soulsource

soulsource, wczoraj

Technically I’m still playing “Vagrus - The Riven Realms”, but I didn’t play much lately, since I rediscovered my love for the Lean4 programming language and am now playing around with a formally validated heap again.

soulsource, 5 dni temu

Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur’s Gate 3 can be launched with the –skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.

soulsource, 7 dni temu

I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.

The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game’s startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn’t enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.

The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.

The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral… Also, due to the game’s grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.

soulsource, miesiąc temu

Acquisitions felt kinda cool when Microsoft was dishing them out like nobody’s business prior to the pandemic.

No, it did not. Consolidation usually is bad for employees and customers, and anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last 150 years has had plenty of opportunities to observe this.

soulsource, 2 miesiące temu

I would recommend to play Skyrim on PC though. Even if your computer is old, you should be able to get a much better experience from it than the Switch version.

I mean, I played it on the Xbox 360, and it worked like a charm. On an ancient three-core console with 256 MiB of RAM.

Then I wanted to replay it on the Switch, and was disappointed. There are a lot of physics glitches on the Switch, but what is worse is that the NPC pathfinding takes a lot longer on the Switch, such that NPCs move in nonsensical directions during combat, as they start to follow paths that they would have needed several seconds earlier. Instead of moving near the player to attack, they move near the position where the player had been some time ago. This is particularly bad on the overworld, but also noticeable in dungeons.

soulsource, 2 miesiące temu

I would recommend to play this on Switch though. That’s because, unlike the PC version, the Switch version can be played without an Ubisoft Account. All one has to do is to disconnect the Switch from the internet, and suddenly the game runs without login.

soulsource, 3 miesiące temu

I’m still hooked on Backpack Battles. It’s slow enough that medicine-induced-brain-fog ridden me can play it, and it’s a lot of fun.

soulsource, 3 miesiące temu

I loved that game, and completed it twice, but the last chapter (or last 2 chapters - depending on which ending you get) is super annoying. The encounters are repetitive, and there are quite a lot of them. It’s almost the same group of enemies again, and again, and again. Once you have a working strategy those encounters aren’t even that challenging, but if you play turn-based, they take a lot of time…

soulsource, 3 miesiące temu

Backpack Battles. I should have never bought this. It’s eating all my spare time.

soulsource, 4 miesiące temu

• Book of Hours. It’s a strange game, set in the Secret Histories, the same setting that Cultist Simulator had. Unlike Cultist Simulator, which was rather gruesome, Book of Hours is a relaxed game, about cleaning out and restoring an abandoned library, reading the occult books left in it, and drinking tea with your guests.
• Potionomics. While it’s primarily a puzzle game about brewing potions, it has a lot of heartwarming dialogue.
• Settlers 2 (the original DOS game, not the remake). The Settlers series was what brought up the term “Wuselfaktor” (No clue how to translate this. There is an English explanation of the term in this article.), and imho Settlers 2 is (by far) the best part of that series.
• Kerbal Space Program. I can’t say why this game makes me happy, but it does. There’s something strangely relaxing about drifting through space in free-fall, seeing the planetary surface pass by at high speed below.

soulsource, 4 miesiące temu

I feel like I have to link this here: The open source project (which also has builds for other platforms than Windows): sc2.sourceforge.net

soulsource, 4 miesiące temu

I don’t know that particular system, so I can’t give any hardware-specific suggestions. However, it might be worth checking out the games that previously were included in Humble Mobile Bundles, especially the very first ones. Sorry, I don’t have a nice to browse list, but this site seems usable enough: barter.vg/bundles/3/76/

That said, OpenTTD is available on F-Droid. That should keep you busy for a while 😉

soulsource, 4 miesiące temu

It’s basically what the Steam Deck does, and for a gaming device it makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of games will probably be installed to the user’s home folder anyhow…

It might be that some games require additional libraries that don’t come with the immutable base OS, but you can always install them in a custom folder (like, the game’s install dir), or just install Steam and use the Steam Runtime for everything.

And, as you said, a lot of open source tools and games (DosBox for instance) are available as Flatpaks too.

soulsource, 5 miesięcy temu

After finishing my second playthrough of Loren the Amazon Princess, I’ve now started Tales of Aravorn: An Elven Marriage. And I must say, it is pretty good. From what I can tell up to now, I like Elven Marriage more than Loren, so it’s a bit sad, that it didn’t sell that well…

Apart from that I’m playing way too much Against the Storm. It’s a pretty fun city builder rogue-like. Basically Settlers, but only the fun parts, with a bit of random challenges sprinkled in.

I also tried to play Albion (the DOS game) again, but I died in my second battle and hadn’t saved from the beginning… 90s games were something different, when it comes to difficulty. I will definitely start over again soon, this time actually saving frequently.

soulsource, 5 miesięcy temu

There are some amazing fan projects though:

• While it isn’t a remake, OpenMW improves upon the original game’s graphics - it does not change textures or models though, just rendering features.
• Skywind is a remake though - it uses the engine of Skyrim to recreate Morrowind.
• Skyblivion is the same idea, but with Oblivion.

soulsource, 6 miesięcy temu

It has gotten an update recently, to improve compatibility with modern systems: Patch Notes

soulsource, 6 miesięcy temu

On the topic of Visual Novels: I’d like to recommend basically everything from Winter Wolves Games that is tagged as RPG. The classic is of course Loren the Amazon Princess, but, to be honest, their writing has improved since then, so you might want to check out their newer Tales of Aravorn games, like Seasons of the Wolf. Also, Loren is really long, so if you don’t have a ton of time, the newer, shorter games might be a better choice.

A word of warning though, by Winter Wolves themselves: mastodon.social/

soulsource, 6 miesięcy temu

Apart from Subnautica, which only is tedious regarding food/drink in the very beginning, I enjoyed Unreal World a lot. It is turn based, so there isn’t any real-time time constraint imposed by in-game hunger/thirst. It also tries to feel realistic in a lot of aspects, including the amount of food/water your character needs. While at game start you of course need to focus on immediate survival (though, that depends a bit on the scenario you play), that focus shifts rather quickly to preparing for the winter, as in stocking up supplies (think: smoking/curing meat/fish, gathering fire wood,…), and building a shelter that you can heat, so you don’t freeze when it gets cold outside. Since the game is set in fantasy iron age Finland, you probably also want to build a sauna 😉.

soulsource, 6 miesięcy temu

How does that work if you haven’t installed the game already? Also, what about copy protection?

soulsource, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m positively surprised that this works.

That will make installing old games so much easier on my Steam Deck. Thanks!

soulsource, 7 miesięcy temu

Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.

SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.

soulsource, 7 miesięcy temu

Enable SSH access (but make sure it only accepts key-based logins - password based on a mobile device that might operate in untrusted networks is a bad idea).

If you enable SSH, you can transfer files from the PC over WLAN. (If you are on Windows: FileZilla is your friend.) Also, you can remote access the Steam Deck command line via SSH. (If you are on Windows: PuTTY is your friend.) That’s way less annoying than having to type longer texts (think: script files to launch emulators) with the on-screen keyboard.

Oh, and if you are into Retro Gaming, my small guide on how to add DOS games to the steam library and get MIDI working for them might be worth a look.

soulsource, 7 miesięcy temu

There are plenty on the web (for instance on handheld.quest), but I haven’t found a single one that contains all details…

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So, I’ll just try to sum up the details here:

First things first: SSH stands for Secure Shell, and is basically an encrypted remote command line, but it offers much more features than just a command line, including, but not limited to, file transfer. The file transfer feature is also known as sftp, and generally considered to be the successor of the more well known ftp protocol.

The very first thing I would do on the Steam Deck would be to set a host name in the settings, such that you don’t need to use the IP address to address it over the network. Screenshot (I totally haven’t just found by googling).

The Steam Deck comes with an SSH server pre-installed, you need to enable it though. The following steps need to be done on a terminal, in desktop mode. The terminal that’s installed on the Steam Deck is called “Konsole” (if I remember correctly). Once you have a terminal running on Desktop Mode, you can enable the SSH server via the following steps (I’ll link the help for all commands I mention, so that you can verify that I’m not trying to trick you into doing something bad):

• First you need to get administrator (“root”) access to the Steam Deck, what can be done by setting a password for the default user. Don’t worry, the Steam Deck won’t start asking for a password on startup, it’s just required in order to get admin access. The command to set/change the current user’s password is simply https://manpage.me/?q=passwd. While typing the password, there won’t be any feedback on the screen. This is normal.
• Once the password has been set, you can use the https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sudo.8.html command to run other commands as administrator. sudo will ask you to confirm your identity by entering the password.
• To start the SSH server, you can use sudo systemctl start sshd. Help files: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/systemctl.1.html, https://manpage.me/?q=sshd
• To stop the SSH server again, you can use sudo systemctl stop sshd.
• To enable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl enable sshd (but I would not recommend this unless you disable password based logins - see below)
• To disable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl disable sshd

On the PC from which you want to connect to the Deck you will need some kind of sftp client. On Linux most file managers have sftp functionality built-in. On Windows and MacOS one needs a special program for this though (afaik). There are many, many alternatives here (just search “sftp client” in your search engine of choice), but the most well known one is FileZilla, which works on Windows, macOS, Linux and many other operating systems. I recommend FileZilla for two reasons. The first is that it’s open source (and free of charge), the second one is that I personally like it as a tool. At work I (have to) use Windows, and whenever I have to transfer files to a remote system like our webservers, our contractor’s cloud storage, or simply to copy a few music files from my phone to the office PC (yes, I am this old), FileZilla is the go-to solution for me.

If you have started the SSH server on the deck, you should now be able to access its contents via sftp. The default user on the Steam Deck is called deck, the password is the one you set earlier using the passwd command. If you are lost using FileZilla, there’s a user’s guide online.

Now, as promised, a few words on security and autostarting the SSH server. If you plan on auto-starting the SSH server on the Steam Deck, I would recommend to set up a means to connect to it without a password, and then to disable password-based SSH connections. The reason is that the Steam Deck, as a mobile device, will quite likely end up in insecure or otherwise untrusted wireless networks, and passwords are really not the most secure way of user authentication… Since SSH is a full remote access protocol, anyone who guesses your password and can reach the deck over the network could do anything on it. Given that the deck’s battery runtime is already short enough even if there is no bitcoin miner running in the background, you probably don’t want password based logins via SSH enabled permanently.

That’s where Public-key authentication comes in. You can configure the SSH server to allow users to connect without a password, if the users have access to a private key for which the corresponding public key is known to the server. To enable this, all you need to do is to create a public/private SSH key pair, and upload the public key to the SSH server on the Steam Deck. The exact process of creating those keys is again depending on the operating system. Here’s a guide about SSH key generation that includes instructions for macOS and Windows. On macOS or Linux the instructions are actually identical. You just need to open a terminal, and, if they don’t exist for your user yet, run https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dkeygen to create the keys. Then you can use https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dcopy%2Did to upload the public key to the Steam Deck. Once that is done, if your system uses https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dagent, connecting via public key should “just work” - also in FileZilla. If you don’t use ssh-agent, you can try these steps in FileZilla.

Once you have confirmed that passwordless public-key logins are working, you can edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on the steam deck. You’ll need admin access, so the easiest way to do that is probably to run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on a terminal (nano help). The relevant change is to replace the line #PasswordAuthentication yes by PasswordAuthentication no (here’s the help file for sshd.conf). In order to apply these changes, you probably need to restart the SSH server: sudo systemctl restart sshd.

soulsource, 8 miesięcy temu

If you want to know how Games Streaming will look like in 10 years, compare today’s YouTube to how it was 10 years ago.

soulsource, 8 miesięcy temu

Okay, Youtube was maybe a bad example. They aren’t that far with the enshittification yet, and just started increasing the amounts of ads…

Things I do expect:

• Price increase
• Tiered pricing (okay, that’s already a thing for GamePass with the “PC” and “Ultimate” plan)
• Lower price tiers including advertisements (could for instance be placed in games streamed from the cloud)
• Other things that aren’t beneficial for consumers.

soulsource, 9 miesięcy temu

I liked it a lot, before they added base-building and all that other stuff that doesn’t align with the game’s original vision.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

My recommendation list is going to be a wild mix of different styles. Basically aynthing in my Games Library that I find visually appealing…

• Gibbous - A Cthulu Adventure: While it isn’t my favourite point&click (that price goes to the Deponia Trilogy), it’s by far the most beautiful I’ve played up to now. The attention the devs paid to detail is astounding. The animations are perfect. In other words: A work of art.
• Euro Truck Simulator 2: I might be an exception here, but to me the main selling point of this game is the scenery, not the trucks.
• Elite: Dangerous: Most of the times this game looks utterly boring. Sometimes however, you catch an exceptional sight. Here’s a screenshot of an eclipse in a binary system, as seen from an icy moon of a gas giant (behind which the primary star is hidden).
• Space Engine: Same argument as for Elite. Most of the stuff is boring. Sometimes you find an exceptional sight. Also, Space Engine isn’t really a game, but rather a “beautiful picture generator”, as there is no real gameplay as of yet.
• Dwarf Fortress in ASCII mode: The ASCII “graphics” are a work of art on their own. Especially the animations. And the best part: The ASCII version can be downloaded for free, while the (imho less beautiful) graphical version costs money.
• Pyre: A mix of Visual Novel and Sports Game. The backgrounds and characters are beautifully drawn.
• Beat Hazard: The colours of the effects are stunning.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Thanks! I caught it more or less by chance though. I was just scanning all moons in the system, and thought that landing would be a nice break from the scanning routine. And then this happened. It looked even better a few moments before, when the sun that’s visible in the shot was still partially occluded by the gas giant. Took me too long to fire up camera mode to catch that though…

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Whoever made that decision obviously never worked in gamedev.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Yes. It’s in the Xbox Requirements, as in, the checklist of stuff you need to fulfill if you want to release a game on Xbox. To be precise, it’s test case 130-04: Featured Game Modes.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

I was talking about the person(s) at Microsoft, who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…

(And for context: I work in gamedev, and in my experience making games stay within the memory budget is one of the toughest parts of porting games to consoles.)

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Tell that to our artists 😉. As a coder I’m all for procedurally generated content. I did replace several heavy textures in our games by procedural materials, to squeeze out a couple of extra MB. However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work. They often don’t have the programming knowledge needed to develop procedural materials on their own, and would need to rely on technical artists or programmers to do so. Drawing a texture however, is very much part of their skillset…

But yeah, the mention of “squeezing out a couple of MB” brings me to another topic, namely that (at least in our games) the on-disk textures are only part of the RAM usage, and a relativley small one on comparison. In the games I worked on, meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage. We have several unique assets, which need to fulfill a certain quality standard due to licensing terms, such that in the end we had several dozens of meshes, each over 100 MB, that the player can freely place… Of course there would still be optimization potential on those assets, but as always, there’s a point where further optimization hits diminishing returns… In the end we had to resort to brute-force solutions, like unloading high quality LODs for meshes even if they are relatively close to the player… Not the most beautiful solution, but luckily not often needed during normal gameplay (that is: if the player doesn’t intentioally try to make the game go out-of-memory).

But I’m rambling. The tl;dr is: The memory constraints would not be a big deal if there was enough time/money for optimization. If there is one thing that’s never enough in game dev, it’s time/money.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m not an artist - my 3D modelling experience can be summed up as “none”, so I can’t really answer your last point. I know for certain that we don’t use normal maps to the extent they could be used, and therefore have way more detail in the meshes than they would need to have. I’m also pretty certain that we don’t do any tesselation on player pawns, and I think (but am not certain) that this is due to some engine limitation (again, don’t quote me on that, but iirc Unreal doesn’t support tesselation on skeletal meshes on all our target platforms).

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Yep. The Series S gives games even less RAM than the One X did.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

That number is - well, let’s just say, the correct value can be found in the docs here: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/…/whats-new-2206

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

For obvious reasons I can’t post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

direct3d Direct3D 11 and Direct3D12, to be precise. Direct3D9 was working fine before - and there even was native driver support for it in Mesa, that could be used together with a patched WINE.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

To be fair, when starting a new game you were told to check the wiki. Which has a very long and detailed tutorial.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Cultist Simulator. However, finding out how stuff works is half the game…

(The devs also posted a manual meanwhile, that explains the most obsucre mechanics.)

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/1356/

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Book of Hours

In my case: Instead of Baldur’s Gate 3. I can’t find time for Baldur’s Gate any more since I started Book of Hours. It’s just too good. It’s one of those games where I just don’t want to stop playing. Just one more book. Light LEAKS through the CRACKS. My mind is BRIGHTER than it EVER was. THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

At least Slack has a usable user interface… Teams is, well, I’d rather sit on a cactus. Let me phrase it like this: We have Office at work. We also have a Slack subscription, because Teams is just so much worse in comparison…

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

I have to second the mentions of OpenTTD, Battle for Wesnoth, Ur-Quan Masters and Nethack.

I’d also like to add:

• Widelands: A Settlers 2 clone.
• Chromium B.S.U.: A top-down scrolling shooter. Don’t let any enemies pass. Perfect if you need 5 minutes of adrenaline.
• Scorched 3D: It’s Scorched Earth, but 3D.
• Frozen Bubble: Hard to describe. It’s a bit like Dr. Mario.
• GL-117: 3D air combat. The graphics are “a bit” dated, but the game is a lot of fun still.
• Kobo Deluxe: A 2D action-puzzler. It doesn’t have the most stunning graphics, but it sure is fun to play.

Then there are also some open-source re-implementations of commercial games (that need the original game files) that haven’t been mentioned yet:

• CorsixTH: Theme Hospital.
• OpenMW: Morrowind
• OpenRA: Red Alert (and others)
• ScummVM: Various point&click adventure games (Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia, Loom,…)
• Return to the Roots: Settlers 2
• VCMI: Heroes of Might and Magic 3

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Some games, like the Pathfinder games by Owlcat, use that initial input to determine if you are playing with mouse/keyboard or a gamepad. Depending on that, you get presented with a different UI in the main menu.

Another reason for such a screen could also be Xbox support. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary, because user-handling has been vastly improved with the GDK, but before the GDK was released a splash screen was the most user-friendly way to do user-handling in a single-player or online-multiplayer game on Xbox.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).

Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.

soulsource, 10 miesięcy temu

I’d also suggest a Steam Deck, but for a different reason. My experiences with switchable graphics (both, nVidia and AMD) have been extremely disappointing. It’s quite frustrating to spend €1500 on a gaming laptop, and then constantly facing driver issues, tearing,…

If I were to buy a laptop, I’d therefore also go with an AMD integrated graphics unit, and no switchable graphics. Performance would be comparably bad, but at least an integrated (non-switchable) card works… And now we are at the point of having a dedicated gaming device like the Deck, which lets you have both: A performant enough gaming device, and a laptop that isn’t burdened by the price and issues of switchable graphics.