Stefano Casillo moves on to new adventures from Kunos Simulazioni

I already see him showcasing the first official America's Esport Cup from Auckland in 2024, from a boat.
And it would be even better if in that occasion Luna Rossa would win so that in 2028 we can go to try the ultimate Hydrofoil Competizione in Cagliari.

 

My God, this is awesome. It looks sooo good, so ... "right".


https://twitter.com/i/status/1486666584953348103

 

@stefanoCasillo
Hi Boss. Any news on HG?
When some other live stream?

 

currently living through possibly the worst time for every game development cycle: trying to get it ready for an Early Access Release.
No time for cool features, no time for experiments.. it's just down and dirty to make the entire thing presentable, lots of frustration and long days, but's it is what it is

Depending on the success of the next 1.5 months of development I might do some live stream once it's close to release, hopefully end of January 2023.

 

Dai Stefano che le facciamo volare ste barche per la prossima AC .
Sei in fase di collaudo come i nuovi AC40 o i LEQ12

In bocca al lupo.

 

Stefano, I saw that you're trying to run this on the Steam Deck. I think that's your first experience then with running a game on Linux, iirc?
If you have any Linux-specific questions or problems, feel free to contact me.
Been using it as my main system for around 15 years and I know my way around.

In any case, wish you luck with the game and the Steam Deck experiment. I think that could be a very interesting device for Hydrofoil Generation.

 

Sadly the Steam Deck native version failed about 1 year ago. After more than 1 month invested in converting the engine to a different API that would allow me to use a Vulkan backend on Linux/Steam Deck I noticed a steep loss of performance compared to the original DX11 version. So I had to either bet on the fact that this new API would evolve and improve in performance or go back to the original DX11 version and forget about the Linux/Steam Deck native port.

Sadly as far as I know the game doesn't even run on Proton, most probably because of a problem with fonts (same problem that stops AC 1 from running on Proton I think).. I wonder if you know anything about getting AC1 to run on Linux?

 

Ah ok, I didn't actually expect you to do a native port at all. I thought you were targeting Proton.
If you've got the rest figured out, i.e. you've got no libraries in use that run only on Windows, and the rendering is the only thing remaining, then it might actually be possible to use dxvk for the rendering.
dxvk is a transition layer from DX9-11 to Vulkan that is used by Proton for most games.
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
However, you can also use it for native games that feature a DX11 engine. Valve did something like this with Portal 2:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/...s-a-big-update-with-vulkan-support-from-dxvk/
How it works exactly in this case, I cannot tell you. The original target is via Wine (or Proton), as stated on the webpage.

Yes, AC1 does run using Proton, but it's a bit tricky to get there.
The "relatively" easy part is that you need to install some libraries like .net and d3dcompiler_47. This part is described in this guide (until the highlighted line):
https://gist.github.com/ANBAL534/8057b5200ace9bdd98795b627e550ba0#file-gistfile1-txt-L47
So yeah, it's quite some work …
But even with all the libraries in place I had some issues starting it and I think the problem is that (iirc) acs.exe is a 64 bit program while the UI part is 32 bit?
In any case, it crashed during the startup of acs.exe due to the wrong versions of the vulkan libraries being loaded (because it runs via dxvk, a DX11 -> Vulkan translation layer). I fixed that for me by specifying the loading order of the 32bit and 64bit vulkan libraries.
Once you get all of that out of the way it does run and the performance is ok. Python apps do unfortunately cost much more performance than on Windows. I don't think anybody figured out yet why this is the case.
Content Manager and CSP (line 47++) are a bit of a hassle, too and some CSP modules introduce peformance issues or crashes. But most of it is working.

If you've got font problems with Proton for Hydrofoil Generation, it could help to install corefonts (contains Arial, Courier and Times) via protontricks:

Code:

protontricks 1448820 corefonts

protontricks also comes with a UI that let's you select the components that you want to install:

Code:

protontricks 1448820 --gui

protontricks is originally available from:
https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks
On SteamOS (which is Arch Linux underneath) it should be available via flatpak and therefore via Discover (which is the KDE package manager that should be available on SteamOS):
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.Matoking.protontricks

 

More information on the dxvk-native approach can be found here:
https://github.com/Joshua-Ashton/dxvk-native

This was a branch for this specific purpose, but it was merged into dxvk and is part of it starting with version 2.0:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0

In principle it is also possible to use dxvk on Windows, but it's not officially supported:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Windows

Generally speaking, dxvk was a huge step forward for gaming on Linux. Before that it was always hit and miss with some games working well and others failing completely.
(And I'm only talking about the rendering here!)
Nowadays, rendering is working out of the box in most cases and the main problems are in different areas.

 

oh thanks for the tip! That sounds very promising, it was crashing because it couldn't locate the fonts that are normally available in Windows. If I bypass the font renderer it works fine.. so that really sounds like a solution.

I'll have to get my Linux PC back up and try.

 

Stefano, at what time do you release the kraken?

The monohull of yesterday's tream is like an LEQ12 (AC40)?

 

Around 5pm.

Yes the jx40 is similar characteristics to those boats.

 

Me: Come on, sailing can't be that hard …
Also me: Aaaaaaah, what's happening?

Anyway, I managed to get it running on Linux with Proton 7.0-6 (so latest stable). With the default setup it'll crash when loading the menu. That's fixed by installing d3dcompiler_47:

Code:

protontricks 1448820 d3dcompiler_47

Since I think it tries to load the Arial font, I also installed corefonts:

Code:

protontricks 1448820 corefonts

Game runs very nicely with about 800fps at FullHD resolution. The only two things that I found not working were that I couldn't join a multiplayer server as spectator, always says it's full. Joining as a player works though.
And the second thing is that the tutorials are broken for me, the hints are missing text. It's likely a Linux-specific problem, maybe there is a font missing, but I couldn't yet figure it out.
It's not a big deal though, I can watch those on Youtube or I can just read the text from the textfiles in the game folder.
All of the important bits are working fine.
Ah and I didn't try my steering wheel and FFB, because right now I don't have a rim with buttons, so it's not really that convenient to use, I guess.
But I don't see a reason why that shouldn't work, works in AC after all.

Now I have to invest some time to learn controlling this thing.
Congrats to Stefano for reaching the early access.

 

so weird only the tutorial text doesn't work, the font is the same as the rest of the UI

 

1st goal: it runs smooth also on my 2014 pc
2nd goal: even on the tutorial... it's fun!
3rd goal: i'm just on 5th tutorial so still i've all to discover but the feeling is that at the end it will become very VERY challenging to manage. And for me this is a big "pro", (in general, in all videogames).

Stefano, did you have ever evaluate the possibity to add "helm sensitivity (mouse sensitivity)" in the controller options?!
My very first feeling about this is that the player need a quite big space to manage the helm, but anyway take it as a newby suggestion, i'm only on the tutorial for now.

 

Ok, so it's not a missing font, but some other problem. There are a couple of options I can look into, maybe something works.

But as I said, it's not a big deal.

 

@stefanoCasillo: just fyi: with the latest proton version (8.0-1) and the latest game version, the text in the tutorials is also shown. So, as far as I'm aware, no more Linux-specific issues.

 

I had to use protontricks and enable the d3dcompiler to make it work, it was 2-3 weeks ago, don't remember the version. I will check it out again.. still not sure where the logs and cfg files go tho.. on windows they are going into the "user" folder, on linux I can't find them... but yeah, proton is pretty amazing.

 

Yeah, I wish that Proton would handle user data a bit better and save them to a more accessible place. Currently, the data is saved in the compatdata folder in the Steam library. I think by default that'd be

Code:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1148820/pfx

pfx here is a wine prefix containing the "drive C:" with the typical Windows-like structure. Each game gets it's own prefix, so that you can install (and delete) components independently.

The main thing that bothers me about how they handle the prefix is that if you uninstall a game, Steam will delete the prefix without asking and without warning and thus all your user data (and savegames) for that game.
Not a big deal if the game is using cloud saving, but if it doesn't you're screwed. :/
So what I do in addition to that is to symlink the pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser to another directory that is better accessible to me, e.g. Games/Hydrofoil Generation
Then when the prefix is deleted, it'll only delete the symlink and the data remains in place.

If a prefix gets "corrupted" (whatever that means specifically), it'll be moved to pfx_corrupted and a new one is created.

One additional helpful thing with proton is that it can generate logs on its own specific to the proton setup etc. That is activated using the launch options:

Code:

PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

 

For the guys interested in the game or just may wish to give a thank you to Stefano Casillo, former Kunos developer and the head behind coding of NetKar Pro, Ferrari Virtual Academy, Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa Competizione, his new game Hydrofoil Generation v1.0 is now available on Steam with a 20% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1448820/Hydrofoil_Generation/

From me, the wishes of the best of luck for Stefano and for his new game with a big thank you for all his hard work and all the time dedicated making some of the best sims ever made.