4 ms·

I Rented Out a Movie Theatre (Again) and Used My Steam Deck to Play Co-Op Games

80 points by taubek 3y ago

pastage 3y ago
Local co-op games are wonderful I have played them alot. I would love to have a tournament like this with Unrailed. Or some rounds of Lovers in a dangerous spacetime. Maybe a https://generals.io https://generals.io 2v2 tournament. Sadly there are not many 4+ player co-op games. I thought NucleusCoOp would be easy to port but looking at the supported game list is daunting.
gareth_untether 3y ago
Reddit straight up blocks me accessing the link even with the app installed. Ultra fence in place!
- vsnf 3y ago
  Are you using a VPN? Reddit, even on the old.reddit domain, started absolutely blocking VPNs about a month ago.
  - voytec 3y ago
    They appear to be blocking everything apart from residential address spaces.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Not blocking iCloud Private Relay, as far as I can tell. If that counts as a VPN.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Access it through the old.reddit.com or use any Web Archive out there. Image in the post: https://imgur.com/a/1fVpv1m https://imgur.com/a/1fVpv1m Text of the post: >> DISCLAIMER: Unfortunately, this subreddit only allows one image per post, so I apologize for the image quality, as I had to collage images of this event into one large portrait. Yes! I am that crazy lad who rented out a movie theatre last year for my graduation party with the Steam Deck! (on r/SteamDeck) This time, I decided to do the same thing except a bit bigger and beyond. As you can see, I have EIGHT PLAYER WIRELESS CO-OP working! No, this is not magic, but a ton of thinking and planning on my part to get this working. This is done by using an external Bluetooth 5.3 Adapter alongside an Xbox Wireless Adapter. To make this simple, this would split the connections to have 4 controllers that are far away in range using Bluetooth, and the other half using 2.4GHz that the Xbox Wireless Adapter uses. I used 4 off brand Nintendo Switch Pro Controllers (that were amazingly better than the authentic Pro Controllers) to connect to the Bluetooth Adapter, and used 4 Xbox Controllers to connect to the wireless adapter. What included in my rental was 4 hours of gaming, unlimited popcorn and drinks by the theatre, can bring food from the outside, all under $1000. Granted, this varies on location for how much theatre rentals can be, so depending on your cost of living is in your area, it could be higher or just about the same! So, you may ask “how the ** did you get 8 player co-op working?!?!” Great question. This was done by having Windows and SteamOS dual booted on my Deck, which I used a program on Windows called “NucleusCo-Op” that lets you basically turn any game into a splitscreen title. After we did Minecraft and BOII CoOp, I had to (no pun intended) switch over to SteamOS to play the Switch games. Would love to see a port of NucleusCoOp on Linux so I can get rid of Windows DualBoot permanently! I did a lot of effort to get this all set up and working in less than a month, as I pretty much planned this last minute. As you can see with the 8 player Minecraft, it looks like old console Minecraft with its visuals and HUD/UI! This is because of a great mod called “Legacy4J” which literally accurately recreates console Minecraft if it were continued today. It even has native controller support built into it, even for the Steam Deck! The Developer of the Mod, Wilyicaro, helped to make this work with NucleusCoOp! Shoutout to him, he’s an amazing man, as he did all of this less than a week to get it working for me. Same goes with Call of Duty: Black Ops II, as I also used NucleusCoOp for that. So, how did it all run? Minecraft with a TON of performance mods, ran at a perfect 60fps the entire time, with each instance having 6 chunks to save on memory. COD BOII with all of the lowest graphical settings, ran at 60fps in all of the instances. It’s truly amazing, considering I was using Windows, a non-supported platform for the Steam Deck besides a new driver about 8-12 months, with such incredible graphical performance. And yes, as you can see with later images, I also emulated Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and held a mega tourney all emulated on the Steam Deck as well with flawless performance. I, at my own birthday party against really good players, somehow managed to win despite the fact at my graduation party last year, I lost in the first round LOL. Snake for the win, baby! You may ask, “Is this practical? Why not use a gaming PC to do all of this?” Amazingly, I would consider this to be more practical than using a gaming PC because of its size. I fit all of the 8 controllers I had, along with my Steam Deck, its dock that had a USB hub connected to two USB extenders of the adapters, fit in a small tiny plastic tub. With a gaming PC, have fun hauling a large 40lb metal box around and take a lot of time to attempt to set up. Steam Deck was literally just plug and play with the projector supporting HDMI! The Steam Deck is clearly powerful enough to be able to handle what I’ve done, with having 8 player splitscreen AND Nintendo Switch emulation off of one singular device. It’s genuinely amazing. Anyhow, I hope this post inspires someone to do what I did, to rent out a movie theatre and use their Deck to play games with good lads and have a ton of fun, because it’s worth it!
  - mindslight 3y ago
    (fwiw: imgur has been blocking much longer than reddit has)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > Access it through the old.reddit.com or use any Web Archive out there. old.reddit.com doesn't work for that anymore
- d_k_f 3y ago
  Interestingly, at least one of the old apps (rif/Reddit is fun) still works through VPN for me even if the web UI blocks the same thread from exactly the same IP.
causi 3y ago
I wonder what the input latency was with that setup.
- peer2pay 3y ago
  Smash ultimate has notoriously bad netcode so playing on this setup locally was probably a step up in terms of latency
- nvarsj 3y ago
  I’ve tried this before and the latency was awful. Must be like 200ms+. But I guess casual players won’t really notice.
roland35 3y ago
What a great idea! Movie theaters often have arcades, but I wonder if setting up a more permanent multiplayer game in theatre would be worthwhile?
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  [flagged]
underseacables 3y ago
My family and I have rented a movie theater several times for our kids to watch their favorite films. As a once in a while treat, it's worth it, but only during the week because the weekends are too expensive.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  What are we taking about price wise here?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ultrasaurus 3y ago
    One partial data point: I talked to my local theatre and they don't have the rights for any of the movies I wanted so that adds ~$400+ (we're still talking, I don't have a full quote)
  - underseacables 3y ago
    The last time we did it was on a Wednesday afternoon last summer, and it was $250. We live next to a major metropolitan area and it was a big regal cineplex. Smaller towns might be cheaper. We just had to bring in the Blu-ray, they said DVD doesn't show as well. For that price, we have the entire theater to ourselves, and we could invite up to 30 friends for free. We had our own concierge she would bring us food. For a special event, absolutely worth it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
komali2 3y ago
I wish games that are 8player on switch were so on their PC versions as well, such as Towerfall. The only 8 player local co-op PC game I know of are the Jackbox games. And maybe move or die?
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  Eight player Towerfall is supported on PC! The developer just made it a separate build of the game for some reason. https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/towerfall-8-player https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/towerfall-8-player (The store page calls this a "mod", but it was created by the game's original developer.)
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  MageQuit, up to 10 (I'm a couch coop/vs addict)
abrookewood 3y ago
The way they did it was even more impressive: "[Nucleus] Adds remarkably smooth split-screen functionality to hundreds of PC games" https://nucleus-coop.github.io/ https://nucleus-coop.github.io/
scotty79 3y ago
Was the steamdeck running 8 instances of Minecraft at 60fps and combine their output with nucleus at the same time?
- bigthiccranch 3y ago
  8 Instances of Minecraft at once. 60fps cap limit for all of them with VSYNC enabled to maintain smooth frame times. Chunks in each instance were set to 6, which is still wild to me that even though Minecraft is running on different threads and cores, technically the Steam Deck was rendering 48 chunks at once. Had to install a ton of performance mods, such as Sodium, to maintain great framerate. Only dips we had, were people purposely lagging the game by flying really fast in spectator mode when they died, which we promptly asked them to not to do that.
haunter 3y ago
What’s the refresh rate of film projectors? The idea sounds good but are they capable of anything above 60hz?
- reaperman 3y ago
  I know this first part sounds pedantic, but bear with me. You can't use a "film" projector for this, because there's no physical film strip. So this can only be done in a theater that has a digital projector (or can have one set up, if it's not usually there). The most widely used "3D" digital projector for theaters runs at a "refresh rate" of 144Hz, alternating between left-eye and right-eye. Refresh rate is not a frame rate, which for movies is typically still 24fps, but flashing the same frame on and off more often than 24Hz reduces the perception of light/dark "flickering". I assume that digital projectors can support a frame rate equal to their refresh rate, but I may be mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D Actual film projectors are incredible engineering - the film actually has to stop for a split second on each frame while the light shutter is open. For understanding film projectors, I really love sharing this video with my friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En__V0oEJsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En__V0oEJsU
karaterobot 3y ago
In grad school, when we had the keys to the lecture hall, we'd just check out a few projectors from the school library and have Halo 2 parties on the weekends in the big auditorium. Nobody got hurt, plenty of nerds got fragged though.
bigthiccranch 3y ago
Hello! I am the guy who rented out a movie theatre and used my Steam Deck to set up a BOII and Minecraft 8 player split screen! I saw some messages regarding input lag, which I will address it in here; Input lag isn’t terribly noticeable unless if you were playing at a lower framerate. I actually did this last year where I rented out a movie theatre with my Steam Deck, which I played some games such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with split screen, but had terrible, I mean TERRIBLE input lag because of the framerate being 30fps. So this time for this party, I stuck with games that ran at 60FPS, which the input lag was really minimal. As for Smash Bros, there was already input lag created by the emulator I used, which is Yuzu, so when we were playing, it felt like we were playing Super Smash Bros. Online! If you have anymore questions, definitely let me know!
defaultcompany 3y ago
I have thought for a long time someone needs to make a system where 200 kids can show up at their local theater and play multiplayer games on the big screen using their phones as input devices. The games would have to be custom made for this system and you’d need a local server and network. But you could license it to theaters and they would make a killing getting kids into the theaters on Saturday morning.

80 points by taubek 3y ago

Local co-op games are wonderful I have played them alot. I would love to have a tournament like this with Unrailed. Or some rounds of Lovers in a dangerous spacetime. Maybe a https://generals.io https://generals.io 2v2 tournament. Sadly there are not many 4+ player co-op games. I thought NucleusCoOp would be easy to port but looking at the supported game list is daunting.

gareth_untether 3y ago

Reddit straight up blocks me accessing the link even with the app installed. Ultra fence in place!

vsnf 3y ago
Are you using a VPN? Reddit, even on the old.reddit domain, started absolutely blocking VPNs about a month ago.
- voytec 3y ago
  They appear to be blocking everything apart from residential address spaces.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Not blocking iCloud Private Relay, as far as I can tell. If that counts as a VPN.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
Access it through the old.reddit.com or use any Web Archive out there. Image in the post: https://imgur.com/a/1fVpv1m https://imgur.com/a/1fVpv1m Text of the post: >> DISCLAIMER: Unfortunately, this subreddit only allows one image per post, so I apologize for the image quality, as I had to collage images of this event into one large portrait. Yes! I am that crazy lad who rented out a movie theatre last year for my graduation party with the Steam Deck! (on r/SteamDeck) This time, I decided to do the same thing except a bit bigger and beyond. As you can see, I have EIGHT PLAYER WIRELESS CO-OP working! No, this is not magic, but a ton of thinking and planning on my part to get this working. This is done by using an external Bluetooth 5.3 Adapter alongside an Xbox Wireless Adapter. To make this simple, this would split the connections to have 4 controllers that are far away in range using Bluetooth, and the other half using 2.4GHz that the Xbox Wireless Adapter uses. I used 4 off brand Nintendo Switch Pro Controllers (that were amazingly better than the authentic Pro Controllers) to connect to the Bluetooth Adapter, and used 4 Xbox Controllers to connect to the wireless adapter. What included in my rental was 4 hours of gaming, unlimited popcorn and drinks by the theatre, can bring food from the outside, all under $1000. Granted, this varies on location for how much theatre rentals can be, so depending on your cost of living is in your area, it could be higher or just about the same! So, you may ask “how the ** did you get 8 player co-op working?!?!” Great question. This was done by having Windows and SteamOS dual booted on my Deck, which I used a program on Windows called “NucleusCo-Op” that lets you basically turn any game into a splitscreen title. After we did Minecraft and BOII CoOp, I had to (no pun intended) switch over to SteamOS to play the Switch games. Would love to see a port of NucleusCoOp on Linux so I can get rid of Windows DualBoot permanently! I did a lot of effort to get this all set up and working in less than a month, as I pretty much planned this last minute. As you can see with the 8 player Minecraft, it looks like old console Minecraft with its visuals and HUD/UI! This is because of a great mod called “Legacy4J” which literally accurately recreates console Minecraft if it were continued today. It even has native controller support built into it, even for the Steam Deck! The Developer of the Mod, Wilyicaro, helped to make this work with NucleusCoOp! Shoutout to him, he’s an amazing man, as he did all of this less than a week to get it working for me. Same goes with Call of Duty: Black Ops II, as I also used NucleusCoOp for that. So, how did it all run? Minecraft with a TON of performance mods, ran at a perfect 60fps the entire time, with each instance having 6 chunks to save on memory. COD BOII with all of the lowest graphical settings, ran at 60fps in all of the instances. It’s truly amazing, considering I was using Windows, a non-supported platform for the Steam Deck besides a new driver about 8-12 months, with such incredible graphical performance. And yes, as you can see with later images, I also emulated Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and held a mega tourney all emulated on the Steam Deck as well with flawless performance. I, at my own birthday party against really good players, somehow managed to win despite the fact at my graduation party last year, I lost in the first round LOL. Snake for the win, baby! You may ask, “Is this practical? Why not use a gaming PC to do all of this?” Amazingly, I would consider this to be more practical than using a gaming PC because of its size. I fit all of the 8 controllers I had, along with my Steam Deck, its dock that had a USB hub connected to two USB extenders of the adapters, fit in a small tiny plastic tub. With a gaming PC, have fun hauling a large 40lb metal box around and take a lot of time to attempt to set up. Steam Deck was literally just plug and play with the projector supporting HDMI! The Steam Deck is clearly powerful enough to be able to handle what I’ve done, with having 8 player splitscreen AND Nintendo Switch emulation off of one singular device. It’s genuinely amazing. Anyhow, I hope this post inspires someone to do what I did, to rent out a movie theatre and use their Deck to play games with good lads and have a ton of fun, because it’s worth it!
- mindslight 3y ago
  (fwiw: imgur has been blocking much longer than reddit has)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > Access it through the old.reddit.com or use any Web Archive out there. old.reddit.com doesn't work for that anymore
d_k_f 3y ago
Interestingly, at least one of the old apps (rif/Reddit is fun) still works through VPN for me even if the web UI blocks the same thread from exactly the same IP.

causi 3y ago

I wonder what the input latency was with that setup.

peer2pay 3y ago
Smash ultimate has notoriously bad netcode so playing on this setup locally was probably a step up in terms of latency
nvarsj 3y ago
I’ve tried this before and the latency was awful. Must be like 200ms+. But I guess casual players won’t really notice.

roland35 3y ago

What a great idea! Movie theaters often have arcades, but I wonder if setting up a more permanent multiplayer game in theatre would be worthwhile?

cyanydeez 3y ago
[flagged]

underseacables 3y ago

My family and I have rented a movie theater several times for our kids to watch their favorite films. As a once in a while treat, it's worth it, but only during the week because the weekends are too expensive.

wodenokoto 3y ago
What are we taking about price wise here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ultrasaurus 3y ago
  One partial data point: I talked to my local theatre and they don't have the rights for any of the movies I wanted so that adds ~$400+ (we're still talking, I don't have a full quote)
- underseacables 3y ago
  The last time we did it was on a Wednesday afternoon last summer, and it was $250. We live next to a major metropolitan area and it was a big regal cineplex. Smaller towns might be cheaper. We just had to bring in the Blu-ray, they said DVD doesn't show as well. For that price, we have the entire theater to ourselves, and we could invite up to 30 friends for free. We had our own concierge she would bring us food. For a special event, absolutely worth it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

komali2 3y ago

I wish games that are 8player on switch were so on their PC versions as well, such as Towerfall. The only 8 player local co-op PC game I know of are the Jackbox games. And maybe move or die?

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
Eight player Towerfall is supported on PC! The developer just made it a separate build of the game for some reason. https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/towerfall-8-player https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/towerfall-8-player (The store page calls this a "mod", but it was created by the game's original developer.)
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
MageQuit, up to 10 (I'm a couch coop/vs addict)

abrookewood 3y ago

The way they did it was even more impressive: "[Nucleus] Adds remarkably smooth split-screen functionality to hundreds of PC games" https://nucleus-coop.github.io/ https://nucleus-coop.github.io/

scotty79 3y ago

Was the steamdeck running 8 instances of Minecraft at 60fps and combine their output with nucleus at the same time?

bigthiccranch 3y ago
8 Instances of Minecraft at once. 60fps cap limit for all of them with VSYNC enabled to maintain smooth frame times. Chunks in each instance were set to 6, which is still wild to me that even though Minecraft is running on different threads and cores, technically the Steam Deck was rendering 48 chunks at once. Had to install a ton of performance mods, such as Sodium, to maintain great framerate. Only dips we had, were people purposely lagging the game by flying really fast in spectator mode when they died, which we promptly asked them to not to do that.

haunter 3y ago

What’s the refresh rate of film projectors? The idea sounds good but are they capable of anything above 60hz?

reaperman 3y ago
I know this first part sounds pedantic, but bear with me. You can't use a "film" projector for this, because there's no physical film strip. So this can only be done in a theater that has a digital projector (or can have one set up, if it's not usually there). The most widely used "3D" digital projector for theaters runs at a "refresh rate" of 144Hz, alternating between left-eye and right-eye. Refresh rate is not a frame rate, which for movies is typically still 24fps, but flashing the same frame on and off more often than 24Hz reduces the perception of light/dark "flickering". I assume that digital projectors can support a frame rate equal to their refresh rate, but I may be mistaken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D Actual film projectors are incredible engineering - the film actually has to stop for a split second on each frame while the light shutter is open. For understanding film projectors, I really love sharing this video with my friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En__V0oEJsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En__V0oEJsU

karaterobot 3y ago

In grad school, when we had the keys to the lecture hall, we'd just check out a few projectors from the school library and have Halo 2 parties on the weekends in the big auditorium. Nobody got hurt, plenty of nerds got fragged though.

bigthiccranch 3y ago

Hello! I am the guy who rented out a movie theatre and used my Steam Deck to set up a BOII and Minecraft 8 player split screen! I saw some messages regarding input lag, which I will address it in here; Input lag isn’t terribly noticeable unless if you were playing at a lower framerate. I actually did this last year where I rented out a movie theatre with my Steam Deck, which I played some games such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with split screen, but had terrible, I mean TERRIBLE input lag because of the framerate being 30fps. So this time for this party, I stuck with games that ran at 60FPS, which the input lag was really minimal. As for Smash Bros, there was already input lag created by the emulator I used, which is Yuzu, so when we were playing, it felt like we were playing Super Smash Bros. Online! If you have anymore questions, definitely let me know!

defaultcompany 3y ago

I have thought for a long time someone needs to make a system where 200 kids can show up at their local theater and play multiplayer games on the big screen using their phones as input devices. The games would have to be custom made for this system and you’d need a local server and network. But you could license it to theaters and they would make a killing getting kids into the theaters on Saturday morning.