Kumubou
Published
Some of the secondary text in the UI gets very hard to read, as it was annoyingly small even on standard displays.
Suspend mode is 100% broken. If you use it, the audio timing between the background and keyed notes gets completely thrown off and the anti-cheat software will kick in and force close the game.
- Game uses XIGNCODE anti-cheat and has an always-online requirement. The anti-cheat does play nice with Proton with the current version of the game and the current stable version of Proton, but the game will not work at all without an Internet connection of some kind.
- Disable the frame limiter within Gamescope to reduce input latency, which is critical in this game. The game always seems to cap its update rate at the display rate, so it won't hurt battery performance.
- Battery performance is very good -- about 4 hours on a full battery.
- The highest difficulty level (SC) was designed for keyboards and is not fully playable on the Steam Deck, at least with the default configuration. All other difficulties and modes work fine. You may be able to address this by double-binding inputs on the back buttons to hit button combinations normally impossible on a controller (like 1+2+3 on 6B/8B mode), but you'll need to cofngiure that within Steam Input as the game only takes XInput devices.
- As of the current stable Proton release (7.0-2, at the time of this report), videos work without issue. You don't need to use Experimental or GE for video playback anymore.
If you can deal with the weird blockstun and wallslam visual bugs, the game runs fine. Great way to play it anywhere (except the bathroom).
Graphical corruption and artificating can occur from the following:
- Blocking (minor artifacting... but anyone who plays this game knows that nobody blocks)
- Wall slams (minor artifacting)
- Activating Heat or Blood Heat (heavy artifacting, can be mitigated by adjusting options)
(Basically, anything that uses the ripple/screen distortion effect the game has.)
The visual effect on blocking will cause a small, short distortion to occur on the blocking character (and any UI elements it overlays). The wall slam visual effect is a quick ripple from the point of impact that has corruption but quickly passes. The heat activiation effect will cover the entire screen and corrupt pretty much the entire background and HUD for its duration (up to 10 seconds).
There is a workaround for the Heat activiation corruption: if you go into the Options and set the Stage Animation option to Off, this will disable the full screen effect and the full screen corruption will no longer occur.
The one thing to keep in mind is that the game has no internal support for controller/player assignment whatsoever (unlike most modern fighting games), so you will need to use Steam Input's options to change the controller order. The built-in Steam Deck controls will always default to being player 1 until you change it.
If you're playing in a more competetive environment, you'll want to disable the frame limiter within Gamescope, due to the additional input latency it can introduce.
The game boots fine in both the current stable version of Proton and Proton Experimental but not Proton-GE.
The game on the Steam Deck only draws 1 watt (!!) from the APU at 60fps, so you could play this for 6+ hours on the battery if you turn the screen brightness and volume down.
The most consistent frame timing (at least based on the Gamescope graph) seems to come from turning off Gamescope's frame limiter and using the in-game Vsync option. Turning both off reduces input latency but can result in very sporadic frame timing issues (but this has not been rigiously tested by me, so take with a heap of salt).
Found launch option to fix graphical corruption issues, runs more or less perfectly now once set
RADV_DEBUG=nodcc %command%
The game hard-binds itself to the first two Xinput devices it finds, so if you want to play docked with two people on two different pads/sticks/etc., you need to use the quick menu options to change the controller order as the game does not allow you to assign players to controllers normally.
I reported the sprite corruption issue to the Proton Github a while back and they were able to provide a workaround for the issue (see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/271#issuecomment-1173899741). They also have made a change to the Mesa drivers to apply this fix automatically with the next release (22.1.3 is the current Mesa version and the fix was merged in about a week after this came out, so hopefully it'll Just Work on the next stable release).
You will 100% want to turn the frame limiter off for this game, it caps itself to 60fps naturally and having the limiter enabled adds a significant amount of lag (about 3 frames/50ms of added delay).
