Steam

In Other News: Valve Is Still Awesome

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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…

Praise Gaben! For He Has Blessed Us With Swag

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I keep zoning in and out of my new profile background. The Steam Summer Sale started today and I needed to make a few purchases (as is tradition), and I learned about tokens and free swag. I managed to obtain enough tokenage to get some free profile swag. That’s when I noticed they updated the Edit Profile section to make it a little more modern. They added a few color themes. I’m rolling with the Summer theme, which is oddly watermelon colored… I think Gabe is in on the whole melonspiracy.

Right, so this happened

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This is one of the most beautiful poems to have graced my eyes recently.

Back in the day, you really had to work hard to pull pranks in Google search results by planting Google Bombs and such. These days, now that the Internet is run by deranged robots made of clouds, it seems Google will happily prank itself. Case in point: today, searching for Steam on Google could return a listing describing Valve’s digital store with the words “FUCK EPIC GAMES STORE” and fragments of broken ASCII art. It doesn’t seem to be the result of a hack, prank, or corporate warfare, just some robot seeing a Steam user’s review of Metro Exodus and thinking “Yeah gwan that’s probably important” in its vaporous little brain.

Open Thread

Private Streaming Returns!

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I’m happy to say that for whatever reason I’m able to stream on Steam again! I tested it while playing AMID EVIL the other day and it worked perfectly. I think I might do some private-ish streams for quick goof off sessions and one shots, or streaming Audiosurf 2 without the worry of copyright bullshit. :trollface:

Something for a more comfortable atmosphere.

Music to my eyes.

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After hearing from so many users about cancelled shipments it was nice to hear that I’ll be getting these; hopefully my co-worker got his too. I told him about the blowout when it happened and he immediately purchased. At that price it was hard not to.

Once these arrive I have some experiments that I’d like to run, see how well two Steam Controllers fare in couch co-op games.

Fill my eyes with that double vision

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Yo Dawg I heard you like steam so I got you more steam so you could steam while you steam.

So I was minding my own business, switching over from Windows to Linux to begin working on compiling another video when I decided to launch Steam as I usually do, and ran into a random bug that causes the system to halt while the client updates (seems to happen randomly). When I regained control of the system I noticed Steam wasn’t running still, even in Task Manager. I launched the client again, and when it popped up on the screen I noticed another window on the left monitor; the update window usually seen before the steam client even launches. I was intrigued enough to see what happened next, and here it is. Two instances of Steam on the same operating system. For the hell of it I installed the Windows version of Steam via Play On Linux and managed to get a third client running for shits and giggles:

Wine can sometimes lead to multiplying

Some interesting side effects when running more than one client. You’ll notice the linux client on the right is offline, but I was actually able to type a status and then refresh the page on the left linux client. Unfortunately the client on the right froze on that status screen. What was funny was that the Windows client had the same issues, but thought of itself as online.

My only remaining question is this; can I multiply the 17 cents in my Steam wallet and place them into one client? :trollface:

Local CoOp Over The Internet

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Steam had an update recently to the public beta branch that allows you to play local couch co-op games with friends even without them owning the game! So say for example I want to play one of the Mortal Kombat games with a friend, but they don’t own any of them. I can launch the game and play it with them as if they were next to me on the couch! I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and from what it sounds like it’s still not working with quite a few titles. But I do intend to check out this feature! This opens up some new possibilities with games that have no online support, and I might even have to purchase some digital board games when the kinks are worked out.

Now it’s just a matter of what to play first? :melon:

This post is brought to you by a company that has made fewer mistakes in over a decade than Bethesda has made in less than a year.

Happy 6th Anniversary to Steam On Linux

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It was six years ago today that Steam announced that they were working on a beta client for Linux. The beta was limited to only a little over 60,000, though later on in the month they would invite another 5,000, and I was among one of those that was honored to receive an invitation. I installed Ubuntu as that was the recommended Linux distro at the time, and began using Linux as a desktop alternative to Windows on the side much as I do now but with Mint instead, as well as Fedora and CentOS over the years.

I remember my library only having a couple of GoldSrc titles in it, but eventually that would expand and improve. Looking at back when I started, and then looking at my library today things have changed dramatically. I have more options for gaming under Linux thanks to certain developers keeping Linux in mind, the introduction to Vulkan (formerly AMD’s Mantle graphics api)and Proton as an added compatibility option to play Windows games under Linux. I can now look at my library and have access to a good chunk of it despite platforms, and depending on an older game it can sometimes run better under Proton instead.

This has also lead to other programs being developed under Linux, such as OBS Studio for making it easier for gamers to record their gameplay. There are also now more video editors for Linux (the video I released yesterday was entirely edited on the Linux version of Shotcut, as well as some others I have planned ahead).

These changes and improvements over the years may not have come at a fast pace, Windows may still hold the crown for PC Gaming, but people need to remember that Windows wasn’t always considered a gaming platform either. There were people like me back in the day having to exit Windows to use DOS which still had a larger game library at the time.

For some people who only play certain games, and having those games available on Linux could be a game changer for them. Me? As I’ve said many times before I still have certain things holding me back from switching completely… But I am using it now more than ever. If something becomes available under Linux, and it runs just as well if not better, that’s one less reason for me to use Windows.

Only half way through the week and I already want it to end

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The last few days at work have been pretty rough. I came home today and immediately passed out after eating some leftover lasagna from dinner at a friend and former co-workers house. Today wasn’t as bad, but yesterday and Tuesday were crazy busy with no rhyme or reason. I played a bit of DMC1 today during lunch, that was fun. I also tried running DMC HD Collection in Mint today. The good news is that the launcher works perfectly, the bad news is that once you choose what game you want to play it’ll just crash to desktop. Of course you can still technically play it under Linux, but you’ll have to use an emulator instead and have the necessary ROMS or disks on hand.

I’ve been collecting video footage documenting my adventures with Proton, and plan on making an introductory video showing my desktop as well as games that work under Linux via SteamPlay. I watched a couple big YouTubers about the subjects, and I can tell they’re mainly making videos about Proton and Linux gaming just to garner attention and rake in the ad revenue. I can tell especially when I compare their videos to other YouTubers who actually do use Linux on a regular basis. For example I’ve been reading and seeing others try to add their Windows Steam Library straight from their Windows game drive, which causes the desired game to download in a loop over and over again, as well as potentially corrupt your game on the Windows side.

Even though Proton uses the same install paths as Windows you can’t install or mount games from a drive that uses the ntfs file system (you can thank Microsoft for not wanting their filesystem to work properly with other operating systems). Best results are achieved if you use ext4 instead. This is one the many things inspiring me to make my own Linux videos, plus YouTube could use more Tux love. :v:

Linux Continues To Make Big Headlines

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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: