple levels without any crashing

I may only have five games that have passed the test thus far, and all of them may be older, but this is a really good step towards making Linux a competitor with Windows. I already have support for most of the daily programs I use under it, and if more things become comparable it would be nice to get off of it completely. But for now (and probably quite some time) it shall remain a dualboot. Though I’m still happy to say I’ve spent equal or more time under Linux than Windows these last few weeks. :happy: I may have to head under there tomorrow though; I’m thinking maybe a little Fallout 4 tomorrow if I have time.

Gaming

Starting a new game with old school vibes.

I made an attempt to go through an area of my game library so that I may strike off another game from my ever expanding backlog. Starting at near the top of my library I decided Alan Wake looked interesting, it was made by the same people who worked on Max Payne 1 and 2, and it had that Remedy style to it when it came to storytelling and the overall environment you’re contained in.

The best way I could describe Alan Wake is like this: Imagine the bad dream sequences from Max Payne, make them slightly less trippy (but still trippy as balls) and make the protagonist reminiscent to Stephen King. You even start out by having a nightmare, you’re being chased by a murder from your own story and eventually you’re woken by your wife, though not too much further into the game your nightmares soon become a reality. You can also collect manuscripts of stories that you never wrote, yet they seem to be yours. Every page you collect gives you the rundown of what will happen to you as well as the others around you. There was also a couple Easter Eggs I found among the pages collected, this was one of them:

I had to listen to this and another page,, the voice reading this page was different from Alan’s and I had to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. Then I confirmed it; this was a reference to Max Payne including his voice actor. That made my evening.

I played it both on Windows and on Linux tonight (science, fuck yeah). Other than some graphical glitches while dodging and a slightly lower framerate it seems to handle just fine through Proton. I may want to do a stream of this game sometime in the future, possibly during October if I have any time to do so. This would be a perfect game to play on a cold dark night lit only by candles and the light from my displays and tower. People might be bummed if I did stream it though, if they’re wanting to watch me get scared they’re going to be bummed. I don’t quite approach horror and jump scares like more popular streamers and YouTubers. Somehow I can’t cry like a little bitch and make my voice go as high as the most popular guys who specialize in this field. :zorak: That is why I’ll never make the big bux.

I guess playing these games before bed isn’t really a good idea considering the Max Payne nightmares fucked with my head when I was much younger, but considering I had a nightmare about going bald last night I think I’ll do fine going up against some annoying axe murdering phantoms. We’ve already confirmed that I’m quite a fabulous murderer myself. :trollface:

Gaming

Weekend Open Thread

With another work week coming to a close I had a nice nap, a little time in the Gmod Cinema, and then a stupid DOOM Slayer match in Quake Champions of our own creation.

One of these dudes is not like the other.

We had a warmup match with all the bots on medium. I wanted to start another round on hard just to see what chaos would ensue, but after a couple attempts it wouldn’t let us connect to a dedicated server. That’s one shortcoming I have with Quake Champions, the inability to go through a server browser and select your own game like in other games released within the last decade. Everything is streamlined these days to work on company servers, but what happens when those are no longer supported? I’m seeing this as more of a trend in newer multiplayer games and I don’t like it. People should be able to run their own dedicated servers if they so choose. This is why to me I’ll always cherish Quake III Arena and consider it the superior game compared to Champions. It’s still an active game despite being almost a couple decades old, servers still exist and the modding community is still as alive as it ever was. Champions isn’t a bad game, and is quite a lot of fun to play. But for this being one of Bethesda’s fewest PC exclusives it’s just a stripped down version of Quake III with a modern paint job and super powers.

Gaming

Steam Play Test Results 8/24/18 PLATINUM EDITION

Oddly this all started when I tried to test Bayonetta via Steam Play, here are the results of that and some others:

  1. Bayonetta: Played perfectly fine until I quit and tried to restart, the window became unresponsive.
  2. NieR Automata: Despite being whitelisted by Steam this title will only load itself into memory and does fuck all on my distro.
  3. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Almost perfect, with only a couple glitches like small bits of lag and lights appearing through solid objects and people (including me). Is actually running on a hacked executable to run at 1440p as well as some graphical modding. Can restart the game multiple times and it won’t puss out like Bayonetta. No I’m not picking up any Nirnroot for you.
  4. Okami HD: Loaded a window, but it was nothing but a short lived world of graphical terror that would eventually collapse into itself, not even Amaterasu could save this poor world…

So out of all of those games I could only get MGR to work, that would be my fucking luck… :melon:

All in an Overlord's day / Hobbies

Evening Open Thread

I wanted to take a nap today so I could be well rested for doing a livestream, but that didn’t happen… which is ok because I never got to do a livestream due to not feeling well. Hooray! I’ll have to remember to double up on drugs and candy before I go in tomorrow, my breakfast of champions I guess.

I also didn’t get a chance to really do any Linux game testing today, in fact the only time I touched a game was during lunch this morning. I was introducing a co-worker to Freedom Planet. I pondered doing a stream of either that or one of my Saint’s Row games, that’ll just have to wait until another time.

I have made a bit of an effort to make my Twitch profile look a little more lived in, adding more things as I go along. In fact if you’re bored you can watch my latest Okami Stream (two videos due to OBS crashing). I think I’ll shorten the video down for YouTube if I find any highlights from that particular session.

Gaming

Steam Play Test Results 8/22/18

Now that I’ve had more time to play with the new Steam Play feature I’ve decided to make a list for what I tested last night and this afternoon:

  1. DOOM 2016: Default OpenGL version failed to load; had to rename DOOM64VK.exe to DOOM64.exe in order for it to launch. Everything but the mouse worked.
  2. Quake Champions: Locked up solid, had to reset.
  3. Hard Reset Redux: Worked perfectly.
  4. Obduction: Same result as Quake Champions.
  5. Blade Kitten: Didn’t even try to run.
  6. Tomb Raider Underworld: Keeps steady frame rate for the most part, but dislikes the Steam Overlay no matter which monitor I run it on (which it kept deciding for me). It also didn’t like me clicking mouse buttons during certain sessions.
  7. MGSV:TPP: Everything but the sky is black.
  8. Commander Keen, but that runs on the Windows version of DOSBox, so kinda hard to fuck up.

I don’t expect every game to work out of the box instantly considering this update only took place yesterday, and the fact we’re able to even attempt this at all is amazing. I feel like it’ll only get better from here. Like I said in my previous post, if anyone has a suggestion for what to test next feel free to let me know, you can have a look at my game library if you’re not sure. I think I’ll take a break from it today to focus on some other stuff. :happy:

Gaming4

Valve just made Linux Gaming a little more attractive

If you’re on Linux this is an option now.

Good news everyone! Steam just rolled out an updated version of Steam Play for Linux users!

 

  • Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
  • DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact.
  • Fullscreen support has been improved: fullscreen games will be seamlessly stretched to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop.
  • Improved game controller support: games will automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Expect more out-of-the-box controller compatibility than even the original version of the game.
  • Performance for multi-threaded games has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine.

At present I’m installing DOOM 2016 under Mint, that is actually one of the games that has been added to Valve’s whitelist of games that will work under Steam’s version of Wine: Proton. As a result you can now purchase any of these games under Linux if you don’t already own them:

Some of the titles can already run on Linux natively; such as early ID Software titles either in the Linux version of DOSBox or Sourceports of games that you can either download from a repo or compile from source. However, in order to even obtain the files to run them natively you had to either have a disk for your desired game or have the files already available in some other method. If you’re running a pure Linux system the only way to previously buy any of these games was to either run the Windows Steam client via Wine, run Windows in a VM, or do what I do and Dualboot. Seeing games like Tekken 7, DOOM 2016 and NieR Automata is already sounds impressive. Of course if you’re an enthusiast and want to try getting a game not listed on the whitelist running under Proton that is also a possibility with the built in compatibility tool.

Naturally I expect that these games won’t have the same level of performance as Windows, at the same time it shouldn’t matter if your game can run at your display refresh rate or above. I’ll be experimenting with games in my ridiculous library, if anyone here has any suggestions for what you want me to test under Linux feel free to float me a comment. I already have some ideas. :happy: