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Update: There's a hotfix out. It has some media foundation fixes to install properly.


Original article

There's no need to wait for Valve and CodeWeavers to update Proton for Steam Play, if you're willing to do a little bit of extra work with a custom build like Proton GE.

Proton GE is one of the unofficial builds of Proton briefly talked about in a previous article, with it just recently getting a rather big update.

Proton-4.15-GE-1 was released a few hours ago updating it to the recently released Wine 4.15. Additionally, it adds in Wine's Vkd3d for running Direct3D 12 games through Vulkan, which you can turn on using "PROTON_USE_VKD3D=1 %command%" as a launch option. There's also an update to D9VK which is on by default, use "PROTON_NO_D9VK=1 %command%" as a launch option to turn it off. On top of that there's also various gamepad updates, fsync was updated and a bunch of Media Foundation work went into it too.

It might sound a little scary using a custom build of Proton for Steam Play but installation is easy though. Close Steam, download the Proton-4.15-GE-1.tar.gz file and place the extracted contents into:

~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/

For the newer Linux gamer: a folder with a dot at the start is hidden. Press CTRL + H to toggle hidden files and folders on/off.

When you re-open Steam, it will then show up as an option to force onto a game. Do so by right clicking the game in your Steam library, go to Properties and then this is at the bottom:

Easy as that.

See the full release notes and download here.

What's the benefit over using the Valve provided official Proton? Custom builds might come with fixes you need right away. Say a game is updated and breaks with the official Proton in Steam Play. You might wait weeks or a month but a custom build like Proton GE could come a lot sooner. It's possible in future, that some custom builds might even do things Valve won't or can't officially. It's just another option to get your games running directly in the Steam client on Linux.

I think it's just awesome that Valve has enabled the use of such custom tools. Just like Boxtron for DOSBox and Roberta for ScummVM, there's a lot of fun to be had.

Hat tip to Bogan.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Proton, Steam, Update, Wine
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Torqachu Sep 8, 2019
Proton 4.15-GE-4 (last release on github) = game playable without videos
tested with steam (runtime) and steam (native), game base and game + open beta, with and without mfplat.dll from windows 7 (only dll not entire workaround)
os Antergos full updated (update come from arch :D )

ask to install wine mono, for one second I saw a windows with protonsomething before game start.
Torqachu Sep 8, 2019
Quoting: 0ttmanHas anyone had success on getting the cinematics in Darksiders Warmastered Edition working with 4.15 GE-2? It's not working for me.
Quoting: grigiNot for me either, All I noticed differently is that it asked to download winemono, but no cinematics to me either?

Eureka, I found the solution sifting through the links ... we need to have wintricks installed for the automagic
0ttman Sep 9, 2019
Quoting: Torqachu
Quoting: 0ttmanHas anyone had success on getting the cinematics in Darksiders Warmastered Edition working with 4.15 GE-2? It's not working for me.
Quoting: grigiNot for me either, All I noticed differently is that it asked to download winemono, but no cinematics to me either?

Eureka, I found the solution sifting through the links ... we need to have wintricks installed for the automagic


Yes it works great now with 4.15 GE-4.
ghiuma Sep 10, 2019
Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE the audio works well, the games work well on par with Windows, thanks for the tip XD


Last edited by ghiuma on 10 September 2019 at 8:24 am UTC
grigi Sep 10, 2019
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Yay, thanks it works. Just having winetricks installed resolves it for me too!
Philip_Fairchild Dec 26, 2019
I'm having trouble getting the GE custom proton to show up in my steam options. I've done everything that the guide has told me to. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but I must be doing something. Any tips?
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