APB 1.30 Open Beta has begun

[gogeo 39]

On 2/2/2023 at 6:02 PM, mojical said:

Surprisingly, it took very little effort to make this new build run on Linux via Proton/Wine, unlike Live which crashes immediately at the district select screen at best. That alone is a huge step up in my opinion and a great incentive to start playing again, because I have pretty much ditched Windows completely other than a tiny partition to run a few well known benchmarks and overclocking tools.

 

This also means the Steam Deck and devices with a similar software stack should be able to run the game now, though it is obvious this game is best enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse.

 

The (simplified) steps I took for this were to install the game using Bottles and the default Soda runner, install the dotnet48 dependency in the same prefix, then have a separate entry for APB.exe and APBLauncher as the launcher can not start the game on Linux yet. Once 1.30 is out on Steam the process will be much more simple.

 

Performance is comparable to Frosi's results on Windows and there are no issues with the anticheat, both BE and EAC support Linux by now.

 

Here is a frametime plot complete with test specs and settings:

https://flightlessmango.com/games/1338/logs/3621

 

I saw this being requested by someone else in the AMA so I hope others (especially with Nvidia hardware) give this a try and check if it works on their setup as well.

 

 

I was under the assumption that the developer needed to contact either BattleEye or EAC to enable linux support, so I wasn't sure whether LO already did that. Good to hear it is working, I'm on the same distro as you as well.

[TheProfit 9]

No crashes not even one. FPS is 150-300 max settings, 1440p. Happy with the results. Bit of work needs to be done on the hitreg.

 

I7 9700k

3070 RTX

16GB RAM DDR4 3600mhz

Win10 64bit

SSD

[R3ACT3M 489]

Did another small play session. 

One think I noticed in social is those shipping container located in the back of social were now properly shaded. Hope this is a good sign that lighting changes are much easier to accomplish now. Or if it was always easy and those containers were left unshaded cause "engine update more important". Which yes it is. But it's kinda funny how long they were left on the more broken side.

Next, im assuming it's a problem in the normal game as well. But when looking towards the ocean in Waterfront I was getting 300FPS but when firing the Ogre fps went from 300 all the way to 100 which is a HUGE drop. Of course the hit wasn't as hard if fps was hovering around 150. But still FPS drops like that need to be solved along side the hitches and stutters that occur a lot when playing.

But the overall feeling? It might be placebo or maybe I am feeling that the game just plays a little bit smoother compared to live. I don't what it is, just moving around feels a little bit better. 

But yea if the stutters and hitching can be ironed out this would make as a great base to do more with. Hopefully some day we can see the LOD changes that were in the Unreal Engine 3.5 version of the game. I also hope that we will also see 2.2's version of social. I for one really liked the new look (outside of the harsh lighting that was present in 2.2).

I do also hope that hiding threat from player eyes will come sooner rather than later. Lots of hopes and dreams but I guess this is a good first step that leads up a flight of stairs.

P.S I also played around with the character customizer (the kiosk in social) and was met with some pretty long freezes when trying to navigate through the menus that I don't remember being present in 1.20 . I didn't play around with car customization. 

Edited February 3, 2023 by R3ACT3M

[Nagletz 219]

Just hopped in Beta again and everything seems just fine aside op’s mentioned issues, no crashes at all and just one stutter been noticed. NA latency is a bit of a pain but i’d assuming there’s been a reasons for that. 

Not sure if I should post benchmarks here, I have old patootie pc and get stable 60 FPS, no fancy numbers.

[BlatMan 718]

In game latency says 0ms but it's probably about 20ms going by camera switch delay, which makes sense if it's NA east. Still surprised by the performance. RAM usage is about 3GB. Total system RAM usage is about 6GB with APB and Discord. Very impressive.

[JungleFlaco 10]

17 hours ago, CreatiiVeDE said:

Sadly there's no way for me to download the launcher.

 

I don't know what's the matter but everytime i click on the link which is supposed to start the download nothing happens.

 

I'm using Google Chrome, maybe that's the issue here?

I had this aswel, even trying on different navigators, had to click the link quite a few times until the download started.

 

Thanks @Mayii

 

So the Test is NA only, thought the error was on my end.. xD

 

Thanks @CookiePuss

 

EDIT:

 

There seems to be an update, but my launcher absolutelly stoped working =/

Yet again, this might be my pedals-reaction PC.

Edited February 4, 2023 by JungleFlaco
Edit

[Somepony 20]

1.30 beta build crashes after character selection if you clear out "APBGame\Content\Audio\DefaultMusicLibrary" directory.

Current 1.20 build works fine. I'm used to do this to disable all the music in the game.

Edited February 4, 2023 by Somepony

[Uhtdred 240]

yesterday i saw a mod/dev saying nobody can cheat on this beta...

 

I just faced a triggerbotter.

[mojical 160]

17 hours ago, gogeo said:

I was under the assumption that the developer needed to contact either BattleEye or EAC to enable linux support, so I wasn't sure whether LO already did that. Good to hear it is working, I'm on the same distro as you as well.

I thought so as well, but given the Deck's popularity I can see both anticheats switching to an opt-out model or asking game developers about it instead of said devs having to take the initiative. Hopefully LO transitioning to EAC won't break compatibility. I'm holding off on making a more detailed tutorial or video until 1.30 reaches Live due to this.

 

Nobara is a great distro choice for gaming on AMD cards, even if the method I described is universal and can be achieved with Flatpaks. 

[Nagletz 219]

2 hours ago, Uhtdred said:

yesterday i saw a mod/dev saying nobody can cheat on this beta...

 

I just faced a triggerbotter.

I think color based triggerbot can still work on beta, so as on any other game with “red crosshair” feature. Or it was probably just another sweaty from NA

[gogeo 39]

On 2/2/2023 at 6:02 PM, mojical said:

Surprisingly, it took very little effort to make this new build run on Linux via Proton/Wine, unlike Live which crashes immediately at the district select screen at best. That alone is a huge step up in my opinion and a great incentive to start playing again, because I have pretty much ditched Windows completely other than a tiny partition to run a few well known benchmarks and overclocking tools.

 

This also means the Steam Deck and devices with a similar software stack should be able to run the game now, though it is obvious this game is best enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse.

 

The (simplified) steps I took for this were to install the game using Bottles and the default Soda runner, install the dotnet48 dependency in the same prefix, then have a separate entry for APB.exe and APBLauncher as the launcher can not start the game on Linux yet. Once 1.30 is out on Steam the process will be much more simple.

 

Performance is comparable to Frosi's results on Windows and there are no issues with the anticheat, both BE and EAC support Linux by now.

 

Here is a frametime plot complete with test specs and settings:

https://flightlessmango.com/games/1338/logs/3621

 

I saw this being requested by someone else in the AMA so I hope others (especially with Nvidia hardware) give this a try and check if it works on their setup as well.

 

 

I installed it today on Nobara, rtx 3060 ti. Ran the setup through lutris, installed no issues and was able to run APB.exe with Wine GE 36. Didn't have to install anything else, it worked, played smoothly for an hour. Didn't see any issues other than all mail showing as "system mail"

[Uhtdred 240]

1 hour ago, Nagletz said:

I think color based triggerbot can still work on beta, so as on any other game with “red crosshair” feature. Or it was probably just another sweaty from NA

nope, it was definetly a triggerbotter, I was trying to surprise him from corners and he ttked me anyways, which means he was triggerbotting.

[BlatMan 718]

3 hours ago, Somepony said:

1.30 beta build crashes after character selection if you clear out "APBGame\Content\Audio\DefaultMusicLibrary" directory.

Current 1.20 build works fine. I'm used to do this to disable all the music in the game.

Edit the defaultmusiclibrary.xml. This will let you remove the music without deleting the files and throwing errors.

 

"\APBGame\Content\Audio\DefaultMusicLibrary\defaultmusiclibrary.xml"

 

Remove everything between <Library> </Library> so it looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<MusicPlayer Version="1">
  <Library>    
  </Library>
  <Config>
    <CurrentPlaybackInformation CurrentPlayingPlaylistID="-1" CurrentPlayingPlaylistTrackIndex="-1" CurrentPlayingTrackID="-1" PlaybackPosition="0" StorePlaybackSettings="true" Volume="1.000000" Random="true" Loop="Playlist" PlaybackOnFoot="false" BroadcastFromVehicle="true" EnvironmentFilter="true" AutoResume="true" />
    <GeneralSettings ShowEULA="true" PermaDeleteOnRemove="false" DisplayPlayerHud="true" />
  </Config>
</MusicPlayer>

 

Login, open the music player and reset it back to default. This will clear all the music. Then you can import your own music if you like.

Edited February 4, 2023 by BlatMan

[Frosi 722]

3 hours ago, Uhtdred said:

yesterday i saw a mod/dev saying nobody can cheat on this beta...

 

I just faced a triggerbotter.

Color based Triggerbots may still very well work, however, cheats that inject into the game will have to be updated to 64Bit which is a big task and therefore means its unlikely anyone has done so in such little time.

[AlienTM 138]

Quote

Back port the cooked package system into 1.30. This will massively improve load times.

Have question about this(gonna happen in some later state)This gonna improve the loading times only when you start the game,switching between districts-or will also improve every else loadin time?Like how buildings are popin up in districs,the time character and car fully load when join district(and not to show the default char with the white shirt and green backwards cap before load the rest)If this cooked packages improve all this-probably the majority of lag/stuter gona be gone 4 ever cause i think this is one of the main reasons to do it

[mojical 160]

2 hours ago, gogeo said:

I installed it today on Nobara, rtx 3060 ti. Ran the setup through lutris, installed no issues and was able to run APB.exe with Wine GE 36. Didn't have to install anything else, it worked, played smoothly for an hour. Didn't see any issues other than all mail showing as "system mail"

System mail issue happens too, will have to see if there are some more missing dependencies that could be causing it. Weirdly enough the title shows up correctly for a second then changes to "system mail", but the items can be redeemed correctly. It's just difficult to know which mail is which.

 

I'm glad it worked fine on Nvidia as well. How was your performance in terms of FPS?

[Tajmoti 2]

On 2/2/2023 at 6:02 PM, mojical said:

Surprisingly, it took very little effort to make this new build run on Linux via Proton/Wine, unlike Live which crashes immediately at the district select screen at best. That alone is a huge step up in my opinion and a great incentive to start playing again, because I have pretty much ditched Windows completely other than a tiny partition to run a few well known benchmarks and overclocking tools.

 

This also means the Steam Deck and devices with a similar software stack should be able to run the game now, though it is obvious this game is best enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse.

 

The (simplified) steps I took for this were to install the game using Bottles and the default Soda runner, install the dotnet48 dependency in the same prefix, then have a separate entry for APB.exe and APBLauncher as the launcher can not start the game on Linux yet. Once 1.30 is out on Steam the process will be much more simple.

 

Performance is comparable to Frosi's results on Windows and there are no issues with the anticheat, both BE and EAC support Linux by now.

 

Here is a frametime plot complete with test specs and settings:

https://flightlessmango.com/games/1338/logs/3621

 

I saw this being requested by someone else in the AMA so I hope others (especially with Nvidia hardware) give this a try and check if it works on their setup as well.

 

 

I confirm that the game runs on Ubuntu 22.10 with an RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU.

 

It runs almost flawlessly, there are two extra issues apart from the ones you mentioned:

• Alt+Tabbing away from APB and back makes the game shrink into a tiny rectangle in the top left of the window, I was so far unable to fix it without a game restart.
• I am unable to unlock the FPS cap because the game resets the config file on every launch. Making the config read-only didn't help.

The performance is pretty much perfect, no stuttering or crashes. Although I can't say more since I am capped to 145 FPS.

 

My configuration for anyone interested:

Bottles 50.2 from Flathub

Runner soda-7.0.7 (default)

NVIDIA driver 525.60.11

Both X11 and Wayland work

[Ketog 1032]

On 2/2/2023 at 6:02 PM, mojical said:

[APB Running through Wine/Proton]

 

 

HOLY F#CK

 

As a huge patootie nerd myself this is genuinely an epic news, i can't wait to try apb on linux, you have no idea how happy your words mad me.

 

Awesome findings 🥹

 

 

[Nagletz 219]

3 hours ago, Frosi said:

Color based Triggerbots may still very well work, however, cheats that inject into the game will have to be updated to 64Bit which is a big task and therefore means its unlikely anyone has done so in such little time.

It makes me think they already trying to make them, beta seems not far from release to live in my opinion. God bless EAC.

Edited February 4, 2023 by Nagletz

[Knite 158]

Crappy phone pic of 1.30 running on my Steam Deck; undocking messed up the aspect ratio and resolution, but it runs perfectly fine in docked mode with an average 50FPS on maximum settings @ 720p

[Nagletz 219]

58 minutes ago, Knite said:

Crappy phone pic of 1.30 running on my Steam Deck; undocking messed up the aspect ratio and resolution, but it runs perfectly fine in docked mode with an average 50FPS on maximum settings @ 720p

APB Mobile is actually released as Unit Games promised. Wait a minute...

[BlatMan 718]

5 hours ago, Nagletz said:

It makes me think they already trying to make them, beta seems not far from release to live in my opinion. God bless EAC.

I doubt EAC will make a difference at first. Anything client sided can be bypassed. Maybe the server sided part will help, but it sounds like it's about as good as FairFight. I don't mean that as a good thing. The game devs would need to fine tune it's detection, and you saw what happened with G1's methods. Than again, I didn't expect Matt to have a working 64 bit version this soon, so who knows what else his team can do.

Edited February 5, 2023 by BlatMan

[Frosi 722]

2 hours ago, BlatMan said:

I doubt EAC will make a difference at first. Anything client sided can be bypassed. Maybe the server sided part will help, but it sounds like it's about as good as FairFight. I don't mean that as a good thing. The game devs would need to fine tune it's detection, and you saw what happened with G1's methods. Than again, I didn't expect Matt to have a working 64 bit version this soon, so who knows what else his team can do.

What I heard is that EAC was waaaaay faster to patch things and that cheat providers would basically have to maintain their cheat with weekly updates else it'd run into being detected. In the cases they were too slow it was detected and players got caught. Putting pressure on cheat providers is huge cause keeping things updated are work hours and in a game with a population like APB they may run into the whole thing simply not being profitable anymore. As for the server side, if anything it'll help with detecting private cheats / closets since server sides can give away who's cheating so the client side can look into said flagged players.

[vsb 6174]

2 hours ago, BlatMan said:

I doubt EAC will make a difference at first. Anything client sided can be bypassed. Maybe the server sided part will help, but it sounds like it's about as good as FairFight. I don't mean that as a good thing. The game devs would need to fine tune it's detection, and you saw what happened with G1's methods. Than again, I didn't expect Matt to have a working 64 bit version this soon, so who knows what else his team can do.

i'd imagine it would be the opposite, back when we had eac the first time it was initially about as perfect as anticheats could get, and then as cheats found bypasses and workarounds there was a trend back towards "normal"

[BlatMan 718]

4 hours ago, Frosi said:

What I heard is that EAC was waaaaay faster to patch things and that cheat providers would basically have to maintain their cheat with weekly updates else it'd run into being detected. In the cases they were too slow it was detected and players got caught. Putting pressure on cheat providers is huge cause keeping things updated are work hours and in a game with a population like APB they may run into the whole thing simply not being profitable anymore. As for the server side, if anything it'll help with detecting private cheats / closets since server sides can give away who's cheating so the client side can look into said flagged players.

Rust uses EAC. The official servers are unplayable due to the amount of cheaters. There's lots of players who can jump higher and fly. There's magic bullet that lets you hit any player within range without aiming at them. It can even hit behind walls. These players do get banned eventually but only through mass reporting. If obvious cheats like that are getting past, I doubt the less obvious are ever detected. They changed the recoil system from patterns to random because of the wide usage of no recoil macros.

 

I don't see EAC being this magical fix like others see it. If LO ignore blatant cheaters, like ones who post clips of themselves cheating and have multiple steam accounts each with multiple VAC bans, I doubt it's going to be different with another brand anti-cheat.

Edited February 5, 2023 by BlatMan