Proton Experimental adds initial speech synthesis support, lots of game fixes for Steam Deck / Linux and easier modding

Proton Experimental has been updated from Valve with some new features like initial speech synthesis support, along with the usual assortment of fixes for specific games running on Steam Deck and Desktop Linux. Confused on what Proton is and how to use it? See my beginner's guide.

The initial addition of speech synthesis currently requires you to manually install "Proton Voice Files", something people saw pop up recently that led to some wild speculation. They've confirmed it works with Infinite Stars - The Visual Novel.

Other changes from this update include:

• Now Playable: VIDEO GAME.
• Fixed Star Wars Outlaws not being playable on some setups.
• Fixed Hell Let Loose crashing when joining a server after a recent game update.
• Fixed Rivals of Aether II crashing with Intel GPUs.
• Fixed fullscreen mode in The Bright Star Of Seraph-Katis.
• Improved video playback in Max: The Curse of Brotherhood.
• Fixed Dread X Collection 3 Bete Grise minigame.
• Fixed Proton Experimental regressions:
  • Progressbar95 no longer has crackling audio when using mouse.
  • Hell Let Loose again plays audio when showing developer logos.
  • Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin no longer requries constant mouse movement to progress.
  • Fixed Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered crashing when playing some of the HD bonus videos.
• Fixed CPU topology override issues on machines with more than 32 logical cores.
• Added support for game mods that load via custom dinput8.dll.
• Fixed Space Engineers not registering trigger input with controllers.

All from the changelog.

Writing about the update, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais posted this on Bluesky:

On new Proton Experimental, most mods can now just be extracted/copied next to the game .exe, without requiring any extra steps like setting WINEDLLOVERRIDES. This change will also be in future stable Proton releases.

Modding Windows games through Proton has long been a nuisance, so removing a barrier like this is fantastic news.

In case you missed it a previous Proton Experimental update added support for NVIDIA Optical Flow API and DLSS 3 Frame Generation for Desktop Linux. We're getting some great stuff for gaming on Linux lately.

On top of that don't miss that Proton 9.0-4 is currently in testing as the next stable version of Proton that most games will be expected to use.