This Week In Veloren 162

This week, we hear about a bug in Airshipper. We also explore some of the difficulties of running Veloren on the Steam Deck.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Sam, @Dr.Dystopia, @Christof, @xMAC94x, @Isee, @Pfau, @DaforLynx, @imbris, @zesterer, @Slipped, and @ninefox!

@Isse has been working on creating new rocks that will be scattered across the world.

Airshipper 0.7.0 release

We've released a new Airshipper version that makes launching Veloren even better:

• Changelog is rendered
• Ability to specify ENV variables in airshipper.
• Heavy under the hood maintenance to improve in the future.

ACTION REQUIRED: Please upgrade ASAP as the old Airshipper 0.6 will no longer work in a few days. You can read the release notes here

Airshipper fixes by @xMAC94x

This week we had a silent bug at Airshipper which was seen during some testing. Our GitLab jobs reached the 2,147,483,647 barrier. That is a common number for computer engineers, for example, until 2014 it wasn't possible for a YouTube video to get more than this number of views.

Back then google faced a similar issue than we faced, if a video would get more than this number of views, it would overflow the possible 32-bit number range and would be -2,147,483,648. Luckily neither YouTube nor Veloren faced an outage. We were able to patch a version overnight before the weekly Thursday release by increasing the number to 64-bit. Our new limit is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, roughly the number of sand grains on earth.

We're also preparing for better multi-architecture and multi-channel support. In the future, it will be possible to use Airshipper to download different versions of Veloren and also historic versions. The groundwork for this feature has been made and the feature will probably come within the next weeks.

Veloren on Steam Deck by @AngelOnFira

Last week, I got my Steam Deck in! One of the first things I wanted to try was running Veloren on it, and seeing what the process of getting into the game was.

Veloren isn't on Steam (yet), but the Steam Deck does have a cool feature where you can add applications from the desktop mode. And since Steam OS runs on Arch Linux, the process of installing Veloren isn't so difficult. In the desktop mode of the deck, I was able to go to the software store and find it without too much difficulty.

However, after I got the game installed, there were many issues that arose that would prevent people from playing the game with ease. First off, it seems that the flatpak version of the game doesn't allow permissions for controller input to work. We had to download Airshipper manually and launch the game through it outside of the flatpak version.

Then, it tends to run alright. The controller maps pretty nicely to the inputs of the game, however, there are interactions that it's much more difficult to achieve on the Deck. Either the UX can't be navigated easily enough, or it's not clear how to achieve something.

We mostly saw around 60fps while playing, although in multiplayer on the main server, we experienced closer to 40fps, and some issues with networking. Although this could also be because I'm located in North America, and the server in Germany.

If you want to see more about the problems, you can check out the tracking issue and the notes doc. Moving forward, we want to explore how to create a more clear UI/UX for controller-first experiences. We also want to explore what graphics settings might be best for this hardware, since it could be standardized quite easily.