Proton and Wine

[Grogan]

Well, we don't have a Proton/Wine thread yet.

I just went to do a new build of my proton-tkg and noticed that Valve Bleeding Edge is now Wine 9.0 based!

I got as far as building the vr_client and it bombed out on inapplicable patches. I looked at the source file and see they aren't needed anymore so I commented them out in the scripts, but I still don't know if that's going to build. I might have to do some gymnastics to skip it altogether (I don't have a VR headset and have no plans to). The wine builds completed, the proton media converter completed, but there's vr_client, nvapi (which I also don't care about) and the dxvk and vkd3d-proton builds but those will be fine (I just upgraded those on my system last night).

I hope I can get this sorted, I'm eager to try it. I'd rather ping the guy with solutions if I report it.

P.S. It also looks like proton_9.0 is stable now. I can't open Steam right now (it'll break my game configurations because my configured proton tool is missing) so I can't check to see if it's being pushed out yet.

P.P.S. Yep, removing the vr_client patches was all that was needed. No other gotchas further down.

[Grogan]

When the Ubisoft client updates, it works, but it is re-launched by the updater and seems to launch out of context. It prompts for an Ubisoft login and if you give it, it opens up the full Ubisoft client.

Instead, if a login prompt comes up, just kill it (click the x will suffice) and wait until it dies out and the Steam button says Play again.

Launch the game again normally, the updated client will load, there is no login and your game will launch. It's supposed to be just tied to your Steam account.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah that's what I've been doing for quite a while now when that happens.

[Zema Bus]

I just played Serious Sam Fusion for a few mins, I hadn't played it since 2019, and I got an achievement:

Kill an enemy with a gib torn from another enemy. 11% of players have this achievement

I'm sure I've done that before in the separate games. Seems like there would have been more players having done that in this one for something so simple.

[Grogan]

Sometimes when you suddenly get a stupid achievement, it's because they've added new ones to the game since you last played it. When they do that, it throws off the stats too, like "3% of players have this achievement". Yeah, because it's a 5 year old game that nobody is playing, that you just added achievements to lol

[Grogan]

I tried Serious Sam Fusion for a bit tonight. The native Vulkan one, that's been beta since 2017 lol

The last time I tried that was about a year ago, I'd not tested it on the new box yet. It worked OK, I turned off vsync and set the framerate limit to 120 FPS (Vsync isn't really useful if my display is 165 Hz) to get it a bit smoother.

That's only good for about 20 minutes for me nowadays anyway though, do some sledge hammering, cycle through the guns and that's about it. I did play my favourite level though, the Museum level and that maze of Cairo alleyways after.

[Grogan]

So my nephew couldn't get the GoG edition of Fallout 3 working on Windows 11. It's an old 32 bit DirectX 9 game.

He decided to go install it in Linux (Manjaro I gave him) to see if it worked there. Note that I didn't give him Lutris, and he only had wine-staging distro packages because I installed it to pull in dependencies. I only had him set up for Steam games (I gave him a custom proton-tkg build and stuff). I told him I was going to get him set up for non-steam games too, but hadn't because I didn't really think he had that much need.

What did he do? Double clicked the installer exe like he would in Windows and it ran with Wine and it installed and the game worked out of the box launched from a shortcut

That's funny (and I am SO glad it worked for him). It gives him incentive to use it more. Oh yeah, and he's been using LibreOffice on Linux, and he was telling me how nice it was.

[Grogan]

Having to interface with binary software (Steam and its pinned dependencies and runtimes) really sucks. Valve has been hacking on wine-gstreamer and has broken it for native gstreamer on Arch (proton-tkg is as native as it can be, while still having to interface with the Steam runtimes). It looks to me like it's barfing on codecs that Valve's gstreamer doesn't have.

Note that this wouldn't affect just using Valve's Proton builds, like Proton 9.0 or Proton Experimental in Steam because they are more containerized. (So this shouldn't be a problem for normal users on Arch)

My last build where the protonmediaconverter (gstreamer) works was on July 3, I have to use that one for those games until I figure it out. A lot of Unreal games use that. I'm working on a built-in gstreamer and ffmpeg (kludge!), but still unsure on what I have to disable... and that's just a theory at this point.

This shit happened just when I was enjoying some Borderlands 3 again (which is non-progressible if the embedded videos don't play, quest triggers are tied to their completion). I reset my playthrough again so I could play the Bounty of Blood and Guns, Love and Tentacles DLC's. Those are actually my favourite things in the game. I never have to keep more than one proton-tkg build. Moreover, I use the same internal and display names for all my proton builds, so I don't have to configure the games, so it's annoying to have to manage two. At least I can do that though.

[Zema Bus]

He really lucked out having that exe just work.

[Grogan]

I can't remember the last time I played it (~ 2 months ago?), but I felt like testing Borderlands 3 last night as I was in the mood to play a mindless shooting game for a little while.

It wouldn't run, moreover, it was crashing the Steam client right out before any game window appeared. I tried several different protons, theirs and mine and the result was the same. I concluded that could only be Steam client API runtime related, if it's crashing the client right out (everything just disappears). I didn't want to play it badly enough to do any further troubleshooting, so I just uninstalled it to regain 150 Gb. I do things like that when I'm pissed off.

Today that was bugging me, so I had a look around to see if anyone else was reporting Borderlands 3, or Unreal games causing that. Top of the list in protondb it's confirmed (two recent posts)

"Current Steam Beta will cause the game and itself to crash. Opt out of the beta program to avoid those problems."

"Switches to "launching" then causes Steam to completely crash. Previously was working without issue for 50-ish hours of game time."

So the Steam client broke its runtime interface. I would expect other Unreal 4 games to have the same behaviour.

[Zema Bus]

I'm not running the beta but I tested mine, it doesn't crash the client but it no longer launches. It complains that Steam isn't running (even though it is) and then exists.

[Grogan]

Ahh, that'll be the Steam client interface too then. Valve is going to have to fix that.

Steam has really become bullshit. It has become the unwanted middle man. I have so much more freedom setting up prefixes in Lutris.

[Grogan]

I got Borderlands 3 working with the non-beta Steam client. I downgraded the client and reinstalled the game from scratch (I had physically deleted the directories after uninstalling it).

Unfortunately, I found out that my proton media converter doesn't work against the system's gstreamer anymore though (it bloody well compiles though). It had been a long time since I've played this game. So I have to use Proton Experimental (or probably any Valve proton), which is linked against the gstreamer in the Steam Linux runtime environment.

[Grogan]

I fixed my proton media converter (libprotonmediaconverter.so) by downgrading my system's gstreamer packages to 1.24.9 (two point releases ago). I actually had built packages archived, but the packages needed to be recompiled against newer stuff on the system, and I disabled neon (http transport and webdav plugin) because it wouldn't compile against the version on Arch now.

-D gst-plugins-bad:neon=disabled

Arch sure likes to fuck my stuff up.

[Zema Bus]

They keep you on your toes

[Grogan]

So many games are working well with wine ntsync, both the proton-tkg I built and a wine-tkg runner for Lutris.

In Steam, I have tested Starfield (which benefits from it), Borderlands 3 (and my protonmediaconverter works in that build), Sniper Elite 4, 5 and Resistance, Rage 2 and even my brand new Atomfall game just released today worked out of the box with it.

In Lutris, the Bioshock games can use this. Bioshock Remastered and friends can't use esync or fsync, or they have texture loading problems, you have to use the old wine server side sync. It works well with ntsync though. I also played Control with my new wine runner. I won't dare try the EA App (it didn't work last time I tried this), I don't want to take a chance on screwing up that wine prefix. I have a lot of games in there and the EA client can be a pain in the ass to fix.

Not all games work though. The Ubisoft client just crashes out before loading. Also, I tried an old game, F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin and it couldn't run. It just launched a little crash dialog to click OK to.

It's not really suitable for all use. What's bad about it is, neither esync nor fsync can exist in the wine build if using ntsync. The ntsync patchsets remove esync from everywhere. (I was fixing some patches and a lot of code related to esync is removed and replaced as I was painfully made aware of lol). So you can't bet the farm on it and build a system wine with it, nor a proton tool that's supposed to work for general use etc.

P.S. Surprise surprise... I had to try it and the EA App works just dandy with that wine 10.4 ntsync runner. So far the games I've tried work well (Mass Effect games and Dragon Age Veilguard)

[Zema Bus]

Where there any issues and workarounds I might have missed since the Sniper Elite 5 patch late last year?

I was going to get a quick game in but instead I got this:

SniperElite5_SteamAPI_error.jpg (33.39 KiB) Viewed 54967 times

I ran into that before but I can't remember the details or how I resolved it.

[Grogan]

No, there haven't been any problems like that with Sniper Elite 5.

Maybe try checking integrity/repairing the game? It sounds like its Steam integration dlls could be borked or something.

[Zema Bus]

Ok, I'll do that. Sniper Elite 4 launched so I played that for a while last night.

[Grogan]

Sniper Elite 4, while older graphics, has the best maps. They are well designed, intricate and highly artistic. There are things I like better about Sniper Elite 5 (and Resistance is the same engine), for example having actual suppressors permanently on the rifles (rather than "suppressed ammo" which magically puts a suppressor on your rifle), workbenches so you can change your loadout mid-map etc. but Sniper Elite 4 is really the best of those games.

I noticed something in your screenshot, the green gradient titlebar on that error dialog. Is that your window manager's window decorations? (KDE?). I quite like that.

[Zema Bus]

Oh yeah that's from the MATE desktop theme I cobbled together I forget what the name of the theme the titlebar came from, submarine something.

[Grogan]

It's a really nice gradient and titlebar text. Sometime when you're in that, can you make me a screenshot with some windows open (e.g. foreground and background)?

When you get to fixing Sniper Elite 5, try the verification first, and if that isn't the issue, next try copying the game data away and deleting the prefix. Run the game once, get to the menu and quit and copy back your data etc.

[Zema Bus]

I combined two different themes, BlackMATE for the controls and Green-Submarine for the window borders. There's also a Blue-Submarine variant. I could probably get it darker overall. With a dark theme and dark background it kind of looks like there's a florescent bulb in the window decoration or a light shining on it

MATE_desktop1.jpg (282.18 KiB) Viewed 53321 times

MATE_desktop_theme1.jpg (36.82 KiB) Viewed 53321 times

MATE_desktop_theme2.jpg (34.28 KiB) Viewed 53321 times

Sniper Elite 5 is working now, the file integrity verification found no errors. I backed up and deleted the prefix and tried to launch it again, but I still got that error, and it popped up after the initial launch settings window but before the game launched, so it never created a new prefix. I even went so far as to uninstall / reinstall the game to no avail. Then I checked to see what Proton version it was using, and it was on Experimental, so I set it to 9.0-4, and on launch it asked about enabling Easy Anticheat, I usually keep that disabled but I enabled it just in the off chance that had something to do with it. But it launched normally after that.

[Grogan]

That looks awesome. It's all puffy looking like Keramik (my favourite style in KDE 3). Very nice rounded corners too. I'd make the black 000000 though

That's weird, SE5 should certainly work with Proton Experimental. I use way more "experimental" shit than that (valve bleeding edge for a long time, which was your Proton Experimental at one time, before this wine 10.4 ntsync proton-tkg). Oh well, as long as it stays working.

[Zema Bus]

Thanks Grogan. Maybe one of these days you'll play around with the MATE desktop I've found it to work pretty well with games, better than Plasma. It was a nice compromise between low overhead for games and usability, plus the compositing hasn't been an issue.

[Zema Bus]

I had some of that garbled audio in Sniper Elite 5 last night, it hasn't happened in Sniper Elite 4 so far, and I've been playing that for about an hour each night.

I've been playing the docks solo survivor map in Sniper Elite 4, tonight I was sniping from the roof tops, I nailed several of them in a row with one shot while they were approaching from the train tunnel. I placed mines on all the approaches to the roof since eventually some of them will try to climb up there after me. Then when there's only one enemy left I'll come down off the roof and collect ammo from the bodies (beats trying to do that in the 20 seconds between waves) before finishing off the last guy. There was one funny moment when there was only one enemy left. He made that yell that they sometimes do when firing, then he throws a grenade that bounces off a low wall and ends up killing himself, and ending the wave

[Zema Bus]

I finally completed all twelve waves of the solo challenge in Sniper Elite 4 on the Dockyards map. First time I've made it all the way through. The final wave had 29 enemies including two tanks. I got one with a teller mine and the other with a Panzerschreck I got off one of the bodies. I had to dodge multiple air strikes too, usually it's the officers that fire the flare guns, but in wave 12 regular soldiers were firing them and air strikes were coming in one after the other. That was a workout, I was determined to get all the way through it, especially once I was past wave 6. Now I can check that off my bucket list

[Grogan]

I must have missed the post above. The garbled audio, was that with Linux 6.14? You can only do it from the settings on the launcher (it's not there in-game), but setting Audio Reverb to Off should fix that. I had it in Sniper Elite 4 as well, but I think increasing buffers fixed it there. I have it disabled in all those games (except for testing).

I don't play those other game modes. Survival, or similar. In Sniper Elite Resistance there's a new challenge and you have to do them if you want to unlock certain weapon parts. In game, you have to collect Propaganda posters from each map to unlock the challenges. Some of them are really fucking stupid, like you have to run around with only a pistol and kill all the enemies on a timer (killing enemies extends your time etc.) Others are simply sniper rifle challenges, that are easy to finish in several seconds.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah, right after installing 6.14. I got the garbled audio in Sniper Elite 4 a few nights ago but not last night. Thanks, I'll turn that off next time I launch it.

That doesn't sound like a fun challenge, nothing but a pistol on a timer.

[Grogan]

I have tried increasing pulseaudio buffers, pre-allocating a 2 Mb buffer for the hd-audio driver in kernel (which should not be necessary with this hardware), I tried a different CPU scheduler (CachyOS patches with Bore) and different pre-emption models. Currently using "Scheduler controlled preemption" (formerly "lazy preempt"). Apparently that one has less overhead and is better for throughput at the expense of some interactivity.

This seems to be the only audio problem I have.

I tried asking on the Steam Linux forum if anyone else was playing Sniper Elite games using Linux 6.14 but got zero replies, which is typical whenever I ask a question somewhere. Most people that would post there would be using Ubuntu and distro kernels, though.