Steam Deck

Fallout 4 just got updated with a "next-gen" update that got the game Steam Deck verified, fixed bugs, and added some new content.

However one of the ways they got the game verified was by disabling the game's launcher by default, the same launcher that is the only way to change graphical settings.

You can re-enable the launcher by changing your steam launch settings to SteamDeck=0 %command%

• Fixed an issue causing no sound output in games that open and close audio devices quickly like Super Blood Hockey
• Stability and security improvements

This combines updates .18 and .19 from the beta channel. Valve is usually more specific about what "stability and security" fixes include. Between being oddly non+specific and the fact that they pushed this update out as quickly as they did, I have a suspicion they were fixing a significant security issue. So probably best to update as soon as you're able.

The sound fix will be nice for affected games as well. I know Dishonored 2 would lose audio after the deck went to sleep, and that's fixed now. I can't confirm if it was actually this patch that fixed it though, but it's a great fix to have regardless.

Here's the official patch notes

There's a New Startup Animation on the Points Shop - Dead Island 2

Sometimes I hit an npc so hard with the gorilla arms their body deforms, and the game slows to a crawl. When this happens, I have to exit the game completely. When I get to the main menu of my deck it runs fine but putting it to sleep doesn't work, it just black screens, like its struggling to get caught up from the frame drop in the game. Any idea what's happening?

I was browsing the Decky store and came across the following new plugins:

• MagicBlack - Turns your whole screen black with a convenient hotkey press. On OLED models this will turn off all the screen pixels, letting you effectively turn the screen off for downloads and other uses. A different plugin called Reshade Deck has been working on similar functionality through adding screensavers to it's plugin, but I'm not sure if that's made it to the stable plugin version yet.

• IsThereAnyDeal - when browsing Steam games on the deck, will check IsThereAnyDeal and show you the lowest price at the bottom of the screen.

• Brightness Bar - when turning the brightness up and down by using the `STEAM/QAM + LS/RS up/down' shortcuts, this will display a bar to show what the brightness level is. Looks just like the volume bar shown when changing the volume, and feels like something that should have already been part of the UI.

To view decky plugins from desktop, you can view the stable plugins here and testing plugins here. If you specifically want to find the github page for a specific plugin (for more details, bug report, etc) go to this page and click on the specific plugin you want.

I found MoonDeck while perusing the Decky plugin store and it's absolutely awesome. I've had Moonlight and Sunshine set up for a while because Steam streaming is very inconsistent between Deck and Linux, but I didn't use it often because it's a pain setting up launchers in Sunshine for each individual game. MoonDeck takes the hassle out of that completely, and I find myself streaming GPU-intensive games to my living room much more often nowadays.

I highly recommend it!

Onboard is old news.

If you want to run Steam's keyboard in your own Linux distribution on Wayland you need to have ibus running.

/usr/bin/ibus-daemon -d -r --panel=disable --emoji-extension=disable

Maybe you can also set some env variables to make it appear automatically. I'll have to test how that clashes with KDE's own virtual keyboard handling.

These are the variables I found:

# Set input method modules for Qt/GTK that will show the Steam keyboard
export QT_IM_MODULE=steam
export GTK_IM_MODULE=Steam

For more goodies look in /usr/bin/gamescope-session. It starts steam with everything needed to work on the Deck.

• Fixed an issue causing no sound output in games that open and close audio devices quickly like Super Blood Hockey.
• Stability and security improvements.

Pretty short list, although I've run into some games with audio output cutting off, so if this fixes it I would be pretty happy with it.

There is also a recent Steam Client Beta update:

• Fixed gamepad controls intermittently not working in store browser
• Fixed crash when playing back certain media in Steam music player
• Fixed some causes of steamwebhelper crashes

Does anyone have recommendations for games that I as an adult would enjoy playing but my 3 year old could watch. So games that don't have or you can avoid violence while playing. I already have Stardew Valley for example.

The Refurbished Steam Deck LCD models are back in stock and extremely cheap! In case you don't want to click on our article, here are the prices:

64GB - $279

256GB - $319

512GB - $359

I am still in the process of ironing out how I want my control scheme, but when looking for a web browser to run in Gaming Mode on my Steam Deck that worked well (Firefox was being funky when run in Gaming Mode/Big Picture) I experimented a little bit with Qutebrowser.

https://qutebrowser.org/doc/quickstart.html Edit figured out how to share steam controller profiles, it is under the gear icon -> layout details, here is my draft vim/qutebrowser profile, try it out and let me know what you think!

steam://controllerconfig/2919876185/3227309282

Qutebrowser is downloadable from the Discover package manager in Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck (then find Qutebrowser in start menu ->right click add to steam). Qutebrowser is designed for a linux window manager like I3 where you don't really use a mouse much, everything in Qutebrowser is meant to be navigated with keyboard commands, no mouse required in the style of Vim keyboard commands. lt also prioritizes using screen real estate efficiently which is a boon for the Steam Deck. Like Vim, Qutebrowser has modes, an input mode (entered by pressing the i key) where you can enter text normally and a navigation mode (entered by pressing escape) that you use the keyboard letters to navigate and input web browser commands. In my control scheme you simply press the menu button to toggle between input and navigation modes.

While this might initially seem like the last software on the planet you would want to try to adapt to using with the Steam Deck's onboard controls, the wisdom of Vim-style keybindings mean that almost every important function in the software is kept to the letters on the main keyboard, i.e. a-z. We can build a nice control scheme with the idea of mapping all the web browser controls to the steam deck while simultaneously mapping letters a-z to the steam deck....

1. The hjkl keys as up/down left/right navigation in vim naturally map to the left joystick, holding shift (long press R1 bumper) and hitting these keys navigates to previous page/next page/tab to the left/tab to the right

2. the entire top row of letters on the keyboard can be assigned to a touch menu on the left trackpad and the entire third row of letters can be assigned to a touch menu on the right trackpad.

3. The shift key can be mapped to long pressing the R1 bumper.

4. That leaves 5 letters remaining, put f aside and map a s d g to the back buttons of the steam deck. Backspace maps naturally to the x facebutton on the steam deck, the a facebutton to Enter and the b facebutton to Spacebar.

5. Finally, the last letter f can be mapped to the y facebutton on the Steam Deck. In qutebrowser f is an important key as it prompts what are called hints. When you press f you see something like this....

If you input a sequence of keys shown, Qutebrowser will navigate the cursor to that spot and left click. The really nice accident of this Steam Deck control scheme is that Qutebrowser by default only uses letters that are mapped to physical buttons on the Steam Deck (hjkl asdf and g) in this Steam Controller configuration.

With f bound to the y facebutton on the Steam Deck, it is natural to bind a similar command / that allows to search on the page (bound to long pressing the y facebutton).

Clicking the leftstick inputs o which opens up the prompt to navigate to a url, clicking the right stick inputs : which is used to access Qutebrowsers advanced commands and settings.

The thing about running Qutebrowser in Gaming Mode is that you can use a separate control scheme in Steam designed exclusively for using Qutebrowser. Obviously, inputting bulk text with the touchscreen keyboard is going to be faster, but I think this control configuration is worth exploring since the modal nature of Vim style keyboard commands reduces the amount of necessary keybindings to fully utilize and navigate a web browser by a huge amount. The left joystick being a good fit for hjkl is the icing on the cake!

cross-posted from: https://swg-empire.de/post/842090

Finally the Onboard on screen keyboard works on Wayland

This is too great not to share. Wayland devs hate this trick! I'll copy what I did from the bug report.

As a workaround you can use https://github.com/Supreeeme/extest to make Onboard work. Compile it as a 64 bit library and launch onboard with

env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libextest.so onboard

If you want to use it with KDE you can add

X-KDE-Wayland-VirtualKeyboard=true

to its desktop-file.

I used kwin rules to get rid of window decorations and have it always on top without stealing focus. If someone knows how to make all other windows smaller when it's active that would be great.

Only problem remaining is that sometimes the keys get stuck on touch input. At least on my Steam Deck on OpenSUSE.

We got the chance to test the Hades 2 Technical Test, so we went ahead to see how it runs on both the Steam Deck OLED and LCD models. And it runs extremely well on both!

No Rest for the Wicked is an upcoming ARPG from the devs behind the Ori games. From what I understand, it focuses on a slower more methodical play style than other ARPGs like Diablo.

Moon Studios co-founder Gennadiy Korol said on Xwitter that we can expect around "30-40fps" on the Steam Deck, depending on the quality settings. There are some dips to "20-25fps" and some cinematics might make that number "dip more". But thanks to their "Game Simulation", the game runs at a locked 60fps, so "the game input for the precision combat remains super responsive!". Korol goes on to say that this info isn't "official-official" yet and that they'll continue to work on performance over time.

"Image quality, performance dips and memory will be further improved as we will be patching and improving the game in the future. I really love how this game feels with Deck's locked 40fps screen and our 60fps game simulation and responsive input. So hopefully we'll be able to get to that locked 40fps target sometime after launch."

Here's the game's steam page, it launches in early access roughly 2 hours after this post.

Edit: early impressions for the game are out, and performance is much worse than how it was portrayed. I would recommend waiting for further optimization and fixes before picking it up unless you play to play on a much beefier PC.

Based on the Very Low preset, which looks at an average of 30 FPS with 1280x720 resolution, we are looking at an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 CPU, Nvidia GTX 960, 8gb RAM, and 75GB of hard drive space.

...

For reference, Street Fighter 6 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth have similar minimum requirements, and both play exceptionally well on the Steam Deck, so that's a huge boost to confidence!

I'm interested in hearing both about if you still use the default carrying case that comes with the deck, and if you use any kind of protective clip-on case such as the Killswitch, JSAUX Modcase, or other.

I have reinstalled the game on my Steam Deck, only to notice all images in the database have been removed!

I have read absolutely no news on this, and looking it up only the original takedown for the Pokemon Switch games come up and I even remember then still being up after those were removed.

When did this happen? This is a PC game!

Any program can be added to steam by putting the Steam Deck into Desktop Mode (hold power button and select Desktop Mode), finding the app in the start menu Right clicking and selecting "add to steam" from the menu. Remember the "game" added to steam will have its own separate controller profile, choose keyboard and mouse template for desktop programs and adjust as needed.

Kdenlive is a video editor that can be downloaded by opening the Discover package manager in desktop mode and selecting to install the program.

Why do this? Well, with Decky Loader plugin Decky Recorder you can record clips of gameplay in Gaming Mode with the Steam Deck. The default file location is /home/deck/Videos/. There isn't necessarily an easy way to view videos in Gaming Mode on the Steam Deck however, which means the next step of reviewing the footage you took while playing the game requires you to exit into Desktop Mode and open a video player like VNC.

Fine, but.. I actually think I like this workflow better, add Kdenlive to steam so you can launch it in Gaming Mode and then create a layout inside Kdenlive (I called it "browse" in demo video) that just has the "media browser", "clip monitor" and "transport" selected. This is your video player to review the clips you record, now you can switch to the "editing" layout (layouts are in top right of screen in Kdenlive) and directly transition to video editing without ever leaving Gaming Mode.

This video is a (clumsy) demonstration of using Kdenlive in Gaming Mode to make a video.

almost 50% better frame rates, which made playing at 90 FPS throughout the game possible on low settings and playing at Ultra quality settings at 30 FPS a possibility as well.

The game also uses less power now while running at a higher frame rate.

Controller experience is also reportedly a lot better:

The gamepad [changes] are fantastic and allow you to use the inventory menu and others much more easily, making playing on the Steam Deck 10x better.

I keep hearing that the OLED version is much better not only screenwise, but also the overall experience. Is it wort paying double the price (second handed)?

Back in the day, as a kid, there was a free shareware game that I played an obnoxious amount of times: Graal. Not the shitty "Graal classic" we have today, (it's a shell of its former self), but the original Graal 1.4.0; I searched EVERYWHERE and I couldn't even get a blip more than old forums about the game reminiscing about the "good old days". It's widely believed that Stefan wiped the OG versions of Graal from the map, but he didn't. But not only have I found it, I've found nearly all the player made creations for it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180312164234/http://nekoroy.com/graal/index.html

The site is long since abandoned it seems, but it has EVERYTHING for the classic graal, from clients to server backups to player made levels, etc, and what's more I actually got the 1.4.0 client running nearly perfect on my steam deck. This, for me at least, is my holy grail. I have a lot of nostalgia for this old game from before it got destroyed for the shitty "new" version we have today, and with it a lot of memories flooding back to me. Probably doesn't seem like much because hardly anyone knows or cares about the original Graal, but for me, it's huge, and I just wanted to share I guess.