Tag: linuxgaming

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This one flew under my radar so far (haha, sorry):

Rescue the civilians, race the clock, and raze the enemy in MH-Zombie, the world’s only helicopter arcade simulator! Three flight physics modes, three difficulty modes, and a tutorial mode provide a stepped learning curve and wider accessibility to realistic helicopter flight.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429350/MHZombie

The reason this came to my attention is because it’s one of the few games that [just] implemented via UDP e.g. available by (and various others). This is great because it doesn’t force people to jump the hoops of , which is only supported for Windows and officially limited to their proprietary devices. See this in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMGFdO7VXiY

Apparently it’s written for mobile games but runs on PC as well – that seems to include Linux PC which even makes this a title! 🤓

I don’t know about you but for 3 bucks I’ll totally get this for the occasional pew pew fun. Game seems to be a labour of love so sharing is highly appreciated.

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This video is how I gutted my already modified old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS joystick of my ViperPit and made it work again with the help of an Arduino Pro Micro. This flight stick (and also the other peripherals) do belong in a museum but where’s the fun in that? I modified it and now it’s a generic USB joystick that works on any recent system. I focus mostly on the 5×5 button matrix since this is the hardest part to understand. In the end are a few minutes of playing X4 Foundations with it to give it a good test run. Now it just needs some oil for the creaking 😅

https://makertube.net/w/qrqqZLr2QvJFjCwyNzzAmp / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYiPFDpHwmc

I totally missed the memo but apparently there is a Linux version of for a while now: https://support.gameglass.gg/en/articles/9351904-installing-gameglass-hub-on-linux

* Ubuntu 22.04+
* Linux Mint 21.2+
* Fedora 39+

Not a fan of GameGlass (I prefer my switches and dials, as you may know) but it’s probably of interest for other builders.

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I’m flabbergasted how good this tracker-neuralnet plugin for works. It does the with just a webcam without any clips, reflectors or LED stripes. I kinda expected this to not work really well in a dark room, that I prefer for gaming, but I was wrong. Even with a tiny light in one corner of the room only it kept tracking flawless.

…can even scratch my nose and it keeps tracking.

To get this neuralnet tracker input in the first place I had to download the ONNX runtime package onnxruntime-linux-x64-1.18.1.tgz from https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.18.1 (My Fedora offered 1.15.1 from it’s repo but this was at the time of writing not sufficient and having it installed resulted in failure due to an API mismatch). I didn’t even install it somewhere, just unpacked it in my Downloads folder.

Back in my OpenTracks folder I run cmake the way I’ve done it before several times but this time I added the unpacked onnxruntime folder to the config.

Configure did it’s magic (note how it picked up module tracker-neuralnet once the ONNXRuntime_DIR was set) and here we are one make later. This is rather impressive 🤓

YMMV

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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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I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this.

Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️

Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn’t check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end – sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.

Pick your poison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2A_uVbUKWU / https://tube.tchncs.de/w/iV21V6EZxNCTsC8bvsCQDt

I held an online presentation and talk for 2h about some weeks ago **in German**. The presentation itself (20m) went live today with **English subtitles** on the channel of @Sciencekeeper@troet.cafe (Stellanebula project lead). I mention as example for native games but the main focus is, due to the audience: a huge German Elite Dangerous wing, focused on (and some for good measure). I’m going to release the talk that happened after this eventually but I have to cut this first, which is _a lot_ of work, so no promises yet. Mebbe this is of interest for someone else too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmaj-MyRkPs.

This presentation was made for absolute beginners as intro into the topic .

CC-SA versions on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7Qj5NvrbWQ / https://tube.tchncs.de/w/tuQs2dBSDSTdUv5DYcA6Mv

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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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I just set https://simpit.dev/ live.

Primary Buffer Panel – The On A PC For More Immersion In Pew Pew

A glorified joystick controller with an LCD (‘MFD’) and plenty of RGB.

Best viewed WITH an ad-blocker (thanks @stefan)

I’m kinda blind by now after hacking away on this page for days so I’d appreciate feedback.

Especially if something is broken.

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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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