Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
I’ve been plugging away at this again. I would have done some animating yesterday, but my adventures through Kamurocho left me in constant suspense. My head is back beyond the clouds though, and not just because I have that good watermelon laced shit. 😛 More fiddling planned for tomorrow.
I can say quite happily that Yakuza Kiwami seems to be passing the Linux test so far, well… kinda. Other than not being able to close the game properly, and having to spam the save button in order for it to generate a save for some reason, it’s pretty much the same performance that I get under Windows, framerate is pretty much the same and I haven’t run across any graphical glitches. I even got a few achievements! They were all centered around Majima but… meh.
Perhaps a few Proton versions from now it’ll work like a native game! One can hope anyway.
I’ve been chatting here and there about my Linux adventures at work, especially to those who aren’t aware of how much it’s evolved over the years. One of my co-workers was even inquiring about good video/paint/audio software, and I named my current favourites (audacity, shotcut, krita, etc), he was quite happy to see all the alternatives we have nowadays. We both agreed that it was nice to finally live in a digital age where Adobe is no longer the king. We even talked Linux distros for a few, apparently he’s a Mint user. I’ve surprisingly met quite a few old guys that are also Mint users, which is kinda funny and cool at the same time. They have a minty taste for distros. 😛
Did a small bit of clean up today, mainly brushing the floor and some pick up. It inspired me to also clean off my desk, at least to make room to charge the laptop. 😛 I drained half the battery playing DMC5, not bad for about 45 mins of gameplay!
Speaking of gameplay, that was pretty much how I decompressed for the rest of the day. Under Linux I played a bit of AMID EVIL, then I experimented with Yakuza Kiwami. I’m happy to report that Yakuza didn’t crash once, and it also had no problem pulling up my Windows save from the cloud. In fact, from what I’ve gathered so far, the performance was pretty much on par with Windows. I’ll need to analyze it further, and see if Yakuza 0 works properly now. 😛
The last bit of the evening was spent in Borderlands 3, ending my week long vacation away from Windows just so I could slay some creeps with a good buddy and one final London Fog Latte. It’s gonna be fun trying to nod off tonight…
I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:
Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.
I have to hand it to Valve… 99% of their games are awesome, they have a convenient platform to buy games on, more than one platform. Which is why I think its cool that Valve, to this day updates their older games riiiiight when you think Valve will never touch them again. Yes, TF2 had an update recently… BUT PORTAL 2 HAS VULKAN NOW HOLY SHIT.
You don’t normally see many game companies update their older products (or even make them available outside of Windows), which is why Valve will always be my main squeeze.
Now if they could just properly port SFM to Linux…
I was feeling a little brave and tried to run Borderlands 3 under Linux just to see if I could get any sparks to fly, and to my surprise it actually ran… sorta.
I made a fresh character just to see how a first time run through of the intro would perform, and the answer is that… it didn’t. Any video that tried to run in game, pre-rendered cutscenes and Lillith sightings, didn’t display correctly.
I broke the game once I got to the part where you had to watch a bandit on a monitor, the game broke and wouldn’t let me progress beyond that point. I tried restarting the game later on to see if the problem fixed itself and it actually got worse, the game no longer wanted to launch. I’m thinking of experimenting with different Proton versions, and maybe switching to a different API.
I did livestream it a bit tonight with Yutram (under Windoze), but for some strange reason it wasn’t outputting any audio apart from my mic, and no one told me… I was getting audio through OBS, so I figured it was streaming properly. Oops. Fortunately I had no plans of keeping this stream locally, already have enough film to sort through. That said; I’ll be returning to animation duty tomorrow for the video. I got the editing done on the video, now I can begin on working on a proper ending and a tiny something for the start of the video. I can’t wait to release this!
To kick off the weekend I decided to try a new/old game. I played a tiny bit of the original BloodRayne a long time ago, and ended up shelving it due to control issues, like proper controller support. I recently discovered that I had the Remastered version given to me for free since I own the original copy! It has controller support! But I couldn’t get it to perform to my liking on the Steam Controller, and I opted to use a keyboard and mouse only to remember there were a lot of buttons I was probably not going to remember. I opted to make my own Steam Controller Config based on the game’s keyboard and mouse settings, that way I have the convenience of a controller with the precision of a keyboard and mouse. It isn’t too surprising that it runs perfectly under Proton, being this is an older game despite it being a remaster. I just hope I’ll actually be able to finish it; I’ve had a couple friends tell me they couldn’t progress a long time ago due to a certain game mechanic.
Hopefully I don’t run into that problem in this version.
I’ve been enjoying the calm that comes with the end of a holiday season. Little to no Karens to endure, less holiday stress, other than I’m still waiting on a couple packages. I forgot a couple of them are coming from overseas, god I hope they don’t get lost on the way here… my new camera floated from state to state for a few days on it’s second attempted shipment. I played with it a little bit today, and so far this is easily the most versatile camera I’ve ever owned. I played with some of the features today, it has tons of built in filter options, and more options for filming that may make this both my filming and shooting cam. I’ve already ordered a remote and a flash for it for uber professional selfies, and other things to gauge your eyes out at. :v
Played a little DMC5 during lunch today; I’ve been seeing how far I can run it under Linux before it crashes, and so far it performs flawlessly with the exception of pixelated background blur. If I can get to the end of it under Linux I’ll post a recommended review on Steam. It was inevitable of course, but if I can get it to run under Proton with flying colors I’d like to recommend it to any Linux users in case they ever wanted to check a look.
I’m just relaxing a bit before bed with some cherry blossom green tea, and I’ve just finished up a bit of animating. I’m almost finished animating a couple bodies in the current scene I’m working on, and I’ll begin working on animating body 3 tomorrow. I also posed another scene the other night. I don’t know how I keep doing it, but it’s almost like I keep coming up with all of these weird ideas for scenes (with the help of a friend or two of course) that I now have a couple instances where a scene is interrupting another scene. DAMN MY IMAGINATION! DAMN IT TO HELL!
I’ve been feeling pretty under weather in and out throughout the day. I woke up feeling fine, had breakfast, and started doing the dishes when I started feeling queasy. I’ve been taking some stuff for it, but I’ve pretty much been relaxing a little more than what I wanted to… oh well. I sometimes think that’s my body’s way of telling me to sit the fuck down and relax for a minute.
I pretty much kicked back and played under Linux up until the evening to crack open Windoze to play Serious Sam 4, where surprisingly Yutram and I had a good time! I tried to get it to work under Linux, and for the most part it does!… but the textures flash in and out like crazy. I’ll have to double check to make sure but I’m pretty sure I’m running the latest Open Source drivers. I also played a little Quantum Break under Linux, and while that does work the game will crash when it tries to play a live action video, and since minor interactions can change how these scenes play it I’m going to have to exclusively play this under Windows unfortunately. Tried to get a couple Sonic games to work; All Stars Racing Transformed runs but I can’t configure the graphics, and Generations runs, but sound is completely broken and controller input is non existent. I did play a bit of Trine, as that does have a native client, only to find that the Linux version only goes up to 1080p while the Windows launcher allows me to use 1440p and also detects my proper refresh rate, whereas the Linux build does not. I’m thinking next time I fiddle with it I’ll see about configuring the text file for the Linux client to see if that makes any difference. I’d rather not run it under Proton unless I absolutely feel the need to.
I’ll see about being a little more productive tomorrow.:P