As we speculated previously, Valve have now officially announced their new version of 'Steam Play' for Linux gaming using a modified distribution of Wine called Proton, which is available on GitHub.
What does it do? In short: it allows you to play Windows games on Linux, directly through the Steam client as if they were a Linux game.
What many people suspected turned out to be true, DXVK development was actually funded by Valve. They actually employed the DXVK developer since February 2018. On top of that, they also helped to fund: vkd3d (Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan), OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges, wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11 and more.
The amount of work that has gone into this—it's ridiculous.
Here's what they say it improves:
- Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
- DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact.
- Fullscreen support has been improved: fullscreen games will be seamlessly stretched to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop.
- Improved game controller support: games will automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Expect more out-of-the-box controller compatibility than even the original version of the game.
- Performance for multi-threaded games has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine.
It currently has a limited set of games that are supported, but even so it's quite an impressive list that they're putting out there. Which includes DOOM, FINAL FANTASY VI, Into The Breach, NieR: Automata, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and more. They will enable many more titles as progress on it all continues.
To be clear, this is available right now. To get it, you need to be in the Steam Client Beta.
There will be drawbacks, like possible performance issues and games that rely on some DRM might likely never be supported, but even so the amount of possibilities this opens up has literally split my head open with Thor's mighty hammer.
Holy shit. Please excuse the language, but honestly, I'm physically shaking right now I don't quite know how to process this.
Update #1: I spoke to Valve earlier, about how buying Windows games to play with this system counts, they said this:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.Hey Liam, the normal algorithm is in effect, so if at the end of the two weeks you have more playtime on Linux, it'll be a Linux sale. Proton counts as Linux.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: SamsaiSo you think that a good way to encourage publishers and developers to support our platform is to file nonsensical negative reviews of their products for which they do not offer any kind of Linux support?No I neither said that nor do I support this but it is the way people react when a game doesn't run. No matter if we like it or not. Windows gamers do it too but since Linux users are a smaller group we stand out more. Have a look at 1-star Amazon ratings. You can see on first sight that the product the people got delivered is defective and just should be replaced but they write a bad review anyway. We can't do anything about it.
Last edited by Wendigo on 27 August 2018 at 4:32 am UTC
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Quoting: WendigoYou can see on first sight that the product the people got delivered is defective and just should be replaced but they write a bad review anyway. We can't do anything about it.
Yeah, that is a thing on every storefront that has ratings and/or reviews. From an end user standpoint the ideal choice would be to have an option to see how often a given product is delivered defective. From a supply end business standpoint, you'd never want that as there will always be at least some defective product shipped and at the least it'd require more QA to lower meaning more costs per unit and thereby a higher price leading to more complaints to field about that. For the store, caught in the middle of these two opposing forces, it's less of a problem to deal with to just let people use such review and ratings systems in such a way even if we all know it's stupid.
Anyway, after testing a handful of older indie games (so far only one of the four didn't at least play) and not a one having any audio, I did some digging online and came across someone having found terminal commands for Proton's included winecfg. Proton apparently uses some sort of dummy prefix that has the config data in it. I have to be at work in about four hours so don't have time to really play with all that just now to see if I can fix my issues, but wanted to share what I found.
WINEPREFIX=[your home directory]/.steam/root/steamapps/compatdata/[App ID of the game]/ ~/.steam/root/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7/dist/bin/wine winecfgI don't remember seeing this mentioned upthread, but I also didn't read every comment. The first part of that is likely the most important, seeing as you should be able to use any winecfg or winetricks once you know the prefix to dither about with.
Last edited by vlademir1 on 27 August 2018 at 8:28 am UTC
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Quoting: vlademir1Just a few notes:WINEPREFIX=[your home directory]/.steam/root/steamapps/compatdata/[App ID of the game]/ ~/.steam/root/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7/dist/bin/wine winecfg
I don't remember seeing this mentioned upthread, but I also didn't read every comment. The first part of that is likely the most important, seeing as you should be able to use any winecfg or winetricks once you know the prefix to dither about with.
- The actual prefix is in a subfolder named pfx, so you should add that to the end of the WINEPREFIX path.
- For me at least the "steamapps" folder should be "SteamApps". That should actually be the default, but better check your capitalization just in case.
- Depending on your Steam Play configuration, you might want to replace "Proton 3.7" in the wine path with "Proton 3.7 Beta", and remember to put the whole path in quotes or escape the whitespace with backslashes or that obviously won't work.
Taking these into account, here's what works for me:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/compatdata/[AppID]/pfx" "$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/common/Proton 3.7 Beta/dist/bin/wine" winecfgProton doesn't package winetricks, but if you've got it installed locally, you can use it with Proton's wine executable by pointing the WINE environment variable to the right place, like this:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/compatdata/[AppID]/pfx" WINE="$HOME/.steam/root/SteamApps/common/Proton 3.7 Beta/dist/bin/wine" winetricks
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Also note that if you install a game into a secondary library, that it will install both Proton and the compatdata into that secondary library as well.
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I haven't read through all of the comments but in case it wasn't mentioned yet -> here is a list of Steam games that shows how well they run with Proton.
The graph on the second table is very interesting: 59% of the games are either stable or completely stable. Pretty impressive amount.
The graph on the second table is very interesting: 59% of the games are either stable or completely stable. Pretty impressive amount.
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: WendigoValve did a really clever move here to force game developers into cross platform development. Publishers will now have to make sure that their games run on all platforms Steam supports, no matter if they intend it to run there or not since the games were made available everywhere. Even though players get a notice when starting a game via proton I guess quite a few will still down vote a game that doesn't run on Linux or OSX, so the Publishers have 3 choices:
1) Do nothing and get a bad rating that affects their future sales of the game.
2) Make sure their game runs with Proton on all operating systems that Steam supports and hope that a future change in Proton doesn't break the game.
3) Do a proper cross platform port or develop future games with cross platform in mind and have control over the game's performance on Linux and OSX.
I guess the third option is the best choice.
If you think this is going to force publishers to support Linux, you are delusional. If you start leaving shitty reviews because stuff doesnt run well on Proton... the end result will be publishers will loudly complain to Valve about it, and force them to blacklist their game from Proton.
You dont get ANYTHING by being shitty to devs and publishers. Didn't Witcher 3 teach you that ?
Your language sounds like an attack, Jaycee. Wendigo wasn't suggesting that (s)he would do this, nor advocating others. It was simply an acknowledgement that this will happen.
And Witcher 3 did teach us that this will happen.
Hopefully Valve have a plan for when it does. Because of the nature of Proton, I can see a lot of potential abuse of the refund system, along with bad reviews, as Wendigo suggests. Buy a game, doesn't run in proton, leave a crap review, refund game.
I expect Valve will update their refund Terms of Service pretty soon...
Edit: [Terms of Service are here, if anyone's interested. And for the record, I agree with Jaycee that publishers/devs won't be forced into anything here, even by bad reviews - they'll just ask for that blacklist, if such a thing even exists...]
Last edited by scaine on 27 August 2018 at 8:48 pm UTC
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Mohandevir Aug 27, 2018
Quoting: GuestQuoting: WendigoValve did a really clever move here to force game developers into cross platform development. Publishers will now have to make sure that their games run on all platforms Steam supports, no matter if they intend it to run there or not since the games were made available everywhere. Even though players get a notice when starting a game via proton I guess quite a few will still down vote a game that doesn't run on Linux or OSX, so the Publishers have 3 choices:
1) Do nothing and get a bad rating that affects their future sales of the game.
2) Make sure their game runs with Proton on all operating systems that Steam supports and hope that a future change in Proton doesn't break the game.
3) Do a proper cross platform port or develop future games with cross platform in mind and have control over the game's performance on Linux and OSX.
I guess the third option is the best choice.
If you think this is going to force publishers to support Linux, you are delusional. If you start leaving shitty reviews because stuff doesnt run well on Proton... the end result will be publishers will loudly complain to Valve about it, and force them to blacklist their game from Proton.
... And potentially make Valve wihtdraw SteamPlay completely.
Personnally I would just ban those that leave bad evaluations because of Proton.. Ok, might give a warning or two, but if it becomes viral... I may be a little too extreme... Still, Valve made it crystal clear that SteamPlay is on them, not on the devs.
Edit: And if someone leaves a bad review on a title because he decided to turn on SteamPlay on all titles... What is he thinking about?! He deserves to be banned!
This said, what I hope for is that it will convince the devs that are on the fence about supporting Linux to do it, because of Proton. But you cannot force it. That would be doing like Microsoft often does and shoot yourself in the foot... And since Steam is not a monopoly like Windows is...
Last edited by Mohandevir on 27 August 2018 at 9:27 pm UTC
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legluondunet Aug 27, 2018
Quoting: PatolaThere was already a 4) by other user, so here it goes:
5) Do an improper cross platform build like Reality Pump Studios did with Two Worlds II: Call of the Tenebrae (it has no executable) and use the Linux port slot, effectively preventing steam play from being used. Actually even some games with "proper" Linux ports that are now broken / stopped working is possible, like this bug report for steam client shows.
This issue will be resolved by Valve when you will have the possibility to launch a Windows port with SteamPlay, even if a Linux native port exists. I'm sure they will add soon this feature, it's a very wanted feature on the Proton github, because a lot of Linux native port are not maintained or/and don't work any more.
Last edited by legluondunet on 27 August 2018 at 10:41 pm UTC
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legluondunet Aug 27, 2018
Quoting: GuestIf they start allowing games with native Linux ports to be run under Proton anyway - how are the Linux porters supposed to know whether that was a "real" Linux sale, or a Windows sale thats being run on Linux via Proton... in other words, how do you stop this damaging legitimate Linux sales revenue that should go to the porters like Feral, Aspyr and VP ?
We are talking about Linux native ports that are not maintained or don't work anymore or Windows port has more features... If dev/editor maintained their port, Linux users will not need to use the Windows port, isn't it? Read the issue here:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5638
there are several reasons to ask for this feature.
Last edited by legluondunet on 27 August 2018 at 11:14 pm UTC
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Quoting: scaineBecause of the nature of Proton, I can see a lot of potential abuse of the refund system, along with bad reviews, as Wendigo suggests. Buy a game, doesn't run in proton, leave a crap review, refund game.Reviews aside, can you elaborate on what part of this you consider abuse of the refund system? I would definitely refund a game if I buy it intending to run it via Steam Play and find out it doesn't run well enough. The 2-hour allowance is very well suited for this kind of demo/test run approach.
Quoting: GuestIf they start allowing games with native Linux ports to be run under Proton anyway - how are the Linux porters supposed to know whether that was a "real" Linux sale, or a Windows sale thats being run on Linux via Proton... in other words, how do you stop this damaging legitimate Linux sales revenue that should go to the porters like Feral, Aspyr and VP ?Wouldn't the problem be the opposite since Proton play counts as Linux? i.e. "Bad devs" who no longer support a broken port still get a cut from Steam sales even though people are effectively forced to emulate the Windows version instead of playing their port.
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