For those of you interested in running some of your Windows-only games on Linux, you might want to take a look at Wine PBA.
The project started with the developer being interested in playing World of Warcraft on Linux, however, from their blog post they said Wine's performance "still leaves much to be desired". What's interesting, is that this developer wasn't actually familiar with Direct3D or the Wine codebase before getting started with Wine PBA, so I'm really quite impressed with their work.
Wine PBA makes use of the ARB_buffer_storage OpenGL extension, here's how the author describes it from the GitHub page:
A set of patches to allocate dynamic wined3d_buffers from a single persistently mapped buffer managed by a heap allocator, reducing the need for command stream synchronization.
This patchset is prototype-quality at the moment. If ARB_buffer_storage is not present, you're not going to have a good time.
From the blog post, the developer showed off some impressive performance gains in their limited tests. There's a few users discussing it in our forum too, with some reports looking quite promising too. The code is undergoing some pretty active development, with commits happening near-daily.
If you're interested in trying it out, Lutris actually provides builds of Wine with the PBA patches applied, so that's pretty sweet—if you can get Lutris to actually work properly that is. I tried myself, but I had major issues getting GOG Galaxy and Steam to work with Lutris and Wine, safe to say the user experience could do with some work but I don't want to end up ranting about Lutris here.
Will be fun to keep an eye on this and see what becomes of it. Hopefully, if the work proves valuable and the developer can keep cleaning it up, it may make its way into a future proper build of Wine.
For record: I rarely ever use Wine, I absolutely prefer buying and playing native Linux games. However, like many, I have quite a few older Windows-only games I would still like to play through. I think Wine itself is an invaluable tool for getting more people into Linux.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: GuestYes, that might be what's happening here.Quoting: liamdaweI was just trying to install Steam in Lutris, then run some games to test.
Edit: Even doing it this way, Steam just seems to exit by itself after a minute or two. I don't think I will be getting any testing done...trying a different Wine version to see if it helps, Wine 3.2 from Lutris just doesn't seem to like Steam.
Ah yes, I've had that issue too where it just quits, I think that can be solved by going into "Game Options" on the configuration and untick "Stop Steam after game exits"
Lutris certainly has its kinks, even after I've installed a game and re ticked "Stop Steam after game exits" I find sometimes it still doesn't exit upon exiting a game, and just other little kinks like not being able to use my mouse scroll in the configuration options, otherwise it starts changing settings about, so I have to use the arrow buttons to scroll up and down on config options
I guess the way I've been thinking about Lutris is partly to blame, I've been thinking of it as a launcher for anything, not just a manager to run specific games. I was expecting it to be more like install Steam in Lutris > then do stuff, but it seems it's not.
Quoting: KimyrielleThere is no real need to install standalone Steam in Lutris, as it's considered a "runner". Lutris will actually install Steam only once (the first time you install the runner) and then every other game using Steam will get installed into it, so all your games are in the same context.Yeah, see above :)
Quoting: KimyrielleThere is no real need to install standalone Steam in Lutris, as it's considered a "runner". Lutris will actually install Steam only once (the first time you install the runner) and then every other game using Steam will get installed into it, so all your games are in the same context.
The problem with doing that, is that many games require different tweaks to Wine prefix, and it can get seriously messy at some point, that the only option is to blow away the whole prefix. If you install everything in the single prefix, it's quite disruptive.
That's why it's way more flexible to install each game in its own Wine prefix. You can easily remove the whole prefix and reinstall one game from scratch without affecting anything else. It works perfectly for DRM-free GOG games, but for Steam users it's a bloat problem, since they would need to duplicate Steam client in each.
Last edited by Shmerl on 2 March 2018 at 3:50 pm UTC
https://appimage.github.io/
There are a growing number of apps here for appimage for instance. It is crowd sourced. Why not games ?
Surely having a site where the image contains all the relevant MS files, specific libraries, controller tunings within an image where clicking runs the steam, GOG, website url etc.. downloader for your account and builds the game files into the image as a one time executable should work better ? You pretty much forever have a working instance of the game on your machine no matter if you return to it 5 years later.
If it was possible that would be a real draw for noobies coming from Windows and also mean less or no endless WINE tweaking. The central store for the app image can auto update the scrips if needed.
Apologises if im missing something here But it 'seems' an image based system would be like a self contained single click .exe for Linux which worked everytime.
ElectricPrism Mar 2, 2018
Quoting: meggermanSaid something similar before, but isn't the concept of WINE 'bottles',Lutris scripts, GOG community scripts etc.. kind of old news now Appimage, Flatpack/Snaps are out ?
https://appimage.github.io/
There are a growing number of apps here for appimage for instance. It is crowd sourced. Why not games ?
Surely having a site where the image contains all the relevant MS files, specific libraries, controller tunings within an image where clicking runs the steam, GOG, website url etc.. downloader for your account and builds the game files into the image as a one time executable should work better ? You pretty much forever have a working instance of the game on your machine no matter if you return to it 5 years later.
If it was possible that would be a real draw for noobies coming from Windows and also mean less or no endless WINE tweaking. The central store for the app image can auto update the scrips if needed.
Apologises if im missing something here But it 'seems' an image based system would be like a self contained single click .exe for Linux which worked everytime.
I think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.
Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.
Quoting: ElectricPrismI think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.
Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.
So do all the usual 're-distributable' files for WINE come directly from MS ? If so what happens if MS stop hosting them. Sorry if these are noob questions just never really thought about that, obviously there are licencing agreements i see for MS software you agree to when you install a WINE game.. do you have to agree to these each time a game is installed in Lutris using the same re-distributables or is once enough. Does the Lutris application agree for you ?
But i do see what your saying.
Just to clarify im not talking about the actual game content.Piracy is bad M.kay.
burningserenity Mar 2, 2018
Quoting: meggermanQuoting: ElectricPrismI think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.
Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.
So do all the usual 're-distributable' files for WINE come directly from MS ? If so what happens if MS stop hosting them. Sorry if these are noob questions just never really thought about that, obviously there are licencing agreements i see for MS software you agree to when you install a WINE game.. do you have to agree to these each time a game is installed in Lutris using the same re-distributables or is once enough. Does the Lutris application agree for you ?
But i do see what your saying.
Just to clarify im not talking about the actual game content.Piracy is bad M.kay.
Redistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.
Quoting: burningserenityRedistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.
Thx. So what kind of thing is @Electricprism referring too ? As i said, not the actual game files but re-distributables and Linux libs that may be required if any.
burningserenity Mar 3, 2018
Quoting: meggermanQuoting: burningserenityRedistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.
Thx. So what kind of thing is @Electricprism referring too ? As i said, not the actual game files but re-distributables and Linux libs that may be required if any.
I'm not 100% sure on what Appimage development entails, but the ones I used were self-contained apps. @Electricprism probably thinks, as do I, that to distribute games as Appimages you would need to include the whole game, including copyrighted content.
It would be better to use Flatpak, since you could just distribute a preconfigured WINE prefix with only the redistributable that are licensed properly, and have the user provide the game files.
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