Posted on: September 29, 2016
vierax
Gry: 73 Opinie: 1
Great game, beware of the bad Linux port
This indie game is good, I really enjoy Neo Scavenger. It's a very intense survival rogue-like game with strong gameplay and mechanics (fighting, hacking, trade) and crafting envolve your imagination (there is a lot of items to find, to create… especially for clothes) A true gem of videogame history and there is a modding capability to tailor the game as you want. Moreover, the dev is still improving the game, debugging, rebalancing, adding stuffs, and every update is a rediscovery. (I bought it on HB a while ago so I'm not sure if the GOG repository is up-to-date to version 1.14) The problem is that it's a Flash game. As Adobe is barely maintaining the native Linux port of its engine with an very old version that doesn't benefit of any hardware acceleration. Combined with the Flixel game engine used, it overloads your CPU. That's why an in-game frame limiter was added. That's not the first Flash game, but other developpers provide a simple SWF file, as Anodyne or Offspring Fling, that can be executed with any Flash Player engine like Gnash (even if I think it won't work with this too poor featured opensourced retro-engineered replacement) or the Pepper Flash API included in Chrome and portable in Chromium and derivatives Web browsers (Actually, the only way to have an up-to-date Flash Player on Linux). Instead of that, NeoScavenger is embedded in a package with the old version of the Adobe Flash NPAPI because of external files like textures, saves and mods that won't be allowed to be loaded from Chrome with the PPAPI. The Free Demo is still playable in browser but lacks a huge amount of features. Finally, the Linux port suffer from a lot of dependencies, more than a lot of 32bit games I've installed before and the worst is that some of them like libcurl3 aren't told with the ldd commandline or even told during an execution into a terminal. That makes running the Windows version into Wine to be the best solution, for sure ! Despite those two difficulties, the game runs flawlessly and not to high load with the fps limiter set to 30. That's still better than nothing : games using Adobe Air like Starseed Pilgrim claiming having Linux port despite the abandon of native support from Adobe. Considering that Adobe made a recent announcement to update the NPAPI for Linux in the future, the experience should be improved and this game might be playable in ten years but Flash is still a dying engine that should not be used since there are many better options in all fields it covers (html5, Javascript, Unity2d, etc.). The developper is well aware of those bad engines choices and even if rewritting the game with a better engine is too much to ask for a one man team, he told in 2013 that he won't make his future games with Flash anymore and he's now working with Haxe.
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