Proton

Back To The Calamity

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Bastion being welcomed by his sky fam.
When you’re here, you’re family.

Scrolled through my endless list of entertainment and decided to chill with some Bastion on Steam Deck! Apparently I’ve been away long enough that they threw me a small welcome back party!

Something Borked

I was tackling one of the Proving Grounds when it displayed this error. The .Net and Micrsoft XNA framework were enough to clue me in to the fact that it was defaulting to the Windows version, via Proton. Thankfully the native Linux build pulled through perfectly, and I was able to score 1st Place in one of the Proving Grounds.

This one was a real Mother to figure out. You have to destroy all of these targets, and if you want 1st Place you have to destroy all the targets with only 5 arrows. It was a pain in the ass, but eventually I nailed it! Now I’m giving my hand a break after attempting the Smashy Smashy Proving Grounds. I made 3rd and 2nd Place, but I can’t seem to smash 100 objects in under 27 seconds… perhaps if they were all watermelons I’d feel more inspired.

Konami? That’s Not How SteamOS Works…

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I’m not sure what compelled Konami to make this announcement; other than maybe other developers prepping their games to be Steam Deck friendly… But they released an announcement the other day about the Castlevania Advance Collection stating the following:

Before purchasing this software, please be advised that it cannot be played on Steam Deck as it does not support SteamOS.

For the record, it does run under Linux/SteamOS just fine with Proton. It’s quite evident that Konami has no idea how Proton works under SteamOS/Linux. Hell, they didn’t even bother to try testing it themselves with a Linux distro, or ask a third party to verify that it works. Also, out of all of the games they’ve released on Steam, why did Konami choose the Castlevania Advance Collection? Quite a few of their other games have been verified to run on the Steam Deck (the Metal Gear games being among them) and they just randomly choose to post an announcement about a game that doesn’t work on Steam Deck… even though it does?

I haven’t played much of it myself, but I can verify that it runs under Manjaro on my Linux powered Surface Pro, which is very similar to current SteamOS. It would have almost made sense if they posted an announcement about a more resource demanding game not working on SteamOS. It would still have been wrong, but at least Konami would have been aiming a little higher, a little more graphically demanding.

Sometimes if you don’t know about how something works, it’s best not to say anything at all.

From Stage 1 To Stage 2

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I successfully rendered the first part of my animation yesterday, and now I’m working on the other half of the scenes. Yutram was away from his usual computer when I was doing this particular livestream, thus he had to rely on his laptop microphone, which is better than nothing but a bit of an obstacle when thinking about how to animate it, fortunately my imagination is always working on overtime. The audio quality is such that it wouldn’t look right if we were both in the same room, so I’ve opted to have us both in different locations.

I have more animating to pick up on tomorrow. Fortunately Yutram’s Minecraft body is easy to work with (and less creepier than Steve, fuck Steve), at least for now. 😛

Sunday Linux Gaming Sessions: Japanese Game Appreciation Edition

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Today was a definate decompression day. I made myself a Chinese brunch, washed my bedding, and played Japanese games under Linux for the fun therapeutic fun of it. Some Metal Gear, and Yakuza 0. I finally got the game to not crash! The only problem I really have with it is with saving, it doesn’t always want to. In Yakuza Kiwami this issue exists too, but if you spam the save button it eventually does save. Apart from that I’m at least glad it doesn’t die when I press the Y button anymore.

Back at it!

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Tonight I rightfully returned to Source Filmmaker under my Manjaro install, with my primary focus being how well does the program run on my new swank GPU. After a few good hours I can say that the results are in, and the answer is awesome! My Vega64 ran SFM alright for the most part, but if you imported too many models or particles into the world it would lag when dragging your cameras, even when splitting clips into smaller ones. So far I haven’t experienced that with the 6800XT, even with the same stage setups I’ve created! If this continues to perform as such I’ll only really need to go into Windows to do the export (and possibly for After Effects work if I can’t get it to work under Wine/Proton), and even then I don’t always have to depending on the scene (lighting sometimes looks better under Windows or vice versa depending on the map and the materials being used).

I mostly spent the entire session doing mouth movements and some animation tweaking. I am shrinking the audio as I go; removing any long gaps in between.I’ll continue on it some more tomorrow after I get off work and do my usual stuff. Who knows, if I get far enough along that I can post something different I might provide an update tomorrow! 😛

My Chariot Awaits

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Today was a “Fuck it I’m not feeling well” kind of day. So, instead of working on my current video project I installed this little beauty.

This is a model(s) replacement for D-Horse. Why ride around on a normal looking horse when you can let these guys cart you around?

Huey really is a horse’s ass.

Well, that’s enough for one weekend I guess. I’m just glad to have played this without any issues, and even with mods!

MGSV Modded & Ret 2 Go

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Happy Easter! I’ve been playing more with MGSV:TPP and modding; it’s actually just as easy under Linux as it is under Windows! I ran SnakeBite Mod Manager under Wine and added my mods back in; including some new ones. I rescued Miller, captured enough victims on my own base to develop a cardboard box, kidnapped hired a translator. etc. I was actually going to add another game to test under Linux, but the call to play this was far too strong to ignore.  I’m really happy with the results!

OMG Metal Gear Works Under Proton!

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Last week I had a fun time playing Yakuza Kiwami under Proton, and for this weekend I decided to revisit the idea of running Metal Gear Solid V: TPP under Proton. My last attempts took place when Proton was a shiny new toy to be played with,  and MGSV:TPP didn’t really agree with it. You could load the game, but only the HUD was visible. This time around cutscenes played properly, it remained stable the entire session, and there was only one graphical glitch at the start of the game.

I’m currently running the game vanilla, but have plans to see if I can get modding to work properly. Overall I’m quite impressed!

The Yakuza Is Linux Friendly?

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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.

Get On The Ball!

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After a week of playing Capcom games at work I wanted to take a break with something different, and an indie puzzle sounded like a nice change of pace from hackin’ and slashin’ or painting my enemies to death  Nope, instead I drug a giant ball around solving puzzles in a tomb.

First up; if you ever decided to get this game I highly recommend using this guide to tweak your resolution and framerate. By default The Ball only goes up to 1080p and has a framerate cap at 62FPS, not very appealing on my monitor. Fortunately the fix is as simple as doing a small tweak to an ini file or two. It also runs peachy via proton.

The Ball is a first person puzzle game where you solve puzzles with the aid of a hammer gun and a giant ball you can carry around wit h said hammer gun. I’m currently three levels in, and the puzzles so far have been pretty easy to solve. It does get more challenging when you approach the undead, and the only weapon you have is your ball which is only as good as your control of it.

Being this is an indie game from 2010 it’s age is showing in the graphics, but for the time period it came from it was considered fabu graphics, even by UE1 standards. :v I remember hearing about it a long time ago, when I stumbled across a video someone did about their Portal chamber update and mentally noted that I had to check it out someday. Tonight was that night, and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.