supersquirrel
@supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Men of War II will be online-only at launch but an offline mode is in development 3 days ago:
Bad game developers!
prods them with stick
Bad game developers!!!
two sharp prods with the stick
Y’all better not ruin Men Of War 2 for me.
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 5 days ago:
Thanks for linking that list!
Also
Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Master
Oh my gosh this looks fun I never would have thought of that!
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
Every game added to your steam deck’s steam library (whether it is an official steam game or simply a shortcut to a game you installed some other way and are just linking to steam (right click on game or application in desktop mode and click “add to steam”)) has a set of controller profiles associated with it. Your steam deck starts off with some basic templates for steam deck onboard control schemes like Gamepad Layout or WASD and Mouse Layout that map the onboard steam deck controls to what most defaults are for that type of software or game.
You can search for community layouts very easily in the steam deck’s controller menu, and you can go into the settings and start changing things by simply opening up the controller layout menu and clicking edit layout. You have control over all of the buttons and inputs on the steam deck and there is a simple menu system that allows you to walk through settings for everything on your deck (buttons, joysticks, touchpads, triggers etc…).
It might seem overwhelming at first, but the good thing is that manyyyyy popular games already have controller mappings that a steam deck user in the community uploaded to steam. Just go into the community layouts tab and browse a couple steam deck layouts, try them out quick and pick the one that feels most intuitive to you and then just go. Later down the road you can get your hands dirty and tweak the little things if you want (and I promise it really isn’t that overwhelming).
The starting controller layout templates can’t be deleted/written over, so you don’t need to worry about messing anything up either, you can always just start again from the very decent templates and defaults.
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
I have played this one a little bit on the Steam Deck and I really liked it too! The gameplay is immediately intuitive and fun and the 2v2 mode looks like it would be a blast with the right friends.
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
Are you playing it with the onboard controls? Do you have any recommendations for making it feel better?
I want to get into Mindustry but the basic movement controls of the ship just don’t feel inspired to me in the base game at least with the starting ship. I mean it makes sense, the focus is more on tower defense and automation, but is there a modpack or something that focuses the gameplay a bit more on the ship movement and combat?
Do you have any other advice for playing Mindustry on the Steam Deck? Which kinds of levels are best to start with and what kind of control scheme do you like?
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
Picked up warhammer Boltgun during the fps sale. Never been into warhammer or played this style of game before but loving it so far.
a mysterious trench coated figure strafe jumps out of the alley way so fast you can barely catch a glimpse of them before they shoot a rocket at their feet and launch over your head. Before you can react they are gone.
Wait! it looks like something fell out of their coat when they leaped by!
On the ground is a semi-intact cd-rom jewel case with video game artwork showing some unreal tournament-like ripoff game you have never heard of with the title Xonotic
Do you:
a) immediately go home and install Xonotic on your Steam Deck
or
b) attempt to strafe jump after the mysterious figure
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
How does this game compare to the more recent Steam World games?
Is Steam World: Heist a procedurally generated roguelike or a singleplayer game with a specific constructed sequence of levels?
It looks really good, I have heard good things about most of the Steam World games I just have never actually given one a try.
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
I’ve been salty over it ever since (around a week now)
Sounds like you have been rather unsalty landlubber!!!
but seriously fuck that ughh
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 5 days ago:
I am honestly incredibly impressed with the show so far. My big question was how the power armor/steel brotherhood were going to be handled because there is a similar risk to warhammer 40k with the space marines or stormtroopers in star wars were the baddy fascist guys are the cool looking ones that look righteous so people begin to casually associate with that imagery… which I don’t think is bad in a vacuum I just think there is a responsibility in 2024 for artists to not make the system of fascism and conservative violent extremism look sexy lol.
There was a big risk of a bunch of business execs looking at the fallout pilot and saying “that t-60 power suit looks cool, make those guys the main characters/good guys” and the fallout writers would be left saying “but… om… I know they look cool but…” and the business executives would just start impatiently tapping their pencil while they wait for everyone to shut up hell up so they can go back to their yacht.
But nah, it is good and it is subversive so far in exactly the ways it should be. I am not a huge fallout video game fan (though I acknowledge the fallout series is undeniably a massive and well loved series in gaming, and for good reason) but I imagine fallout video game fans must be loosing their fucking minds right now with how much better the show is than it had any right to be in the way only someone who has spent decades as a fan of a game series (or comic book, or book, or whatever equivalent) could possibly appreciate.
- Comment on Proton 9.0-1 released with expanded game support for Steam Deck / Linux 5 days ago:
Lets not get so caught up in the numbers! (I am saying this as much to myself as to you)
There really isn’t much that can be done to change the numbers significantly in the near term, growth is basically a function of how many of us invest genuine energy into helping people we think might actually try linux get over the initial reluctancy and learning curve, and if done right that is going to be a slow process of interpersonal connections and self help guides people seek out after deciding to really give it a go.
What matters is how possible it is when the next major upheaval in operating systems and consumer’s tolerance of their bullshit really happens in force and that it is finally enough for a good chunk of users to cave off and say “fuck it, I really am going to linux this time”. We can’t precipitate that tipping point, we shouldn’t try to necessarily in my opinion (other than pushing for structural adoption of linux like say on school computers) because it will just feel forced, but what we can do is make the tools work well, we can experiment and tweak and keep making this place better and better so that when that opportunity comes no matter how close or far it is, the tipping point will engage like the transmission on an extremely expensive luxury car, it will just be a smooooottth departure and it will leave corporate tech companies reeling how fast they loose their incredibly unbalanced power over our digital lives.
- Comment on Junk Store - a wonderful Decky Plugin that lets you install Epic Store games easily from gaming mode 5 days ago:
The plugin mentions GOG support, but it’s not live yet. Also the junk store has an open plugins system that will hopefully allow other game libraries to all be accessed this way as well.
Oh hell yeah, the Steam Deck is going to absolutely explode in usage longterm if there is a decent system for smoothly integrating other store’s games into the Steam Deck library. I know that this is not in the best business interests of Valve according to Big Tech Company Brain, but long term what will ensure the Steam Deck totally upends pc gaming and gaming in general is how nice is the experience of installing and playing non-steam games in actual practice?. The more difficult and annoying it is, the more the Steam Deck remains a cool but niche idea.
- Comment on Top 10(+) Racing Games on Steam Deck 5 days ago:
And going off the with supersquirrel, there are a lot of other types of driving games that work well. (Spintires, American/Euro Truck Simulator, City Car Driving, and Pure Rock Crawling.)
Don’t forget Snowrunner, the game where instead of racing against time you race against mud.
- Comment on Top 10(+) Racing Games on Steam Deck 5 days ago:
What I love about horizon chase turbo is that it celebrates old school racing games made during a time that it was simply impossible to create a realistic driving physics engine. Horizon Chase recognizes this genre of arcade racing for how it should be seen from the perspective of modern driving physics engines, not as a curious but obsolete historical oddity but as an expression of what racing games can be outside of a narrow continuum with racing sims on one end and GTA or Forza style arcade style racing games on the other… that are mainly focused on sanding off the rough edges of the game mechanics implications of driving sim physics rather than treating the departure from semi-realistic physics as a creative opportunity.
(I suppose there are cart racers but they arent really concerned with evolving the racing genre for the most part)
- Comment on Top 10(+) Racing Games on Steam Deck 5 days ago:
If you want a fast car quick, the mini cooper is cheap and even with a small engine it will go veryyyy fast.
If you want to drive fast, take only urgent taxi jobs or deliver pizzas, though don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that you can’t treat every single job in Motor Town like it is an old episode of Top Gear and you have to accomplish it as quickly and chaotically as possible.
- Comment on Top 10(+) Racing Games on Steam Deck 5 days ago:
Well it isn’t a racing game but I don’t really get latched onto traditional racing games around a handful of tracks where you repeat the same course over and over again.
I like open world games where I can drive around doing missions or just cruising (think driving around in GTA vibes) and thus Motor Town is by far my favorite singleplayer and multiplayer racing game currently.
…steampowered.com/…/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/
The tire physics make throwing a massive engine in a car and ripping power slides at 80 mph a blast. The driving just feels damn good, the only games that beat it are BeamNG and maybe some of the bigger racing games like Assetto Corsa or iRacing but I don’t know I haven’t played those because in those games I can’t buy a box truck, throw a v12 in it and drive around like a mad man delivering packages, then abruptly decide to go for chill vibes and do autopilot deliveries with my 18 wheeler, then decide to some urgent taxi jobs in my 4 door sports cars…
Motor Town has a the brilliant autopilot feature you can toggle on and off whenever you want which makes this the perfect driving game to play on a mobile gaming device like the deck because you can walk away or put the deck down for a second by just putting your vehicle into autopilot and treating the game more like an “idle clicker” game than a game that requires your constant focus.
No extensive destruction modeling in Motor Town, your vehicle definitely suffers damage in terms of performance being impacted from crashes but it doesn’t deform the vehicle like the detailed simulations of BeamNG or Wreckfest. That isn’t that important to me actually though.
Speaking of car crashes, Rigs Of Rods I think deserves a mention here too especialllly since it is open source!!. Yes it is old but it is still being actively developed (albeit at a slow pace) and that age makes it run fantastic on the Steam Deck. I wouldn’t suggest Rigs Of Rods as a replacement for the other racing games suggested in this video, but the sandboxy vibes of Rigs Of Rods are ideal for a portable device like the Steam Deck where you might want to play a game that doesn’t require you to do anything but mindlessly smash cars into walls as fast as you can lol.
It also is worth mentioning, a whole lot of people have put a WHOLE lot of effort into making detailed cars for Rigs Of Rods. Apparently a decent amount of vehicles including stuff like Dakar rally style off-roading heavy duty trucks didn’t make it into BeamNG because of the conundrum of moving donated work to a monetized game.
- Comment on Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Deck 6 days ago:
This is ABSOLUTELY what I’ve wanted from the steam deck from the first minutes I got my first deck. Being able to work in the desktop mode without having to use the onscreen keyboard has been a fundamental limiting factor for me.
Same!
Case in point, I want to use the steam deck as a productivity device. I need a ‘generalized’ mapping of keys.
The point I was trying to make in a somewhat obtuse and convoluted fashion is that this is a generalist mapping of keys, especially if you don’t need a mouse. You can drop this same control scheme into qutebrowser… a normal text editor, emacs in evil mode, vim and any number of programs that either have factory inbuilt vim controls or have had vim style controls added by the community.
Obviously entering text is faster with a physical keyboard or even a touchscreen keyboard, but for general, low intensity text input this mapping is extremely easy to remember and you can pick it up quick especially if you have experience with vim and wasd controls.
- Comment on Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Deck 6 days ago:
Mate. If all you want is an echo chamber then don’t post on a message board. That is a blog post with the comments turned off.
There is a happy middle ground between the two where you can just block people that are interacting in a toxic way :)
- Comment on Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Deck 6 days ago:
Do you realize how it feels when I put this much work I put into explaining my particular keyboard mapping and creating a graphic and you jump into the post with the first response “kinda seems like it is missing the point” when it doesn’t really feel like you even read my post?
- Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Decklostpod.space ↗Submitted 6 days ago to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz | 11 comments
- Comment on Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
distrobox
Yes I agree in the vast majority of cases distrobox is the way to go, I made a short post on the “List Of useful tools” post that I might as quote here.
Here is a guide to installing and using distrobox on the Steam Deck. The usefulness of using distrobox is that distrobox sets up little mini environment you can install programs too that is outside the context of the immutable SteamOS operating system. Thus, after updates, software or setups you install in a distrobox environment will remain the same. Distrobox is more than just a simple bifurcation between the main SteamOS and a virtual environment, it provides tools to set up the ability to connect programs between the two for advanced setups (though you can ignore this stuff and just use the defaults).
What Distrobox does (quote) Guide For Installing Distrobox On The Steam Deck
github.com/89luca89/…/steamdeck_guide.md
Quckstart Guide
github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/…/README.md#qu…
Distrobox Guide Homepage
github.com/89luca89/distrobox/tree/main/docs#read…
note because distrobox is a process that can be run by command line, you could presumably launch distrobox in a terminal window in Gaming Mode and keep everything for that session within that steam Big Picture window no problem. I am gonna have to keep experimenting with this, I will update with progress.j
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
official oh heck yes! subscribed
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
Yeah I get that vibe, and yes it is definitely a bit intimidating at first but here is the thing.
The biggest shift in gaming right now by far is gyroscope aim input maturing into a serious control scheme in many different contexts (primarily mobile shooters like COD mobile and Farlight 84 that also confusingly have competitive and usable touchscreen claw setups for playing shooters that most pc gaming fans are utterly oblivious about and would confidently dismiss as a joke idea).
People are starting to realize gyroscope is amazing for shooters, but what almost nobody has put two in and two together about yet is that the same fine aim control problems controllers have with shooters, they have with real-time or even turn based strategy games with complex UIs. While gyroscope isn’t as fun to use in this context, it works just as well. A “flick” shot from the center of your screen to the build menu on the side to quickly up some flashes, stumpies and samsons, with a quick flick shot back to center screen to give a construction unit instructions is exactly the kind of mouse movement that Gyroscope excels at introducing mouse-like precision too once you get used to it.
I can definitely share a control scheme but BAR is already so brilliantly designed with every single damn command in the game being able to be shift clicked to make it into a series of tasks for a unit or factory… that you don’t honestly need to do much. It is basically just.
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What button do you want shift to be bound too? This should be comfortable and easy to press and shift clicking is at the core of BAR and TA.
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What button do you want gyroscope to be toggled on and off by? You don’t have to use gyro but I really recommend giving it a thorough go, if you hold your device comfortably than it will be still and thus you can just focus on the joysticks or trackpad and let your subconscious brain begin integrating gyro.
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Probably bind zoom in and zoom out to the bumpers on the deck, the normal WASD and mouse template for the Steam Deck comes with this binding as the default if I remember correctly.
Now, you can go so much farther than that obviously. For example I found a great BAR control scheme that looked like someone put a lot of care and time into it called “BAR perfecto” but it didn’t fit my conception of how I wanted things so I just started from scratch.
I hesitate to build up this crazy complicated control scheme and then recommend it though, because most potential fans I can poke and prod enough to try BAR on the deck probably feel the same as you. So honestly at this point I would rather point out that just those three choices/keybindings will get you to a point where you can genuinely play BAR and feel like the control scheme can actually work and feel good after a bit of adjustment time.
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- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
Honestly, if that is your jam hell yeah.
The point isn’t the joysticks, it’s the use of a gyroscope aim as a complement to whatever other input method you like. I vastly prefer the joysticks and I can attest to being able to play Xonotic at a fairly competitive level (I am NOT good but I can play Xonotic the way it is meant to be played with strafe jumping, quick weapon shots and immense dynamics of aim and movement). I imagine you can get that synergy with gyroscope and trackpads but I just haven’t personally seen it in action so I figured I would let someone else be the champion of that control scheme!
I love playing shooters with joysticks because I grew up playing Halo 1-3 on the Xbox as well as Call Of Duty and all the other controller shooters that came out in that era on Xbox. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t play a shooter with a mouse and keyboard, I just never had the money for a gaming computer and neither did my family. It is how I feel at home in a shooter, but it always frustrated me (like everyone else) that fine aim control is just shit with joysticks even though they are a blast to use (and then you have to layer a big dollop of auto-aim on to make controller shooters work). For me, gyroscope is like magic because it allows my subconscious to “fix” my joystick aim with the gyroscope and I don’t ever have to think about it except to remember how fun it is to do when I pull a flick shot with the vortex (rails) mainly using a gyroscope flick.
Also please try aiming devastator rockets with gyroscope aim, it is like realizing you have been petting cats and dogs with an oven mitt on your whole life and haven’t been getting the real experience.
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
Good bot!
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
Yeah I mean I would totally understand if people in the Xonotic community felt weird about this, you can already download Xonotic off of flathub in 5 seconds on the deck, but regardless in my opinion it would be perfect as a fun open source game that came default on a gaming device like the deck.
- Comment on What is your favorite Open Source Game on Steam Deck? 1 week ago:
Xonotic by far and away!
You might wonder how the hell you play one of the fastest Quake multiplayer derived shooters in existence using the joysticks on the Steam Deck (the answer is Gyroscope massively complements Joystick aiming once you get used to it). Check out my post on the Xonotic forums detailing the important bits of the control scheme.
forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=9846
I am dead serious the Steam Deck should just come preinstalled with Xonotic and a control scheme like this, it is brilliant and Xonotic is probably the most resource efficient 3D competitive multiplayer game in existence.
Of course I love the shit out of open source games and the communities that maintain and love them so there are gonna be a bunch.
Beyond All Reason
Beyond All Reason is the latest in over a decade of Total Annihilation inspired games made on the open source Spring Engine. Brilliant game and like the original Total Annihilation being able to hold shift and que up many commands as well as easily instruct units into formations makes playing BAR so much less of a headache than trying to micro the shit out of everything in a game like StarCraft. Also unlike StarCraft the fighters and bombers actually fly around like planes instead of being land units except they hover.
Really all you have to do to get the Steam Deck’s controls working well is bind a key to toggle gyroscope so you can use it for making your quick fiddly mouse movements with the joysticks perfectly precise and figure out what key you want to bind shift to in order to make queuing orders up for a unit easy to do.
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead taught me that in the apocalypse bicycles and slings (NOT slingshots) will be your two most useful tools. Or roller skates lol. Seriously though I love this game and the community around it from the bottom of my heart, what a stunning tour de force of an open world survival game. Check out the Sky Islands Mod if the main game doesn’t feel focused enough to you. Also please join the Lemmy community around Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, there is a decent amount of activity and it would be a perfect place to ask new questions as a newbie!
sopuli.xyz/c/cataclysmdda@lemmy.ml
I don’t have a control scheme for this one yet, but I have no doubt it will be easier to play this game on a Steam Deck than a normal laptop without the number pad (we can just use one of the joysticks!).
Rigs Of Rods An odd one, an old one, but it is an open source driving game with advanced physics. If the point of the Steam Deck is to play games in contexts that you otherwise would never have been able to, having a game you can mindlessly drive around and crash into things while watching how pretty and cool it looks is a no brainer. This game has years and years of updates and is a quasi-predecessor to BeamNG which is another superb game (though not as resource efficient I believe). It also actually has a more generalist, capable engine than BeamNG appears to (with vehicles being able to have fully articulating parts like cranes that interact with the world).
I really think this game will just keep chugging along doing it’s own thing long into the foreseeable future.
- Comment on Vampire Survivors gets a AAAA update with functional doors, a train and rail kart racing 1 week ago:
We used cinema quality assets and paid our artists 50k a year to make it all!
*Correction, we used AI ripping off cinema quality assets from artists who formerly had stable respectable career working for us but we have solved that problem!
We will sure miss those human artists, but in the pursuit of bigger and better we had to fire them all. We will probably just blame consumers for pirating too much or something when this plans massively fails.
It’ll be ok though since the investors in our company know that though this transition to AI will be difficult and there is a high chance it won’t work and will fail catastrophically, that in the end the value of programmers and artists in video game development will have been permanently devalued. A rising tide lifts all share holders :)
- Comment on A Solution To Web Browsing (in Qutebrowser) And Text Input Without Touchscreen Keyboard Or Mouse (piggybacking on Vim keybindings) 3 weeks ago:
How tf does this cute little browser that is meant to be used exclusively with the keyboard manage to be so usable on devices that do not even have a keyboard?
Yeah, it is a pretty funny quirk. Qutebrowser was obviously made with the complete intention of using a keyboard but because it commits to that with such laser focus it actually ends up being paradoxically much more flexible than it was designed to be.
When I sat down and thought about trying to map emacs commands to my steam deck, my brain just broke. How do you manage key chords? What letter keys do you prioritize easy access to? Every solution feels obtuse.
Whereas with Vim keybindings it all just kind of fell in to place in my mind after I assigned the left joystick to hjkl. The result is a control scheme that easily blows any other steam deck onboard control scheme for navigating a web browser and entering text, clear out of the water, especially when you use hints (f). I didn’t set out to do anything other than see what would happen if I tried out a silly gimmick, but the power of vim turned my fools errand into a slick control scheme that puts basically every other method of navigating a web browser and entering text with a gamepad to shame, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Steam…. None of their design teams can hold a candle to Vim I guess.
- Comment on A Solution To Web Browsing (in Qutebrowser) And Text Input Without Touchscreen Keyboard Or Mouse (piggybacking on Vim keybindings) 3 weeks ago:
Isn’t there something like this already builtin popup half keypads like I described? Not sure if this could be used. Wouldn’t it be basically perfect and what you/we need?
I think so but the integration with vim style controls for easy navigation and command input was a key reason I made this particular control scheme.
- Comment on A Solution To Web Browsing (in Qutebrowser) And Text Input Without Touchscreen Keyboard Or Mouse (piggybacking on Vim keybindings) 3 weeks ago:
Yeah that looks like it would be a drop in replacement for qutebrowser in this contex, that is what makes this hack work right? A roughly reasonable mapping of letters and commands for the Steam Deck that took a long time to memorize feels possible but in practice unlikely to be worth the effort for any particular individual program/workflow in isolation… but if you can memorize a simple mapping of 26 letters and 2-3 modifier keys and apply that single instance of memorization to an entire class of programs that support vim-style keyboard bindings than that memorization becomes an order of magnitude less tedious.