Valve adds support for games using CEG DRM through Steam Play Proton

Quoting: GuestOut of curiosity, is there a commit or patch somewhere to go along with this?

All I could spot was this:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/6fdc1b54bc62ea54e573370a49e7d3b2d606ab3f

Nothing as far as I can see on the proton-wine side. But I assume most of the work needed was done on the Steam client.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: GuestOut of curiosity, is there a commit or patch somewhere to go along with this?

All I could spot was this:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/6fdc1b54bc62ea54e573370a49e7d3b2d606ab3f

Nothing as far as I can see on the proton-wine side. But I assume most of the work needed was done on the Steam client.

Makes sense I suppose. Still a little annoying: anything to fix it is not going to be open sourced, and running Steam through wine directly (this is what I still do on rare occasions) means it probably still won't work. DRM is just plain evil.

Not quite. Most of them from what I've seen worked in plain Wine, just not Proton since it uses the native Steam client.

AvP 2010... need to check that. I got it working before, by copying over the CEG signed executables from a wine Steam install on the same machine, but it was a hit or miss... it worked every other day. So it does start and you can start playing, but there are certain trigger points where it can crashed. E.g. when activating the first generator in the marine campaign. or when looking at the overseers in the predator campaign. Or when killing the first alien in horde mode. When I found a date that was working, I used `faketime -f 'YYYY-MM-DD' %command%` and was able to play. But it seems the date(s) where it works changes, if you accidentally have overwritten the executables with a verify. On a side note: as the executables are signed for your current installation, a verify will always re-download them.

First check, it does start.

Aliens: Colonial Marines fails to start, but not the game itself, so there is a new window popping up: Steam Client Service, which closes, and then I get the message:
 
The Steam servers are too busy to handle your request for Alien: Colonial Marines. Error Code (2)

But this is exciting. Especially as the statement before was: we need help from the Steam Windows client devs, it's tricky, not many games are using CEG so it's not a priority, it might even never come.

And I had sever issues getting those games to run via wine Steam (through Lutris), as often the Steam friends network was offline. Turned out, I had to turn of hardware acceleration in the wine Steam (Windows) client...
But I prefer to be able to play those games directly through the Linux Steam client of course ;)

edit: just checked a few of the trigger points, yeah AvP 2010 seems to work now! \o/
edit2: oh my, looks like I didn't set proton to experimental for A:CM... it also does start. Needs some playtesting I guess to see if it really works, but this is already a step forward.


Last edited by Corben on 29 October 2021 at 1:45 pm UTC

But three of those titles (Bioshock, Hitman, Saints Row) are Linux native and have always worked?


Last edited by Beamboom on 29 October 2021 at 11:12 am UTC

Quoting: BeamboomBut three of those titles (Bioshock, Hitman, Saints Row) are Linux native and have always worked?

Yes, except Saints Row the Third performance is horrible on the "native" client

Quoting: BeamboomBut three of those titles (Bioshock, Hitman, Saints Row) are Linux native and have always worked?

Doesn't matter. The point of Wine and Proton is to eventually run everything. Even games that have native ports, they might share issues with other games that when they get fixed up fix others. Plus, as we know, Proton tends to get better performance than older ports.

Quoting: BeamboomBut three of those titles (Bioshock, Hitman, Saints Row) are Linux native and have always worked?

I don't think Hitman Absolution is native, and the other two while they still work for the moment, at some point might run into problems.
I remember BI working perfectly before, but recently I had some issues starting it, and the situation could get even worse in the future.

some of these games are DRM free on gog and run perfectly fine with proton
i dont get it why dev arent replacing the DRM files

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: GuestOut of curiosity, is there a commit or patch somewhere to go along with this?

All I could spot was this:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/6fdc1b54bc62ea54e573370a49e7d3b2d606ab3f

Nothing as far as I can see on the proton-wine side. But I assume most of the work needed was done on the Steam client.

Makes sense I suppose. Still a little annoying: anything to fix it is not going to be open sourced, and running Steam through wine directly (this is what I still do on rare occasions) means it probably still won't work. DRM is just plain evil.

CEG was always a Steam client feature and since they won't open source the client ( obviously ) i don't get why you got annoyed.

Also; CEG always worked with Steam Wine ( Windows Steam client on Wine ) , Proton side didn't work until now because Linux client didn't have any CEG integration.

Quoting: GuestStrange, CEG games well and truly didn't work for me last time tried (admittedly that was probably over a year ago now). Within in that, the only one I want to play is Space Marine, where the (co-op) multiplayer was great fun.

Yeah, it was always a bit of hit or miss with Wine and the Windows client here too. Some CEG games worked with some Wine releases some of the time...