Transport Fever 2 released on schedule and for #linux. I’ll be in my bunk 😁
Transport Fever 2 released
Tag: gamingonlinux
Swapfile
One of the things about #Linux I love most is it’s flexibility. This may astonish some but I am gaming on my Linux system for approximately 15 years by now. Situation for #linuxgaming improved a lot lately but it was always possible to keep myself distracted 😉
So one of the games I just love to play is XCOM (UFO series). I don’t think I skipped any part and Terror From The Deep will always have a special place in my heart. Anyway, when XCOM was relaunched and eventually ported to Linux by Feral Interactive in 2014 I thought I couldn’t have been happier. Firaxis Games topped this in 2016 with XCOM2 and Feral Interactive once more got the job for the port.
Sadly with all the expansion sets it takes quite a toll on the required hardware. Huge fan of all sliders on maximum and see how it goes and while my box can mostly keep up I notice that I run out of RAM towards the end of the game fast and my machine starts swapping. I’ve 16GB RAM and this game eats it away like children their candy.
I’ve got additional 4GB of swap installed on slow spinning rust disks (legacy) so I notice the moment it starts swapping like hitting a wall. After another frustrated restart of the game I paused for a moment. I don’t know why this games needs so much RAM and frankly I don’t even care. Maybe I’m spoiled nowadays since stuff tends to “just work”.
So I decided to throw more power at it but RAM is expensive and I usually have enough of it for my daily work (or other games). I did get a decent SSD (Solid State Disk) recently tho so it’s #swapfile to my rescue:
swapoff -a
fallocate -l 16G /games/swapfile
mkswap /games/swapfile
swapon /games/swapfile
…and that’s it. I stopped my previous slow swap partition(s), created a new swapfile of 16GB size on my SSD, formatted it as swap partition and activated it. Now I tabbed back into my game and enjoyed the rest of the evening. Let it swap. The SSD can keep up with it. Not minding a few more seconds during loading screens 😀 I’m considerung to add the activation sequence to my “gaming mode” script.
Bootsplash
“Now THAT is a grub screen! Thank you to @LinuxPaulM for telling me about grub-customizer!”
Now THAT is a lilo screen!
I admit it’s an old #bootplash. I used to reboot on LAN parties just to show off. Bonus points if you guess it’s year 😉
(Boot progress bar was mapped to the health bar)
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition For Linux
Liam Dawe (GamingOnLinux)Feral Interactive have finally confirmed the Linux release date for Shadow of the Tomb Raider after announcing it for Linux back in November last year.
Well bite me, I guess I have to spend some money on this 😀 Curse u Feral 😉
Native Linux Gaming
Marc Di Luzio (Medium)…and then Valve dropped their Proton bomb
Did you know that you can play hundreds of games nowadays? Not just Windows through Proton – no. I’m talking about native games.
https://medium.com/@mdiluz/so-i-was-making-a-montage-full-of-native-linux-games-92ce12b21631
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U8bLArlRXw
Disclaimer: Many of the snippets were contributed by me. @mdiluz did the fantastic job of wrapping everything up.
Portal
So.. computer games for small children.. that be Portal. Portal 2 to be specific. My kids started to demand me playing Portal 2 on the Steam Link in the living room. That game with the mean computer. Can’t argue with that ;-P
The Witcher 3
Playing The Witcher 3 on Linux. So much progress since my first play through 2 yrs ago when I hardly managed 25fps with many tweaks. Game is beautiful af and runs smooth on highest settings nowadays. This penguin is really happy. Attached images show GOG version run via Steam Play aka #Proton.
MAIA
This game is a little gem for colony/base builders (and mayhap even SIM players). There is so much going on and it takes some time to get all the details even at it’s slow pace. Sadly not much is explained in-game [yet?]. Figured most stuff out by playing or watching others play. I still absolutely recommend this. It’s very relaxing and hilarious fun at times when an unfortunate chain of events culminate in an unexpected disaster 😀
This game always had a very steady progress, unlike other EA games, and it was fun keeping an eye on it and watch the improvements over time. Remember that this is an Indie and not a huge studio. I’m a dev myself and I tell you it’s amazing what S. Roth managed to achieve here. He could also be reached e.g. via Discord or Twitter so I’ve absolutely no idea why some people here complain that they were ignored. Mayhap they were simply rude?
Don’t give the bad reviews [on Steam] too much credit. The annoying repeating crashes e.g. that many players describe did only happen in fact for Windows players due to a bug with async operations in a library from Microsoft. That was not related to the game itself, and is fixed by now. This game didn’t crash for me in hours on Linux so I believe this statement by the dev. And to this dude blaming this killed his hard-disk or boot-loader or whatsoever: Just no. This is not how computers work o0
One can’t play under Linux
One can’t play under Linux, they said.
I don’t care for ~20 years by now and since 2016 I can’t keep up with my queue any more. The variety became just too much.
Find screenshots of a fraction of the games that came native to Linux in the last years attached. The selection is random since I simply searched for files of the image type when all the screenshots came up.
Nostalgie: Dungeon Keeper
Gestern wurde es mal wieder sehr spät und wie so oft kam das Thema auf Computerspiele. Aus irgend einem Grund kamen wir auf Dungeon Keeper. Ich rede vom ersten Teil. Das war ein 16Bit DOS Spiel aus dem Jahre 1997 von Bullfrog. Falls sich noch jemand erinnert.
Ich habe also in meiner Spieleschatzkiste gegraben und tatsächlich die originale ziemlich lädierte und zerkratze CD zu Tage gefördert. Und das schöne: Lief mit “dosemu” auf Anhieb und ohne Murren mit Ton, Sprachausgabe, Maus und “3D”. Oder was man damals halt so unter 3D kannte.
Zum Spiel selbst: Herrlich, witzig, böse, innovativ. Allein das Introvideo war preisverdächtig. Unglaublich, was hier aus einem DOS rausgekitzelt wurde. Und das Beste: Dank grafischer Ausgabe über SDL seitens Dosemu ist eine stufenlose Fensterskalierung möglich. So kann ich es auf meinem reinen 64bit Linux auf einem modernen Monitor, der diese niedrigen Auflösungen nicht mehr kann, noch einmal mit mir genehmer Größe und Verpixelung spielen.