Siri

One step closer to having a portable version of my favourite kusoge white whale, Operation Darkness.

3 minutes ago, JoeK said:

I did the whole Resident Evil thing wrong and instead of the new remake (or indeed Viilage, which I’ve yet to play!) I picked up 5 and 6 for £6.

 

I’m not entirely sure I’ve made the right decision…

You're right. There's probably a load of spare RE codes floating around after that very silly Resident Evil humble bundle happened.

Alright, got to level 25 on Necro. I think I'm happy to call it there.

In all, I think I like it. Not to a fever pitch amount like Diablo 3 before it came out, but those were different times.

I'm glad that the itemisation is mostly a lot better than Diablo 3's core stat hunting wankery - there's actual affixes that give +1 to skills for one, and quite a few legendary mods do give some nice benefits early on. The lack of sets on launch might hurt, but it sounds like it's more a long tail thing, so fair enough.

Also, looks like some passives have a lot of impact - gaining essence on consuming corpses was a big QoL on corpse explosion in my time playing.

But most importantly, it just felt right to play. A bit slower than D3 and a lot slower than peak PoE, but combat had weight, played well on a controller and I felt compelled to keep playing.

And as mentioned, even on low, it looked gorgeous on the Steam Deck and generally held together at 40hz. And yes, I'm fully aware that the game's online only and playing on a portable doesn't make sense - I've used phone tethering to run PoE maps on a work lunch break, so I know what's up.

Unfortunately, I think one of the main reasons I jumped at Diablo 3 on launch because you could pick up a PC boxed game for cheap from retailers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that will no longer be the case after umpteen years. We'll see, I guess.

2 hours ago, Opinionated Ham Scarecrow said:

 

Well I guess this is what I'm doing now with my morning coffee.

FYI: This will only work with the very latest Xenia Canary, as it's brought a lot of Vulkan Changes that's made some games like this possible now (and RDR1, but that needs more parts implemented to get a framerate over 10-20fps) - I'm not sure if Emudeck is using that yet, so you might have to fuck around with it.

Also, Lost Odyssey is 30fps by default, so to get the 60/40hz stuff you'll need a patch for the game itself.

EDIT: here's a guide with a link to the emulator:

I don't refund often, but I think the only time I got refused a refund was when I wanted get rid of an unplayed copy of Gris after it came to humble bundle. Normally I'd be in my rights, but it was like three weeks after I bought it instead of the 14 days policy, so that's fair.

I do remember successfully refunding a WWE 2K game on the basis of 'It's not fun', though.

Xenia's coming along

As for controller-supported city builders, here's a list. If I was going to try one, It would be either Kingdoms and Castles or Tropico, but I'm not really one for the genre. I usually gravitate towards even simpler games than SNES Sim City, like Dorfromantik and Islanders.

3 minutes ago, footle said:

@SumireIt was server lag. The skeletons jumping every few frames behind me I saw yesterday wasn’t a problem this morning.

I think it's also server instancing, too, in rare occasions - when I got through the initial tutorial bit, I had that skeleton stutter in town until I went into another area that required loading. The animation corrected itself, and then when I went back into the overworld which is back where you can interact with others it was still fine.

Played a bit more, got a couple of legendary pieces now and it's nice to see some juicier suffixes. I'm still compelled to play it after an evening, which is a good sign compared to its contemporaries.

1 minute ago, Vimster said:

81gb for a demo? Jesus.

If you're on PC, you can lower it to 40gb by opting out of 4k textures. Which, well, is alright for the Steam Deck.

Speaking of the Deck - I followed some advice on Reddit and raised the max VRAM in the BIOS to the maximum (4gb), which seems to have resolved the crashing issues I had. At least, enough where I actually got a good couple of hours out of the game before signing out.

As for the game itself, it's.. okay. It looks lovely on the Deck even with everything on the low preset. Very wordy, so I'm not sure if I'll enjoy subsequent playthroughs with other characters. Necro is good fun, I quite like using the ranged reaper attack and then corpse exploding the rest of the pack. It does feel slow compared to D3 and even post-nerf Path of Exile, but I guess they're trying to emulate the grimdark of the first two diablo games in pace as well as theme.

I don't think it's sold me on the game yet like how Diablo 3 did with the jaunt to the skeleton king, but I might have a look when it's a bit more affordable.

Boo - played a bit more, game crashed again, look at queue - 140 mins this time.

I think I'll wait until tomorrow morning to play again - it's clear I'll have to fuck around with ProtonGE and video settings to get it running well, and I can't be doing that while it takes hours to get in. I can sit there watching YouTube while in the queue, but it's a waste of videogame time!

16 minutes ago, ontwofronts said:

I’ve finally picked up a dock and my 8bitdo controller is having one of those days, which will no doubt end up with it taking a flight shortly…

 

Ive a drawer full of PS4, Xbox controllers, will they be any good to me? If not, what is the go to controller of our hive mind?

I use a PS4 controller, it works great for me.

Regarding the 8bitdo controller though, have you tried the different modes? Starting it up while holding the button for xinput mode usually does it for me (on the SN30 Pro, it's start and either X or Y, can't remember which).

I also had a retrobit Saturn pad that freaks out with anything other than xinput, from testing. And that's wired.

Well, played a good ten minutes before I hard locked the Steam Deck and got back into an hour queue! Could be anything, though, it's a beta after all.

Started with Necro, I'm enjoying the Scythe skill a lot to help manage what your summons are killing - it's slow, but it has massive AoE. I also love how grimy the world is and the initial customisation of the character.

Alright, started up Diablo IV and it's in the queue.

100% GPU utilisation while in the queue even with desktop GPUs, though?

*Sets TDP to 3w so it's 99% of fuck all*

lol

2 minutes ago, Strafe said:

Diablo 4 isn’t on steam so I guess it’s a Battle.net exclusive. Did anyone get the beta going on deck and how easy/hard is it to do so?

I've installed it, but I haven't ran it yet. I have played other Blizzard games on the deck, though.

It shouldn't be hard by following any recent video guide - essentially, they all boil down to running the battle.net installer in proton, finding the files you installed and running the launcher, and then installing the game you want. As an extra thing, you can link to the game's launcher directly and making it share the same files as battle.net, but just having battle.net is enough.

3 minutes ago, ph0rce said:

I don't think I need the official dock, any recommendation for one of the third party ones please? I know there's been a variety sprinkled through the thread but I'm not sure if one is considered better than the others?

Generally that's the case - unless you're after something specific (like the M2 slot on that one JSAUX dock, or Displayport/Freesync on the Valve dock), they pretty much offer the same stuff on a sliding scale of features to price.

Just make sure it has a Gigabit Ethernet port and maybe a HDMI port with a 4k60fps signal, and you're probably good with whatever Amazon has a deal on at that moment in time. Even then, you might not need that stuff, either, which then that makes it incredibly inexpensive.

1 minute ago, thesnwmn said:

 

I assume it's the GraphicsPipelineLibrary. A piece of rendering tech that's designed, I believe, to reduce the shader compilation stutter for non-Steam games.

 

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/proton-ge-7-44-is-released/

Yep, that's it. It's been in Proton for a while (As part of DXVK, which handles DX9/10/11, but only affects DX11), but it couldn't be used on AMD hardware because neither the official (RADV) or Open Source (Mesa) drivers didn't have the Vulkan backend stuff to run it.

It's been added to both now and has been rolled out as part of SteamOS updates, but as it's still in testing phases you have to use a command to activate it (RADV_PERFTEST=gpl).

I haven't had success, though - I've been looking at the DX11 logs and it hasn't triggered enabling it while playing EGS games (which is where it's more beneficial, because they can't access a shader cache distribution like Steam offers). I'm wondering if the latest Mesa/RADV stuff was only implemented in a preview SteamOS update that I'm not on, but I don't want to fuck around with it until Diablo 4's beta weekend is finished. One less headache to worry about, if you dig.

Got myself ready to DDoS the Diablo 4 server with anyone else this afternoon - thankfully, found an old battle.net install and worked from there instead of trying to find where the fuck I put Diablo II Remastered and Immortal (which I really should, as they're *somewhere* in the billions of files between the SD card and the SSD).

Everyone including myself will likely shit on D4 not having server capacity for a test, but one thing I do appreciate is the game offering Ultra HD textures as a separate download. A 40gb download was much more manageable before I got to bed.

I also bothered to link up more of the games I had on the SD card - namely, THPS1&2. seems to work great, and it's dropping connection to the online services less now (and as a result tank the framerate), touch wood.

Still haven't got my head around enabling GPL, though. It'll have to wait until the D4 beta is over.

53 minutes ago, StumpyJohn said:

Grabbed Crafty Survivors and a couple of others before the end of the sale.  Can't see anything about it on deck, is there a way to get it running on it?

If it's something genuinely unknown, I'd just.. well, try and play it. If it doesn't work, maybe try Proton GE. And if that doesn't work, I'd probably refund it if it's old as fuck, or look at the discussions in the Steam forums for that specific game.

Speaking of which, here's a post from the developers themselves on their discussions page on Steam:

Quote

We test it a lot on our own Steam Deck and it's playing great on it.
It had a few performance issues in specific situations with a lot of ranged enemies, but the recent patch we made fixed that problem.

Morning Steam Deck shitposting instead of going to work on time:

Bothered to set up Heroic Launcher again. I'm impressed by the improvements made to the App itself - the one-touch add to Steam function with pulled artwork is great (although a bit redundant after finding it because of SteamGridDB), and it's nice to have proper controller support and it recognises my SD card storage right away.

I'm not entirely sure if I've put in the command correctly to enable GPL, but I did spend an hour trying to figure out how to get the EGS version of Sable past the title screen so I might be soured on working out the difference. Plays fine with lowered settings at 40fps, anyway. You could probably bump the settings up if you uncap the TDP, but I like a quiet Steam Deck and battery life, and 30fps always felt horrible on Sable after trying the demo on Xbox.

26 minutes ago, deerokus said:

Not had any problems, other than the whole system rebooting when I bought a game once. 

 

It's weird how bad the actual buying of games on the deck is.

Yep, and the whole browsing experience is bunk, too.

At least the phone app works again for payment - I ended up buying my Sale games via a web browser because PayPal was being a shit, but after that the app recognised my PayPal account again and let me buy games direct again.

It's no wonder official key stores became so prevalent (well, not really - I think it was more humble bundle, keys from physical games at the start of my PC journey always felt a cop-out back when broadband speeds were still crap)

15 minutes ago, deerokus said:

Install heroic launcher and this won't be a problem 

This does remind me to fuck around with the new version of SteamOS, as it does include the new pipeline stuff that improves shader stutter, which would be ideal for all the free shit on EGS that don't have access to shader cache downloads from the client.

Anybody had any problems with the new update? I've seen a couple of posts about suspend/resume being shagged on Reddit, but I don't know if that's universal or with OS modifications.

Oh man, Spec Ops: The Line is fantastic. While it's an FPS, The Darkness 2 was also a great shooter during that era.

I'm hoping to have a proper go on Alpha Protocol and Binary Domain after I'm done with.. well, everything else.

God, playing GTA IV feels like forever. In case anyone's wondering where I am in it:

6 hours ago, Stanley said:

It’s hard to recommend games I think because it runs everything! Just think about what you want to play and it’s likely you’ll be able one way or another. 

Yeah - one of the great successes this thing does is make relatively recent videogames have a portable version. It's kind of silly to say that I bought anything specific for this thing when I've generally redownloaded the games I've got just to play them at work or when I've got a spare moment in front of the TV.

Portable Tekken 7 is kinda sick, as is New Vegas and Cyberpunk.

But hey I might as well shill this again

6 minutes ago, Poet said:

I have some questions!

 

Are people buying 512Gb or larger SD cards nowadays? I know to go for an A2 and I'm happy redownloading things as and when I need to, but I'd like to keep the emulators and those games all together on the one card at the very least.

 

And, as regards setting up certain things (use cases: Steam obv, then all the emulators, Epic games, GOG and Itch.io as a starting point), I'm sure you fine people here have a go-to recommendation for a post or video for a decent concise guide for getting this stuff working easily - can anyone share their favourite?

- 512gb cards generally have the best ratio of space to price at the moment, 1tb cards are pricey. All comes down to how much you want to play at any one time, though. I'm an idiot who likes 100+ games in case I'm stranded on the motorway for ten minutes. Yes, minutes

- as for the installing stuff, I just search Reddit or YouTube and look for the latest article. As good as SteamDeckHQ and so on are as a baseline, it's still pretty much a state of flux and things may get easier/harder as time goes on, even after a year.

1 hour ago, Eighthours said:

Do you pretty much need a PC in order to make the experience of handling the 'back office' of this device better? I ask because I only have a Mac at home, and all the talk of fiddling with so many settings and sideloads and such, makes me think that doing anything beyond playing obviously compatible games would benefit hugely from a PC. I presume not everything is done on the device itself? I'm not a PC gamer at all, but the concept of the Steam Deck appeals!

Just to go along with the choir - everything I've done on the deck up to this point has been, for the most part, done on the deck itself without any hardware accessories.

This includes:

- installing and playing Steam Games

- installing and playing non-Steam PC games (including old ass PC CD-ROM and self-contained executables, like fan games and RPG Maker creations)

- installing and configuring power tools for emulation and extra add-ons (Emudeck, Decky Loader and ProtonUp, mainly)

- setting up streaming services and an ad-free TV mode for YouTube

- installing certain games in regards to Emulation (namely PS3 games because they have a funny-ass system of handling software)

The only things I recall doing outside of the Deck's ecosystem includes the following:

- moving emulated game files onto the SD card, as they were all on another computer anyway and I had to use the DVD drive to rip my PS2 games and prepackaged emulated collections (like the free Unibios and ROM with every DRM Free DotEmu NeoGeo port)

- moving one particularly big game install from desktop to SD card before the new network install feature became a thing, which I proceeded to fuck up and vowed not to do it again unless I was desperate.

So, I'm confident you'll be alright. Maybe buy a diddy bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo in case you want to type fast.

It's also quite fun that the games someone might really love on the Steam Deck are completely different to the games I love to play on the Steam Deck.