I've been doing most of this project on my work laptop because it has HDMI out and bluetooth and I don't have a machine new or nice enough at home to have these things. It has a NVidia graphics card and I've always been satisfied with the noveau drivers. Until today.
I finally had all 4 controllers working so I gave a 4 player race in Supertux Kart a whirl. It was painfully laggy. I haven't figured out how to print the framerate on screen but it was bad. The controls were all slow and gameplay would have been no fun. Good thing it was just a test.
So I had to go to proprietary drivers. Doesn't that break the whole goal of the FOGC?! Probably, but at least these are supported by the manufacturer, and aren't a break of any license agreement. Its a real shame, but OH! what a difference it made, suddenly everything is smoother frame rate is excellent, and the controls are super responsive.
What this really means is that when it comes to the time to buy hardware for this project, nvidia is a no-go, because it required proprietary software to have acceptable performance. I'll have to do some more research on what I should get, because I've never cared about graphics performance before and noveau has been more than sufficient. But I'll cross that bridge when it comes.
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Super Tux Kart
Super Tux Kart is possibly the best game to match the purpose of the FOGC. It's simple to use, has kid-friendly controls, good cartooney graphics, innocent play/story, and has local multiplayer mode for up to 4 people (more with LAN). The menus are all navigable using the controller and it has lots of options for various display sizes and resolutions. It is also in the ubuntu repositories so it's easily installable.
The only downsides are that it does have a single player mode that must be played to unlock certain things in multiplayer mode (though you can bypass it through editing a config file) and that the PS3 controller mapping wasn't very usable until I went and configured them all (which seems more an issue in the PS3 driver). I would like if it had an option for more controllers (TVs are large enough these days you could easily have 9 screens), and you have to have all the controllers connected to the computer before you start up the program, but most of these are pretty consistent with most games.
Now for the kids reactions: they liked this game... but they aren't very good at it. The physics are realistic enough that its fairly challenging even for me (who is a far cry from a gamer but I've played my share) and my wife didn't care for it either. I've learned to change each race we start to only be for 1 lap and often I have to stop it after about 15 minutes of them wandering around if we try one of the more difficult/hard to follow courses.
First we mapped the steering to the accelerometer. This worked fairly well since newbies have a tendency to tilt the controller the way they want to go, but after a few games, I remapped it to the left joystick which took some learning for the boys, but they seemed to get it eventually. This is their first foray into gaming (and they're all 5 and under) so they are really still developing the coordination it takes.
So A+ for SuperTuxKart. https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page
The only downsides are that it does have a single player mode that must be played to unlock certain things in multiplayer mode (though you can bypass it through editing a config file) and that the PS3 controller mapping wasn't very usable until I went and configured them all (which seems more an issue in the PS3 driver). I would like if it had an option for more controllers (TVs are large enough these days you could easily have 9 screens), and you have to have all the controllers connected to the computer before you start up the program, but most of these are pretty consistent with most games.
Now for the kids reactions: they liked this game... but they aren't very good at it. The physics are realistic enough that its fairly challenging even for me (who is a far cry from a gamer but I've played my share) and my wife didn't care for it either. I've learned to change each race we start to only be for 1 lap and often I have to stop it after about 15 minutes of them wandering around if we try one of the more difficult/hard to follow courses.
First we mapped the steering to the accelerometer. This worked fairly well since newbies have a tendency to tilt the controller the way they want to go, but after a few games, I remapped it to the left joystick which took some learning for the boys, but they seemed to get it eventually. This is their first foray into gaming (and they're all 5 and under) so they are really still developing the coordination it takes.
So A+ for SuperTuxKart. https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page
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