Category: LinuxGaming

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So… this is news to me, because I don’t have a headset, but I can set my Pro glasses into (side by side) mode by pressing the small button longer. Some games, like , can do this as well without fiddling around with Reshade. I didn’t really expect it but it just works. This way I even get 3D on foot, which is not supported for VR in Elite Dangerous Odyssey at all! Side by side Crosseye mode (right eye left, left eye right) though? Add some head tracking to the mix, which is totally possible, and I get a very nice VR-like experience even on foot in Elite Dangerous – and on Linux PC!

This is the SBS version that does REQUIRE VR/XR glasses and mebbe something like xr-video-player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEtRijojBx8

This is the MONO version that does NOT require VR/XR glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPTk1vygM4

The FOV is somewhat cramped. No idea if this can be tweaked any further but I’ll fiddle with the settings on my next test. Mebbe this can be tweaked (or I use Desktop to zoom in somewhat).

Update: I got the aspect ratio somewhat under control. It’s not perfect but much better and an odd combination of window mode and resolution and upscaling, that somehow affects the HUD only but make no sense to me at all. At this point I think it’s simply a bug of Elite. It’s like the HUD doesn’t get the memo to scale up after the intro played. I’m also not sure if this is a side effect of gamescope but I can totally live with this result (though it does start to stutter somewhat on foot but recording this at the same time somewhat overwhelms my rig anyway). These are my gamescope settings with Steam:

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 obs-gamecapture gamescope -h 1080 -w 3840 -H 1080 -W 3840 --max-scale 2 -f -e -- %command%

Max-scale is probably not needed but it was started with this so I won’t omit it now. The ingame settings are 1280×960 and windowed with _NO BORDER_. Every other mode broke the aspect ratio even more! That is also true for 1920×1024, which would have made _some_ sense to me at least, but this did also NOT work FOR ME. This results in a pixelated HUD which is worked around with upscaler INTERNAL or AMD CAS cranked to x2 – AMD FSR did NOT WORK. If someone could enlighten me on this: Bring it! YMMV.

New footage with better aspect ratio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qdvfdpTy_k

New footage with better aspect ratio framepacked, which MAY just work with VR (or fall back to anaglyph) – the YT FAQ is very thin on 3D content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYYJTqnpz8

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Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown by Bandai Namco Studios Inc.Bandai Namco Studios Inc. (エースコンバット7 スカイズ・アンノウン｜バンダイナムコエンターテインメント)
『エースコンバット7』バンダイナムコエンターテインメント公式サイト

A jet next to a huge explosion in the sky. Two smaller images depict the perspective of the pilot and the player sitting inside a ViperPit playing the game with XR glasses.

Got some help carrying the from the basement into my man cave today and since I got the peripherals operational again already, and got Ace Combat 7 on a sale, which seemed to be a good fit, I decided to play that first:
https://makertube.net/w/wiKFYNPaKhhCmrrz3aGLYb / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEPK0lHX_3s

Little did I know what a pain in the neck it would be to get this running. No, Linux wasn’t the problem. That was just Press Play, as usual.

There is however no settings menu for joysticks so any mapping has to be done by manually editing the `Input.ini` of the game in an text editor, which is a guessing game. Head tracking is also a no go. I pulled the old trick to map the head tracker to a virtual XBOX controller but the game comes with an annoying deadzone where the camera snaps to the center.

Ah well, got it all working okay-ish in the end and enjoyed some pew pew in the skies. There seem to be plenty of mods too so trying that will be next 🤘

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Back in 2023 I started a new game in where I did set out (on a whim) to build the – and fair warning: I never finished it. I found some measurements of this iconic ship from the verse online, which is apparently something like 1.44km x 551m and converted this to 179.6 x 68.9 Satisfactory Foundations (look Mom, a game made me do MATHS again).

Finding a spot with enough space was a task on it’s own and I settled for the West Coast in the end. This is so close to the edge that the game starts to kill the player because the map ends there. This is also a Vanilla game with no mods.

After laying a square for the proportion and being somewhat satisfied (haha) with that I started refining the outlines. This took ages and some mad image editing skills to scale photos with correct proportions and overlaying them with a grid in the Gimp editor. Ah well not really but you get the idea.

The goal was to build a mega factory inside the hull working with the given layout. Vehicles and trains would pick up all required resources and bring them in via the fighter decks. I kinda imagined what could have happened if the Galactica crashed on a planet after her last journey. Using the powerful engines to power machines that would aid in starting with a settlement program or something like that, while the former ship itself would get decommissioned and transformed piece for piece.

I am rather happy with the result, even without ever completing this. My gaming focus shifted a lot and with the announcement that no further early access updates would happen I kinda lost interest in the project. I am not expecting to complete it once the release drops. That’s okay though. I am still looking forward to said release.

I mean after ~850 of casual hours I kinda have seen it all. Best early access ever – and yes all on a Linux PC – as usual for me 🤘I’m very curious what else the devs will come up with for this title. Anyway, here are the rest of the 16 screenshots. This shows more of the inner ship including the various power plants and reactors.

Thank you Coffee Stain Studios for making such an entertaining game. I enjoyed every hour of it and despite this being basically an endless grind game it never felt like grinding at all. Heck, thinking of all the possible ways to transport, collect and divide stuff is endless fun for me ❤️

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The Expanse: A Telltale Series by TelltaleTelltale (The Expanse: A Telltale Series – Telltale Games)
Experience the exciting universe of The Expanse like never before in Telltale’s latest adventure, The Expanse: A Telltale Series. Follow Cara Gee, who reprises her role as Camina Drummer, and explore the dangerous and uncharted edges of The Belt aboard the The Artemis. From scavenging wrecked ships in a zero-g environment, to surviving a mutiny, to combating fearsome pirates, you make the difficult choices and reveal Camina Drummer’s resolve in this latest Telltale adventure.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

There are rumours that I “just checked” if this game works at all and finished it 6.5h later in one sitting. I can neither confirm nor deny that. I’m also very sleepy today.

I got this Telltale-game to my birthday and decided to give it a go yesterday. Didn’t expect much and was already kinda annoyed when the starter suggested it requires a gamepad controller (turns out it doesn’t – it can be played with a mouse too). So I got my good old sturdy Steam Controller from next room, jacked it in and… watched it crash. To be fair: I was starting it on Linux, and this game is not made for this. So I checked briefly with the ProtonDB and switched the version from Experimental back to Proton 8.0.

Smooth sailing from here. Game started without a hitch, the controller was recognized, the provided Steam layout worked perfectly fine and it did not crash once until I finished the game hours later. It would also seamless switch to mouse input when this was touched but I decided to keep playing with the controller.

The graphics are nothing to write home about. Sound and music feel immediately like home though, as my wife put it (we’re both fans of the books and show). There are some puzzles but nothing too complicated and – thankfully – sparse. Same for some quick actions that require to hammer a certain button in time (without penalizing hitting a wrong button too). The Zero-G walks are amazing and gave my brain something to chew on when the ceiling suddenly became the new floor.

I won’t talk about the story itself, but I did like that it shows percentages of how other players decided in key situations after each chapter. Kinda interesting to know that there are other outcomes and that also makes me want to play it again. There are plot twists, backstories that may be uncovered, drama, tension, violence, love and death (yes yes, it is a telltale game :D).

Can recommend. Get it and don’t forget to change the air filters 🤓

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Yes, does only support one gamepad. Single digit. This gamer doesn’t care. Here have and in . Vanilla. No mods. Thanks , and ❤️

Mebbe I’ll do a proper recording someday:

No Man’s Sky with headtracking and HOTAS (on Linux PC)

Wondering about that button box? Didn’t use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/

How it’s done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!

This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).

So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.

Doing so I noticed that NMS does “look-around” on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"

And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓

PS: I’m aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in “gamemode”.

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Did some space pew pew like it’s 1999. This is X: Beyond The Frontier. One of the very first space games using a “so called” 3D card. Haha, those crazy peeps at Egosoft updated it in 2021 to make it compatible with Win11 which means it’s basically running on Linux PC out of the box as well. Mapped my joystick and dived into it once more. Doubt I’ll play it much but that was a nice excursion down memory lane

I still have the original CD-Rom but when I noticed that it’s on a Steam sale for -,99ct I didn’t even bother to look for a CD reader. What a surprise that this runs at all.

I also have some short video footage. I’ll never forget that glorious intro. “Here is how the ship navigates… and action. Bam. Here are 1000Cr, the most basic shield and no weapons. Go! Trade! ‘Maps’? ‘Earth’? What’s that? Oh and you have to pay those Cr back. With interest.”

X: Beyond The Frontier (on Linux PC)
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I hacked a mod for X4: Foundations to get ship telemetry and targeting data to my “Primary Buffer Panel” via a socket. This is a demonstration of my simulated cockpit made from cardboard on a budget usually used to play Elite Dangerous now also used for X4: Foundations. This is work in progress.

My DIY cockpit for X4: Foundations (on Linux PC)

In use:

  • A Linux PC
  • A DIY Headtracker
  • A DIY Joystick (My Primary Buffer Panel)
  • A X52 Pro HOTAS
  • An AMD RX6700XT
  • …a lot of plumbing in Node-Red xD

This is loosely based on the Python Pipe Server mod for X4 that is sadly Windows only using Named Pipes. I fixed that for Linux PC by side-loading the library LuaSocket and starting a socket server directly in X4. That’s right, the Python Server is simply not needed now and companion tools may directly connect to the socket. It’s a nice bonus that LuaSocket also allows a UDP or TCP server depending on how it is started. That was some piece of work though and I’m still wrapping things up to publish my code changes. I’m also still looking for testers so if you’re interested get in touch!

So you _still_ think you can’t space pew pew on Linux PC? Think again. I do it all the time: https://beko.famkos.net/2021/10/16/space-pew-pew-on-linux-pc/

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Here are the humble beginnings[1] of a working example to read the ship status of in a format very similar to the Status File of

Both games are quite similar and by using a “well established” format it should be possible to use this with existing companion apps – like my own

It uses the “Named Pipe API” of “sn_mod_support_apis” – on PC 😁 This was not supported by this MOD so far but I made it work.

Well, at least on my machine 🤓

And yes, the pipe server works with some minor adjustments for other _existing_ apps as well. Here is a demo of with a data feed directly from X4: Foundations – it does not use the though, since that is not really needed, so I had to make some small adjustments in it’s connection routine but that was like 2 lines of code 🤷

[1] TBF the humble beginnings were back in 2021 (https://beko.famkos.net/2021/05/01/getting-into-x4-foundations-modding-on-linux/) but I kinda let it slide to tinker and build my Primary Buffer Panel (https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/) first. Other games made it easier to retrieve game data and I did learn a lot during that time but it was X4 that started it all.

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Another night in the X4 sandbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=665hXLKSfek / https://tube.tchncs.de/w/pHFP8jZf7PYLyLZSARZQ4T

This is heavily distilled early gameplay of X4: Foundations, where I started another play-through slowly expanding my little empire with trade, side missions, station building, border patrol (loosing the the “Misfit”, my good old starter-ship), a surprise Xenon attack on a station where I was just for shopping and eventually good old fashioned piracy with unexpected guest appearance of some Kha’ak trying to crash the party.

01:11 Setting up trade routes aboard The Law Abiding Windrunner
02:20 Switching over to the Misfit
03:05 Witnessing the death of a trading station (while escorting my own ships to safety)
03:50 Patrolling for money (and looting stuff)
05:48 Repairing satellites (in EVA suit)
07:32 Docking at the impressive Teladi ring station for shopping
08:45 Surprise attack on the ring station by a Xenon K (and it’s demise)
14:32 Extending my own station and buying more mining ships
11:26 Switching over to my frigate for border patrol (lots of pew pew)
14:30 Loosing the Misfit to Kha’ak (and avenging it)
16:07 Going for resupplies and preparing for piracy
16:39 Ambushing the prey, a fat water freighter looking for a new owner
17:59 Starting the boarding operation
18:40 Realizing I need more support to deal with surprises
18:58 Stumbling over mentioned surprises, Kha’ak trying to crash the party
19:51 Sending more boarders as the first group fails
20:22 Finally going home with the price, a “slightly banged up” L water freighter

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SpaceBourne 2 by DBK GamesDBK Games (SpaceBourne 2)
The official website of indie game studio DBK Games, the developer of SpaceBourne series and Mesel.

So this was recommended to me by Patola and while I usually do not buy into an early access game I made an exception. I’ve only seen one hour of the game so far but this promises a lot of fun. It’s still very rough, that I can tell – and often inputs do not register or register double. Nonetheless I felt right at home and after a lot of fiddling with the inputs I was happy enough to give it a spin with my X52 Pro (that was indeed detected just fine after the initial tutorial).

So after learning the basic ship navigation and shooting up some drones during the first quest I got ordered to investigate some asteroids.

There were of course some pirates hanging around and the shoot-out did take more time than I’d like to admit. For some reasons I could not for my life get any target lock so all the shooting had to be done with the good old Mk 1 eyeball without having an idea about reach (or even arcs?) of the weapons. Probably a bug. Or user error. The jury is still out on that.

Next was a surprise. After parking the ship in stealth I was ordered to exit and do a little space walk to clear a hidden platform of hostiles. Space diving was not on the things I expected 🤯

Anyway, after some more shooting, and some more explosions, I was back with the contractor and the reward was for reasons yet unknown a freakin robot head. That kicks off a quest to reassemble that poor thing. For some reasons this unfolded into an epic space battle where two different fractions slugged it out in the middle of an old battlefield with me, the contractor helping with the parts and the robot head in the middle – also somehow attacked by scavengers as a 4th faction. What a chaos!

After surviving this I got recommended to someone else to get the robot assembled again. The person that would be able to do this resides on a station in another system though, which means travelling through a… stargate. Awesome! After filing a flight plan and requesting passage I had to line up my entry and found myself in another system – surrounded by illuminated advertisement of all things, of course.

An in-system jump later I docked at a station and found the contact that would help me with the robot. For a price, of course.

This was where I decided to stop for today. So much stuff happened during the first 60 minutes of this and judging by the in-game menus there is a lot more to come. There are skill trees, load-outs, factions and many systems to explore. Yes, it’s not as beautiful as StarCitizens but it’s perfectly playable already and I’m getting Wing Commander vibes from that and this feels rather good.