Steam Play compatibility tool Luxtorpeda gets controller support, new tooling

Luxtorpeda is a Steam Play compatibility tool (like Proton) that allows you to run games from Steam using various different game engines and reimplementations.

The basic idea is that Luxtorpeda manages various Linux-native game engines for you. So you go to download a game on Steam, like Warzone 2100 or Arx Fatalis and instead of giving you the old and crusty versions Steam has it will give you the currently up to date open source game engines (not all game engines provided are open source though). There's a lot it supports and the Luxtorpeda website was updated to make browsing what it supports easier.

Version 45 drops GTK for egui for the user interface, along with tons of controller improvements to make interacting with Luxtorpeda possible without a mouse (Steam Big Picture / Steam Deck). Quite a big one really, as it should make playing with this on the Steam Deck much easier. There's also now a basic management tool for clearing config and cache directories for particular games or engines.

Pictured - Caesar 3 from Steam using Luxtorpeda to run it through Augustus.

You can download it from GitHub.

How to use it? Simple really.

1. Close Steam. Important, as Steam will not update the Steam Play compatibility tools list while open.
2. Download latest version at https://github.com/luxtorpeda-dev/luxtorpeda/releases.
3. Move and extract the contents of the downloaded archive to the compatibilitytools.d directory (create it if it does not exist) at ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/
4. Start Steam.
5. Right click a game on Steam, go to Compatibility and select the checkbox for "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and select "Luxtorpeda".