Liam Dawe (gamingonlinux.com)THQ Nordic and Mimimi Games kept to their word, with Desperados III now being officially released for Linux PC and macOS along with the latest update. "Desperados III is a story-driven, hardcore tactical stealth game, set in a ruthless Wild West scenario. Play smart if you want to succeed. A good pl...
Oh yes, Desperados III on Linux PC 😀 So want!
Man, this is a 180° turn for me. When I started out with Linux the GPUs where usually troublemakers and I kinda got used to throw moar power at it to solve the problem. Spent nights fiddling with Elsa Winner or 3Dfx Vodoo or some ATI cards (that eventual became AMD). When laptops of mine could no longer be used because AMD simply dropped support for perfectly fine hardware I was really never again buying from it again.
The background for finally ripping out the heart of my Linux PC is basically this issue: https://beko.famkos.net/2020/01/17/computer-fallen
NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: GPU has fallen off the bus.
This is followed by a frozen X server rendering all HID interfaces dead until reboot. It happened once or twice a week. NVIDIA support has no idea and while the card is still fine and up for any task I finally decided to get a more recent GPU hoping that the problem will be gone (and not be an issue from the mainboard).
The decision to try AMD again after a decade was basically made because I read so much positive news on their open source drivers and general good support by Mesa nowadays. Since nothing about the old fglrx days is valid any more this is sort of a jump into cold water for me 🙂
I decided for the slightly older RX 5600 XT 14Gbps 6GB (THICC III Pro) edition by XFX that seems to be good for 1080p gaming and this is close to my main display resolution of 1920×1200. While I never heard of XFX before I was hooked by NO RGB and that tiny vBios switch it has offering a backup bios. That’s a feature I like in my mainboards as well.
Speaking of I heard a lot of confusion on said vBioses on this series so I digged deeper on this topic. Thankfully a lot of the legwork was already done for me by André Almeida who describes the process for Linux PC on https://andrealmeid.com/post/2020-05-01-vbios2/ after a lot of research in part 1.
With the help of the mentioned tool amdvbflash I was able to drag the following vBios information out of the GPU:
AMDVBFLASH version 4.71, Copyright (c) 2020 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Product Name is : NAVI10 A1/A2 D1990301 XLE 6GB 300e/875m
Device ID is : 731F
Bios Version : 017.001.000.068.000000
Bios P/N is : 113-170WCNAVIXLE6
Bios SSID : 5710
Bios SVID : 1682
Bios Date is : 03/27/20 21:25 The extracted rom of the active vBios (switch was set on position closer to power connector) has the sha1sum 9ce7ecc9625d7ff39b3b08c45916b6c2e3bf4a8c and is according to the flashing tool valid and signed. I understood it’s a bad idea to flash with an unsigned rom because the GPU will probably refuse to boot. I’d upload it to techpowerup that seems to collect such roms and allows hassle free downloading but their extract and upload tool seems to be for Windows PC only.
XFX has vBios roms for the 12Gbps variant on it’s website but currently none for this one so it seems it is up to date already.
Installing it was a breeze. I upgraded to Fedora Workstation 32 before changing the GPU to make sure I get more recent drivers and that was it. System booted up just fine and the card worked out of the box. Unlike NVIDIA I didn’t need to download a specific driver first or add some further repository. There’s this nice tool CoreCtrl that shows me a power consumption of only 14W while the card is in idle with zero spinning fans. That’s right – no noise! When not in use this card consumes next to no resources which begs the question how I’m going to heat my man cave from now on 😀
This surprised me as well. All the cool bits are laid out for me to play with at /sys/class/drm/card1/device/. I mean I’m not much into over-clocking but it’s all there. This brings me to benchmarking the new GPU. I’m not some YTer so you’ll only get the Unigine Superposition benchmark with basically irrelevant OpenGL (I know of no nifty Vulkan benchmark like this yet) for Linux PC gaming.
That’s rad! My old Titan X has it’s stronger side in other features but managed only a total result of 3055 without over-clocking on this benchmark.
I’ve not much gaming experience with it yet. I just made sure that Valheim (beta) and X4 Foundations works fine with it. There seems to be some sound issue with Discord + Fullscreen that I found so far but I solved this by switching to windowed mode on the games seeing no difference in FPS.
The one notable issue I have compared with NVIDIA is that I have to set the environment variable DRI_PRIME=1 or games will pick up the integrated GPU of the i5-8600K. This is probably because I’ve a display connected to it as well so it’s active. Going to play with this a little until I get the idea. Will need some adapters first tho 😅
Update: Just as guessed. Once I had all my adapters in place the integrated GPU was not needed any more and does no longer show up. No need to use DRI_PRIME=1 for each 3D application any more.
“Releases for PC”. Oh we Linux gamers know this phrase well. So it seems that #GamingOnLinux is taking another approach now instead of the usual “PC is not Windows”. Liam changed the wording on the news slightly:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/06/beyond-a-steel-sky-to-release-for-linux-pc-during-july
I like that approach and I shall also use “Linux PC” in the future. And not just #Linux for my #LinuxGaming.
Things were going smooth for a while. The pirates didn’t stop harassing my ships so I decided for drastic action. We slacked their station in the system.
That sure put a damper on their actions in the sectors nearby. Surviving ships were hunted down, boarded and taken over. It was glorious. The fleet was unstoppable for a while and with each carefully picked battle it grew.
Gate duty helped to train the fleet further and a lot of sweet loot to improve and modify ships further could be collected.
The highlight was two Xenon K jumping into the sector to be annihilated by my fleet of two destroyers, plenty of small fighters and an auxiliary ship used as bullet sponge.
This was when I decided to contact the Split while extending my mining business all over the galaxy big time. I started with a bad reputation towards Split – that’s kinda default for most races in the X4 universe – so I had a hard time to make them like me… somewhat. This was mostly achieved by destroying enemy ships near to their stations.
Meanwhile I bought several Magnetar mining ships so keep the needed raw materials on my prospering stations coming. Everything was going nicely and I decided to claim the sector Heretics End.
While I was busy building my stations to do so my new not-exactly-enemies decided to go to battle in freakin Argon Prime. Four Rattle Snake destroyers went basically unchallenged into the Argon heart and took out the Wharf. I didn’t want to interference since I just made not-exactly-enemy with the Split. From here it went downhill fast. Almost all of Argon Prime was wiped out – and I had bought most of my ships there. This! Hurt! Business!
I had not much time to mourn though. While I was busy with my new stations in Heretics End I was ended by a very surprising Xenon attack myself. First two more K ships showed up that I hardly managed to destroy – especially since most of my fleet was busy rescuing some Teladi trading station from another K.
While I was busy counting my losses _it_ showed up. The worst nightmare X4 has to offer: The Xenon Branch 9 Destroyer I entered the sector and all I had to offer were two half built stations, some Interceptors and my badly damaged Argon Behemoth destroyer.
I tried to keep my distance while waiting for my fleet to arrive. This worked for a while but it eventually was going to destroy my station so I tried to get into it’s blind spot. That was my last stand. Out of mines and turrets, low on interceptors and badly damaged my destroyer went down with me on the bridge.
I accept this glorious defeat – for now 😀
I wonder for a suited format for a series of log entries for my X4 adventures. Mayhap I should simply edit and append as the story [of my sandbox] unfolds.
Spent most of the day hunting pirates that seem to develop a taste for my ships. The salvaged Cerberus Vanguard is a huge help with this and whenever a pirate surrenders my own support fleet of Minotaur grows. Did I mention that I just love the design of this ship? It’s such a great all-round asset that can even haul some cargo on occasion or act as small carrier.
I also stumbled over another really tiny vault. Took some time to unlock all it’s secrets but I’m starting to get the hang of it.
Talking about raiding I had some notable encounters as well. A Raider tried to steal from the current head quarter. That was a mighty stupid idea and the Raider was toast before I even got close to it.
And another had the nerve to attack my medium freighters during their duty of making profit. When I finally had enough I called in the fleet and together we started a boarding operation. That was a long and ugly fight mostly because due to a bunch of Xen fighters trashing our party. Lost one small heavy fighter and 45 marines but in the end the ship was ours. Good thing the Cerberus brought a repair drone along to fix the busted engines, by the way.
I also identified a choking point in Napileos’ Fortune VI where a lot of the pirate traffic seems to originate. It’s an empty and unclaimed sector so I started building an Administrative Center here hoping to get this pest under control.
I wonder if it makes sense to start more stations here, because a lot of other huge stations are within 4 sectors of this – the typical maximum distance for auto traders to go – and a lot of traffic is passing through this already.
Oh yeah – and I finally got all the parts to assemble the SINZA device. It’s IMHO not really obvious that it simply activated with Shift+4 because I tried to install it as modification or ship drive first.
diving back in
So… this is how I get custom logos into X4 on Linux. In my case (GoG version) it was ~/.config/EgoSoft/X4/logos but otherwise it worked like a charm.
![T2X Shadows Of The Metal Age main menu [run via Wine]](https://beko.famkos.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/gnome-shell-screenshot-XESZK0.png)
Good memories 😀 Nice to see I’m not the only nutter who played T2X on #linux
https://parasurv.neocities.org/20200401-how-to-install-t2x-thief2-linux.html
File: /home/beko/.thief2/drive_c/Thief2/t2x/
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 97fh/2431d Inode: 127271738 Links: 14
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 1000/ beko) Gid: ( 1000/ beko)
Context: system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0
Access: 2020-05-25 17:42:23.679421134 +0200
Modify: 2012-04-27 23:13:23.844169998 +0200
According to https://beko.famkos.net/2012/04/28/thief-ii-the-metal-age/ I even wrote a tutorial on this at http://wiki.linuxgaming.de/index.php/Thief_II – and I should really syndicate this back. I’ve a bad feeling this won’t be much longer around.
I played the visual novel game Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. I admit I didn’t even look up the details before when I got all three parts dead cheap as a bundle. I’ve a very faint memory of reading the book/s but that’s all. It looked like a decent point-and-click adventure available for #Linux and the idea was to play it via Steam Link in the living room with the kids around. Hint: Don’t do that.
The story is an emotional roller-coaster not shy of splattering blood all over the scene. There are dramatic moments where decisions have to be made [in time] but also peaceful chapters and fun moments. Some have to be spotted and can be missed. The story builds up slowly based on character development and decisions made. Or so it feels. All strings come together in the end and some scenes may change in detail but the overall outcome is probably the same. I’d have to read up on this or do another play-through to be sure though.
It’s not a difficult game. There are no riddles (minigames) to be solved. The only minigame included is some sort of timing game (“quick action”) where one has to click at the right moment. That was mostly annoying but mercifully simply reset the scene when it really mattered so one could try again.
The character style may be an issue for some. Animations are not very smooth and there seems to be no lip sync. Sometimes the animations don’t fire at all. The audio however is very good and makes up for this. Music and scenery are awesome. A lot of research went into this, unlike most #mediaeval games, and the depiction of 12th century England looks adequate [to me]. Since this is a hobby of mine I’m really thrown off if this does not match up in games [or movies]. I also catched the vibe of architectural love for cathedrals that I can relate to. While it’s timberframed buildings for me I can certainly understand the fascination. I visited Guédelon some years ago after all 😉
So if you like #mediaeval stories for your #linuxgaming do yourself a favour and get this game. It’s worth every penny.
I checked some old #backup disks of mine and found to my utmost joy a copy of my former #ut2003 installation. Well, #linuxgaming is hard because who can support 500 distributions, right? How comes this just works in 2020 on #Fedora 31? 😀
Liam Dawe (gamingonlinux.com)Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order are celebrating Cities: Skylines, as it's coming up for the five year mark since it took the city-building world by storm. What a storm it was too, not much can really come close to just how fun Cities: Skylines actually is. Frankly, it's become the definitive ...
Cities Skylines is a very special game. I sunk way too many hours into this and still enjoy it on occasion.
There’s a nifty plugin that allows to overlay a png image with transparency so one could hobble together a map with imported heights data from e.g. NASA and overlay it with streets, rivers and train tracks from e.g. Google Maps.
This results in recreation of real cities within the engine bringing the hardware to it’s limits.
There are also hundreds of downloadable assets in the workshop.