The last UE Game i played with proton was Manor Lords DEMO. The Demo was only available for a week or so in October 2022, so i cant try it

You can probably still install it from here:
https://steamdb.info/app/2122820/

I'm currently playing Relicta. That's also UE (4) and runs through Proton. Runs quite good. So it's not UE or Manjaro itself... maybe the AMD GPU driver has problems? Or something else is wrong with the installation... maybe some lib missing?
You could try to start the game and / or steam in the shell and redirect output to some file so it hopefully survives the "shutdown"... maybe something useful shows up there...

That sounds related to the mediafoundation API, the intro videos and embedded videos in game use that. Wine emulates them and it works for some codecs in some games, Valve Proton has a media converter that is supposed to work.

There is a mediafoundation install script that extracts them from Windows 7 SP1. Those are getting long in the tooth, but may still work in some scenarios.

https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install
https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-installcab

If going that route, I'd recommend running the mf-install script first, then mf-installcab. It shouldn't be necessary to do both, but I've found that the first one seems to do something (wine registry?) that makes it work and also it will a usable copy of mfplat.dll in your wine prefix.

First though (as recommended in the readme for mf-install I see now, even) try the newest Proton you can for example Proton Experimental (or proton experimental bleeding edge) and hopefully the media converter will work for you.

As a general rule: anything that causes your computer to hang or reboot is either a driver/kernel bug or a hardware issue.

Faulty/too weak power supply.

Faulty/too weak power supply.

no.
1) i play other heavy loaded games like death stranding, assassins creed and war thunder. i even can record gameplay, so the load ist even higher. i also played "lego builder's journey" and you can TORTURE your GPU with this game. even a 4090. no joke
2) it crashes at start up, not in game

As a general rule: anything that causes your computer to hang or reboot is either a driver/kernel bug or a hardware issue.

That sounds related to the mediafoundation API, the intro videos and embedded videos in game use that.

yeah i thought so. i have this update in mind
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-update-2022-12-06-kernels-mesa-plasma-cinnamon-nvidia-libreoffice-pipewire-virtualbox/128453

it came out after the last UE game i played.

"includes a notable change which disables hardware acceleration for proprietary video codecs (most commonly H.264 and H.265) when using the Mesa drivers stack. Open video codecs (VP8, VP9, AV1 - based on your hardware capabilities) are unaffected and can still be hardware-accelerated out of the box."

Aww, seriously? Manjaro did that? I didn't think Arch (and consequently Manjaro) was going to disable those codecs in Mesa. I always build my own so I don't notice (I hate distro dogfood)

I just looked at Arch's (official) PKGBUILD to make sure, and they are still enabling those codecs.

-D video-codecs=vc1dec,h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc \

It doesn't surprise me. Manjaro got bought out, where Arch is still a pure community distro (that does most all of the work, by the way. Most of Manjaro is just straight Arch PKGBUILDs, they only customize a relative few things)

Well, one thing Manjaro does have is Arch's dev environment and Mesa isn't hard to build. Are you familiar with building packages in an Arch environment? I'm not sure if this is exactly (or only) your problem but I'd want a properly built Mesa if I were me.

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... as a general rule yes, the symptoms may seem like a hardware fault, but shitware can cause driver faults that can hang or reboot your computer. Games aren't normal software (and that mediafoundation shit interfaces with DirectX etc.), you give them direct hardware access through poopy interfaces and faults can happen. I actually find that less likely to happen with Wine gaming though, because there are more layers of abstraction that tend to fail before something like that can happen. I can usually flip to another virtual desktop or barring that, another TTY (ctrl-alt-f2 usually cuts through the slime) and kill stuff. My X session may be hurt if I flip back to TTY1 after killing the game executable, but the system is still functioning.

As for "hangs" quite often it's not quite a hang, just that your input devices and display aren't responding. Sometimes it might be so b0rked that you can just ping the machine but high level networking is dead, but that's still not halted. (I'm saying that because before I ever try something drastic like a forced reboot or hard shut down, I'll try to SSH in from another box)

I would say you would be having a lot of trouble with other things if you had such a hardware fault. (It wouldn't just be intro videos in Unreal 4+ games)

I would say you would be having a lot of trouble with other things if you had such a hardware fault. (It wouldn't just be intro videos in Unreal 4+ games)

no problems with other engines so far
but i tested "The Flame in the Flood" and "SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated"

both have UE4 and and i played them a few minutes. so i do not know if it is UE.

i tried older proton versions with Metamorphosis, but it still shuts down my pc.

i hope mesa 23 fixes it

You OK building Mesa packages? I just whipped up a quick tutorial and provided some PKGBUILDs in this thread if you need a helping hand.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/5592/page=1/

You OK building Mesa packages? I just whipped up a quick tutorial and provided some PKGBUILDs in this thread if you need a helping hand.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/5592/page=1/

thx, but i really do not want to mess with my pc. i just wanna use it

Aww, seriously? Manjaro did that? I didn't think Arch (and consequently Manjaro) was going to disable those codecs in Mesa. I always build my own so I don't notice (I hate distro dogfood)

I just looked at Arch's (official) PKGBUILD to make sure, and they are still enabling those codecs.

Was wondering why I hadn't noticed anything different.

little update: i am on kernel 6.3RC, mesa 23.0 and proton 8 now and it is still broken
i played a few other games in the meantime. no problems at all
guess i have to wait til i have a new PC, or at least new GPU for those UE games

Sorry to hear that. I do my own Proton builds (based on the wine-tkg-git build system) but I let Steam download valve's new Proton 8.0 and tested it, and to my surprise, the mediafoundation poo worked for me. I'll bet it's their new "Sniper" runtime.

That's the first time I've ever seen that work outside of my (more native) -tkg builds. I tested Borderlands 3 with that, which is horribly fragile for the mp4 intros and embedded in-game videos.

That IS trouble. I've noticed that some new Unreal 4 titles aren't even using that anymore, they are using Bink video with the Unreal 4 engine. My guess is because of the fragility (it's not only us Linux users that have had problems with Microsoft's media foundation machinery in games). It looks like Epic actually owns that now too, Bink video (they seem to own RAD Tools now) but it would be additional licensing vs. Microsoft Mediafoundation which is licensed with Windows on the client end.

For example, "High on Life" and "The Callisto Protocol", both recent titles, use Bink.

Sorry to hear that. I do my own Proton builds (based on the wine-tkg-git build system) but I let Steam download valve's new Proton 8.0 and tested it, and to my surprise, the mediafoundation poo worked for me. I'll bet it's their new "Sniper" runtime.

valve fixed it a long time ago for several games with proton.
like postal 4, die young, or Yesterday Origins
i do not know what this sniper runtime does

this BINK think could be the reason. but i do not understand why my PC shuts off completely.

little update: i am on kernel 6.3RC, mesa 23.0 and proton 8 now and it is still broken
i played a few other games in the meantime. no problems at all
guess i have to wait til i have a new PC, or at least new GPU for those UE games

Can you still reproduce the problem with Metamorphosis?

If you want to try the theory that mp4/videos are causing the issue you can move them away (rename the directory Meta1/Content/Movies in the game directory). The game should still start, or at least the demo does.

You might also want to try launching the game with PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% to see if it crashes with the OpenGL driver too.

this BINK think could be the reason. but i do not understand why my PC shuts off completely.

No, that has nothing to do with it. You would be unlikely to have problems with bink video. I only mentioned that in context of the mediafoundation being trouble (devs using bink instead).

P.S. The "Sniper" runtime is the new runtime that Proton links against, vs. the previous "Soldier" runtime (not to be confused with the Steam runtime, "heavy" that the client links against)

Last edited by Grogan on 20 Apr 2023 at 12:02 am UTC

little update: i am on kernel 6.3RC, mesa 23.0 and proton 8 now and it is still broken
i played a few other games in the meantime. no problems at all
guess i have to wait til i have a new PC, or at least new GPU for those UE games

Can you still reproduce the problem with Metamorphosis.

yes. it behaves alway like that, but i do not like to try too much because of this behaviour. i do not think it is healthy for my pc. especially hard drives and OS itself

but since GPU prices going down lately, i hope AMD releases a new affordable one soon and i buy one of them. i hope this will fix it

i bought a new graphics card and now it works. still do not know what the problem was.

Probably different graphics chipset not hitting the same problem. You're following different code paths in the driver and graphics libraries etc. too. Glad you got it solved in any case

It IS, however, possible for specific things to expose a subtle fault, though.

I had a cheap motherboard in 1998, with a Pentium II 300 MHz processor. At first I thought everything was great, until my computer froze while opening an image in Paint Shop Pro. It was a sample image showing layering techniques. Odd, it was the only image causing it. Similarly, there was a big Sony logo flash animation on a site that caused it every time too. There were not many things that hit this fault, it seemed to be certain graphics operations (not any of the games I played though). Also later found to have problems compiling C++ (but not C lol).

Long story short... L2 cache on the board was subtly faulty, I guess it couldn't quite handle the bus speed it was supposed to. Changing the jumpers on the motherboard, such that the CPU was downclocked to 266 MHz allowed it to be stable in all those cases.

Probably different graphics chipset not hitting the same problem.

do you have PCIe4 mainboard?
my guess: maybe a bug for PCIe3 cards in a PCIe4 slot?!