Category: Games

Game-Changer Alert: Microsoft Flight Simulator on Steam Deck – A Dream Come True!

Paul2 Replies
Golden Gate Bridge – Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 by Bhautik Joshi

You might be asking yourself, can you play Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Steam Deck?  The Answer is Yes you can and here’s how you would do it.

Before Installing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

Before we even begin installing the game onto the Steam Deck, we shall have to do some things to better make it more likely to run. You’ll probably need at least a minimum of 256 gb of space on the NVME.  I have tried to use the SD card that is was was fast read but slow in writing and that caused problems with the game.  You’ll need to have something that can do fast writes and that would require a NVME or some way to use an external hard drive that you can plug in while you play the game on the Steam Deck.   However if you don’t have the room due to it having a small amount of storage to begin with then I have some good news.   Amazon has started selling NVME that are 1gb of space for around 60$ to 70$.  The Minium hard drive you should use is a 512gb then you should be able to install the game.  The Game requires a massive amount of space that including the world updates that come along over the years which are free. So you want to upgrade your SSD on the Steam Deck, huh? I created a good blog post on how to do it even more but this is about the game and you should at least get the biggest Hard drive you can and that would be a 2 terabytes NVME which does cost a lot but would allow you to have the game and other games installed.

How I did it

Now we get to how I did it because this worked with me, I got a copy of the Steam deck OS image and re-imaged my Steam Deck.  You’ll want to use Rufus or some other imaging software to create a boatable USB drive and boot into that the Steam Deck.  This is the best approach to make sure you have enough space for a the game if you only have a 512gb installed and it is also good just wipe the hard drive because you never know what files are left after you installed a game or not.

If you are doing the install my way, you should update the OS once you boot into the Steam Deck. Log into your account as if this was your first time using the Steam Deck and check for OS updates in the settings.  Don’t install any games yet because you should also be using a Dongle of some kind or dock to speed this process up a bit.   You can use wireless but it will more than likely take twice as long and that can be time consuming to say the least.

It’ll take while to install the game

It’s like a 130gb or a bit more to install the game once you have installed the initial game from Steam which is like 3gb or so.   Make sure to install it on the main hard drive and don’t select the SD card because it will not work more than likely.   It took me about 3 or 4 hours of just keeping the system active while it was download the packages from Microsoft which uses AWS(Amazon Web Services), so the speed isn’t going to be fast.   I would say if you are on dock plug in a mouse or something and occasionally move the mouse while it downloads from Microsoft.   Again this can’t be helped no matter how fast your speed is on your network.   However before you click on the game the first to actually download the files you are needing to install from Microsoft, you should go into the properties and select the Experimental.  This is under the compatibility menu in the game.   You’ll need to make sure that is selected and experimental proton was downloaded from Steam before you can run the game.  Also you’ll need to add the -FastLaunch in the launch options settings.

Community Files on the Steam Deck

Does the steam deck have a community folder for Microsoft Flight Simulator?  Yes it does.  So you want to add your community files you have on your Windows Systems to the Steam Deck, the good news that can now be done on the Steam Deck.   You’ll have to go into Steam Desktop and navigate to the right folder.  Once you do that grab a USB that has the files on them and put the USB into an empty USB slot.  Once done, open up the drive and folder where you put the community folder in and copy all the contents not the folder into:

Where’s the community files located on the Steam Deck?

Go to your steam deck desktop find the home folder.

Before you can find this folder, you’ll need to hit Control + H to show hidden folders and files.

/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1250410/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft Flight Simulator/Packages/Community

You’ll want to have a fast USB drive to do this because I am sure the community files will be more than 10 gigs of space at least that is how much mine was, so using a USB 3.0 device is something that helps you move the files over quicker.   However that just depends on how much you have to copy over.   Once that is done you can boot back into Steam environment or just reboot the system to get to the steam menu like before if you aren’t that knowledgeable about this that is one way to do it.

Finally I suggest you just start installing all the world updates you want it just depends on how much space you have on the NVME.   If you have a 2gb then you can possibly install all the worlds and that would be around 300gb of space or something like that.   So you just have to be mindful of that and also which community files you want to install on the Steam Deck. Once you have did all this you can begin to play around and setting it up the way you like to play the game.  On Battery power I would assume it will last around an hour and half on the LED Steam Deck and the OLED probably a bit more since they have a bigger battery.  I haven’t had a chance to see how long it will last on the Steam Deck on battery but I would just be mindful of that and have the overlays showing you how much battery power you have left.

Have fun and if you enjoyed the blog post consider subscribing

P.s. on a side note someone was asking if Microsoft really did use AWS.  I did do a check on this on my desktop and they are going to the AWS servers:

ec2-54-225-216-74.compute-1.amazonaws.com

 

How The Last of Us – will win the silicon lottery!

Paul
Last Of Us Pt 1
My Screen of the Game

Understanding the Silicon Lottery

Whether you like it or not, that CPU or GPU you bought might not last the entire time you have it.   After all, You could have a slighly below average CPU from what others who have the same CPU are experiences.   There is a great Youtube Video on this that you should go check out.   Let me be clear that I think most of the people who are having issues with games such as this are those who have faulty CPU’s or GPU’s.   So a break down of what I have found out, most users who are using a K series Intel isn’t have much issues with the game.   Why’s that well the video tells you what I have always suspected those cpu’s are higher end and probably aren’t likely to fail as much due to the high demand of quality they are wanting out of the series.  Even in th discussions there are several post about who can run this game without issues.   I will admit I had to turn on V-Sync, DSS, and make a limit of 9 FPS to get my GPU not to be used at 100%.  This is something you should do too.   I also did notice some cutsceens (Cineramics) For the game did drop me back into Windows 10.   So I do not like that idea but it did   Even though people will probably blame the game for their GPU’s dying, but in truthfullness you should already be limiting just how much the system uses your GPU.

Gameplay for my Systems

I found this to be very rough to start up with since there was at least an hour that the system was using 100% both CPU and GPU.   It doesn’t help that you have to build the shaders and I honestly would like to know how much space those are taking up in bouth my Steam Deck and PC but I couldn’t find any information, I have found people asking the same question but I have yet to find a way to see just how much shaders are being stored on my systems.  That would be something I would like to know at a glance on my Steam deck.   I have 42gb on my 256gb NVME drive on my steam deck that just say other.  So why can’t Steam fix this for us.

System Specs:

  • I9-10859k on a Asus Prime Z590-P Motherboard  (240 Watercooled Rad)
  • 3050 Geoforce RTX GPU
  • 32 gb DDR4 4,300 ghz ram
  • NVME Hard drive

As you can see this isn’t beginner PC, I built this for my enoyment and thus I know a thing a two about keeping the system cool.   It was constantly getting hot while building the Shaders which took an Hour at the least and I don’t know why they would need to build the shaders in the first place.

The Game

Other than the problems I had, I really didn’t have to much else problems on my computer so far.  I’ve been playing the game on and off for the past few days and I’ve not seen anything else to cause me trouble.   Is that because I won the silicon lottery, that would be a good guess and I’ll probably say yes.  I’m not sure why others are having more issues, but I would be willing to bet it is because they are letting the game take over their Frame rates and cause more issues than they need to.

SteamDeck Play

I even tried it on my SteamDeck and it only could do 20 or 30 FPS on it and it was very intuitive playing it because there was always those times you just couldn’t keep up with the game play due to it stuttering and don’t remind me of the hour long shaders building for it.  Again that needs to be fixed, we shouldn’t have to wait an hour just to play the game, which I did just to not have any stuttering in the beginning game.   I still don’t get the idea of why this is necessary, I thought our systems could build shaders as we go or maybe build the shaders for the next part of the game and so on.   I am hopeful that they at least make the game a little more playable on the Steam Deck because it was something I would like to do more often.   I play Spiderman on it without much issue but The Last of Us just seams to be a little more harder for me to play on the Steam Deck.

Is streaming feasible on the Steam Deck or to the computer?

Paul1 Reply

Live Audio Streaming Second Life

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The Preface of this post

Let’s begin with that what I am about to talk about is probably not even going to work for most of you because it would require way to much money to upgrade your home networking. This however is going to be something to understand and consider in your future upgrade plans for your home networking. Nothing here right now will stop you from streaming or make it useful but it will be a chance to educate you on how you might want to proceed in the future and make the experience a little more enjoyable. You also have the options of downloading games and installing onto your steam deck but someone games won’t work with the Steam as well as streaming them. This topic will at least maybe make it more enjoyable for you and make it so you can stream and not be pulling your hair out in the process.

Bandwidth will be the issue

Depending on what your computer you are using that you want to stream to your Steam Deck, the issue will be for the time being the amount of information that is sent to the Steam Deck.   Most  games are playing at the Highest possible settings and that requires the information to be transmittable to the Steam Deck.   Something like 1440p or really good RTX graphics card will want to send all this information to the Steam Deck.   There will be movement Lag or game lag even if you had the best home network in the world.  I can’t see this being without some form of lag.   You are essentially trying to send loads of data over either wired to Wireless or Wireless to Wireless, or even Wireless to Wired connections.    Even then you have a cap of how much data can be sent to through the air or though a wired connection.

Wired VS Wireless

Let’s Now talk about the speed caps and how much you will most likely get with each one of them.   According the LifeWire, You will get these types of speed:

I tend to think this is somewhat accurate because I can’t see this not being any faster than this in most cases. You have objects in the way to get to the wireless whether it being a Door, a Wall, or even other objects. That will tend to slow the connection down because of errors and bandwidth.  Even then even if you had gotten a 802.11ax wireless router the Steam Deck right now could only do the 802.11ac so that would mean it could only do 200 mbps(Milibytes Per Second) even at the best of times.

Now let’s talk about Wired options.   You can buy  dock that will connect to your wired network but the Steam Deck Dock will only do 1 Gbps which is way faster than you could wireles.   You would need  to do several things to get a faster connection.   One buy a Switch or Router that is 2.5Gbps capable, and upgrade your wired connections to a Cat 7 or 8.  You’d also need a 2.5Gb Ethernet connection to the Steam Deck by using a USB-C to 2.5gb Ethernet connection.  You can also use this to download games faster if you have a already have installed a big enough HDD or maybe you expanded your MicroSD card selections.  I have not yet to found a dock that will support 2.5gbps that will work with the Steam Deck but I am not sure if they even make them just yet.  It would be nice but I doubt anyone but maybe Steam Deck will incorporate that into their next versions of the DOCK.  You will also need to make sure you Desktop system that you want to stream from or two is capabile of thw 2.5gb also on a wired network.  You will need to check with the company that you bought your system from or check the motherboards website to see if it has a 2.5gbs ethernet connection.  Most gaming systems or motherboards will already havea 2.5gbs connection but some don’t.  So you might need to buy a 2.4gb ethernet connection dongle for the laptop or desktop in question.

Game performance tweaks

Finally with all that  being said, the last way to not have so much game lag while streaming is drop your resolution of the game and make the game run with less graphics.  Turn off DLSS and other options in the game, also if it says it is running best possible graphics, drop it down to mid way or lower and that will allow the information tobe transmitted faster to your streaming device such as the Steam Deck.  Even with this, it might still be a little slugish and slow to respond.  So the best approach, I have come up with is to download the games onto the Steam Deck and try to play them on the steam without streaming them.  I’ve found that most games work rather well playing from the Steam Deck than to try to stream them.   The only one so far I haven’t had a chance to try to figure out is Micrisoft Flight Simulator 2020.  I am hopeful they will release a patch for that so that I can play that on my Steam Deck.  Although, I have begun to try to figure out a way to get it to run on the steam deck like it does on the Linux machines I’ve used in the past.  Hopefully I will come up with a Hack to do that.

What’s your thoughts on Streaming Vs Downloading?  Do you have any problems streaming or have you had similar issues?  What games seem to run smoothly while streaming or did you have any games that will work well streaming?  I’d like to hear your results also.

What types of SD cards are the best for your Steam Deck

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As small as a fingernail: close-up of Micro SD card SanDisk Ultra 64 GB on white background

So you want a Good Gaming Experience

If you are like me, you only bought a small 64gb version of the Steam Deck. After all You can upgrade the internal storage up to 2tb if you really had the money for the hardware. I know I will be doing this in the future myself but until then. I still have a lot of steam games and other games I want to play on the Steam deck. This is another way to increase your storage and you can save a lot of money this way also, if you aren’t confortable about opening up your Steam Deck. No screws required to do this way also.  This is the easiest way to increase your storage space but you have to have the right cards to have the best gaming experience.   I’m going to talk about some of the things you will want to look for and also give you some examples of the cards you should buy.

Read and Write Speeds

This is the first place you should be looking for.  The SDXC (MicroSD card) has to be able to write  and read up to 100 mb/s.  The faster you get the better experience you will be.  You should look for cards that says V30 and has the U3 Symbol.   These will tell you that they are designed for up to that amount but I find that you will want to get something that is as fast as possible but also really cheap.  You can buy several of these and switch them out with the games you are wanting to play at the time.  You can buy several small 256gb MicroSD cards and switch them off when you need because of games being on them that you want to play.   Here’s a Few of my Amazon recommendations on which ones to buy that will get you the most out of gaming experience.

Final Thoughts

My final thoughts on this is that you can have anywhere from 64gb up to 1 tb of extra space and if you have a 1tb internal space.  I can’t see you needing more that a 2 tb amount either way.  This would probably the most you probably, unless you add in the Epic Games and other ways to mod your Steam Deck.  I’ll be talking about that in an upcoming post about how you can do that for almost any gaming network but maybe not Nintendo.   The Steam Deck is more powerful than the Switch right now.  You can play games from other providers and enjoy playing mobile.   This is something that has been a long time coming to allow gamers to take their games anywhere they want to and play them on any display they want to.   I don’t know how the Logitech G Gaming handset will be but at least the Steam Deck is far better than what people have thought it would be.  I can’t wait to see the Version 2 of the Steam Deck and see what they do in the future.

How to move your Minecraft World from PC to SteamOS (Archlinux)

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Installing Minecraft

See Link here for more information

After you get done install Minecraft on your Steam deck you will then be able to log into your Minecraft Java Edition. I suggest setting updifferent version for the game if you have several different versions for example 1.16.2 and 18.1 and Maybe even 1.19.0+. I’ve found this to be the very easy to use and keep your from having to log into to your minecraft java edition. Once you have Micraft installed and ready to played. You really should go ahead create test world so you can verify that it is working properly. Once done you’ll want to process to the next step.

Zipping your saved worlds

This next step is important because you never know what could happen. You’ll want to hit “Win + R” and type in “%appdata%\.minecraft” while you are logged into your Windows device. This should bring your to C:\users\[loginID]\Appdata\.minecraft. Once there you will want to navigate to saves directory. You’ll find in most times it is there unless you have designated another location in the Minecraft Java launcher where to go. I’m going to assume you know where your save directory and we’ll talk about what you will need to do next.  I’d use something like 7zip or even Windows Zipping utility.  For the People who are absolutely beginners with this.   I recommend copying these to a USB and then copying them to the Steam Deck that way or you could use the microSD card if you have have a MicroSD card reader to move the zip files over.   Once you have zip the worlds you want to play on you Steam Deck.   You basically just want to zip the whole directory of the world name for example if you have a Test World on your Windows computer, it will probably be something like “Test World” folder.  Zip the whole directory up and copy it over.   Don’t change anything when it get’s zipped up.

If you have multiple worlds and have them set up with different version.   I’d suggest zipping them up and creating folders with the different version onto the USB or MicroSD card.  So when you create and import them into PolyMC you will know which versions you will need to create in Java PolyMC.

Importing world into PolyMC

Once you have them zip files copied over or at least installed on the MicroSD card and inserted into the the Steam Deck.    You are going to want to start PolyMC in Desktop mode if you are using this on the Steam Deck.   One you run it you’ll want to view the worlds:

View Worlds _ PolyMC

Then once you do that, The next screen you will want to click Add (saved world).

Add worlds as Zip files

Once you hit Add you will then want to go to the directory on the MicroSD card or USB drive or Where ever you moved the zip files. Once you find it and click OPEN. It should start to add it to the PolyMC World. If you created the right version you will not have to worry about it when you start the game. After Adding all the worlds you want to play with, you can then get out of Steam Deck Desktop mode and go back to the the Steam OS and play your game that you were playing on your PC. I haven’t tried moving these back to the PC or keeping them syncorized but at least you can play your favorite worlds on Steam Deck.

Like this little quick tutorial. Why not share it and tell people so more people can play Minecraft and or use your worlds you were using it on the PC. This will only work for the JAVA version of Minecraft. Bedrock will probably not work, I haven’t tried or thought about trying it for Steam Deck. Hope this helps. Have a Good Monday Morning.