If it hasn't left the "Launching..." phase, the program hasn't returned success or failure for it to turn to green "Running..." text in Steam, or abort.

Crashes may seem like programs freezing or not responding, when one process or thread dies and the main program is still running.

In Steam, you might get some useful information (along with a lot of noise) if you enable Proton logging.

In the Launch Options field in Properties of the game, put:

PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

Attempt to start your game, and stop it after it doesn't launch. Now in your home directory you should fine a log file named steam-appidnumbers.log (with the appid numbers of the game)

It may not have much of anything, if it's not even getting to launch the game with Wine (Proton). It could be stuck on installing runtimes and thus never leaves "Launching..." status. The new Steam client stopped showing what the game setup is doing now, it used to show dialogs for installing various runtime redistributables.

Attempt to start your game, and stop it after it doesn't launch. Now in your home directory you should fine a log file named steam-appidnumbers.log (with the appid numbers of the game)

I followed your instructions but there was never a log file created after multiple attempts, even following a reboot after setting the launch parameters.

I guess it's not even getting far enough to create it, sorry.

I had a few Proton-GE builds that didn't log with PROTON_LOG=1 in the past, but that would be rare for that to not work.

You play other games with Proton and it works, I presume.

This is just a shot in the dark, but if you go to steam/steamapps/common and find the game installation directory, look for a directory named "Support" or "Third Party" or something (I've seen both). It may contain directx and msvc++ redistributables. If you can rename the runtime that it's hanging on, you might see if it proceeds further (and if it's really necessary, it may be possible to install with winetricks after the fact). Games that install runtime redists other than the common redists in "Steamworks Shared" tend to have them in the game directory.

Attempt to start your game, and stop it after it doesn't launch. Now in your home directory you should fine a log file named steam-appidnumbers.log (with the appid numbers of the game)

It may not have much of anything, if it's not even getting to launch the game with Wine (Proton). It could be stuck on installing runtimes and thus never leaves "Launching..." status. The new Steam client stopped showing what the game setup is doing now, it used to show dialogs for installing various runtime redistributables.

So i launched the game while I had the terminal command "journalctl -f" running as well and it said that a dll was missing, along with some other things. I downloaded the .dll but whenever I place it in the directory it tells me to and try to launch the game, the .dll file gets deleted. I tried making the file read only but it still doesn't work and gets deleted.

However, doing this dll download makes it so that the game goes past saying just "launching" on Steam and it says "Running" now on the client, but there is still no activity or a window that launches. This "fix" also stops after a reboot and it goes back to saying "launching" again.

However after doing this "dll fix" I was able to finally generate steam-218620.log as was requested. I also captured the new journalctl log from this temporary state.

Thanks for the help, and would love to get this sorted!

Proton will likely die in the ass like that if your vkd3d-proton and dxvk are broken, but your Payday 2 game seems to be DirectX 9.0c on Windows.

d3d12core.dll is part of vkd3d-proton, but until recently, it was just one dll. d3d12.dll. Proton bundles those and updates the wine prefix accordingly, but older versions of vkd3d-proton won't have the d3d12core.dll

Proton 8.0 does NOT have that newer version of vkd3d-proton, so perhaps the errors about the dll were related to switching from Experimental back to 8.0

Now, this is a 32 bit game so you would need to copy the 64 bit version to windows/system32 and the 32 bit version to windows/syswow64 if you were to do that.

You already said you've tried plunking down a new Wine prefix, but did you try creating a fresh one with Proton Experimental? Let's just make sure we're on the same page. The way I would do that would be to rename "218620" in compatdata (in case you want to go back to your current state of progress)

/home/onurubu/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/218620

Make sure Proton Experimental (or whatever proton you're going to use) is selected and then try to start the game freshly and let it create a new one. It should populate the wine prefix and copy the dlls correctly.

Sorry if I'm going over stuff you've already done, but I don't know how you did it.

You already said you've tried plunking down a new Wine prefix, but did you try creating a fresh one with Proton Experimental? Let's just make sure we're on the same page. The way I would do that would be to rename "218620" in compatdata (in case you want to go back to your current state of progress)

/home/onurubu/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/218620

Make sure Proton Experimental (or whatever proton you're going to use) is selected and then try to start the game freshly and let it create a new one. It should populate the wine prefix and copy the dlls correctly.

I already tried creating a new prefix like this multiple times on proton versions from experimental down to 5. No luck unfortunately.

Sorry if I'm going over stuff you've already done, but I don't know how you did it.

No apologies necessary at all! Thank you so much for still being willing totry and help solve my issue after so long. I genuinely appreciate it.

At first I thought that you had a broken proton setup, but I don't see how several different ones can have the same issue.

I downloaded the .dll but whenever I place it in the directory it tells me to and try to launch the game, the .dll file gets deleted.

Did you use the MS one or the vkd3d one like Grogan said?


Can you check the sizes of the d3d9 and dxgi dlls in the syswow64 folder? The wine ones are much smaller than the dxvk ones…

Ahh yes, you have to copy the correct dlls from the version of Proton you are using if resorting to manual copying

For the ones that go in system32:

steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files/lib64/wine/vkd3d-proton

For the ones that go in syswow64, that's

steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files/lib/wine/vkd3d-proton

P.S. Corrected typo, I said lib64 for both

Proton versions prior to that (including 8.0) have their files in "dist" rather than "files"

Something is of course broken if you have to do things like that though.

Last edited by Grogan on 7 Jul 2023 at 9:43 pm UTC

Can you check the sizes of the d3d9 and dxgi dlls in the syswow64 folder? The wine ones are much smaller than the dxvk ones…

They are 3.9 MB and 2.6 MB respectively.

Ahh yes, you have to copy the correct dlls from the version of Proton you are using if resorting to manual copying

For the ones that go in system32:

steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files/lib64/wine/vkd3d-proton

For the ones that go in syswow64, that's

steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files/lib64/wine/vkd3d-proton

Proton versions prior to that (including 8.0) have their files in "dist" rather than "files"

Something is of course broken if you have to do things like that though.

I copied the dlls from the Proton files as you said and still have no luck. However now the dlls are not deleted whenever I try to launch the game so that seems better? It still just hangs on "launching" though.

I made a typo that I corrected, hopefully you knew better. I put lib64 for both paths where the 32 bit dist files are in lib

Have you considered trying Proton-GE?
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton8-6

In case you aren't familiar with it, unpack GE-Proton8-6.tar.gz to steam/compatibilitytools.d (probably /home/onurubu/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d create it if it's not already there)

Last edited by Grogan on 8 Jul 2023 at 3:06 am UTC

I made a typo that I corrected, hopefully you knew better. I put lib64 for both paths where the 32 bit dist files are in lib

Have you considered trying Proton-GE?
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton8-6

In case you aren't familiar with it, unpack GE-Proton8-6.tar.gz to steam/compatibilitytools.d (probably /home/onurubu/.local/share/Steam/compatibiitytools.d create it if it's not already there)

Yeah I figured the lib files were meant to be different. Followed the instructions of Proton-GE and tried to launch with no results again.

However thanks for the recommendation of Proton-GE! It's making my other proton games (Prey, Halo MCC) run noticeably smoother.

Last edited by onurubu on 8 Jul 2023 at 12:01 am UTC

There's something weird with the setup of Payday 2 for you on your system, then. I don't know what that is from here.

Proton logging isn't going to give us anything useful, but it might be easier to get more coherent messages from Steam if you start it so it will redirect all its output, stdout and stderr to a text file.

I don't know how you start Steam, I point whatever menu or panel shortcut to a wrapper script I made for it. Set a few variables and ultimately start steam.sh. I normally just direct it to /dev/null because I don't want its noise but I change it to a file if I think I need to see something.

The business end of that is:

/path/to/steam/steam.sh > /home/yourname/filename.log 2>&1

I'm glad to hear Proton-GE has helped you. I'm just starting to play Prey myself, enjoying it so far. I like having to figure out the traversal :-)

There's something weird with the setup of Payday 2 for you on your system, then. I don't know what that is from here.

Proton logging isn't going to give us anything useful, but it might be easier to get more coherent messages from Steam if you start it so it will redirect all its output, stdout and stderr to a text file.

I don't know how you start Steam, I point whatever menu or panel shortcut to a wrapper script I made for it. Set a few variables and ultimately start steam.sh. I normally just direct it to /dev/null because I don't want its noise but I change it to a file if I think I need to see something.

The business end of that is:

/path/to/steam/steam.sh > /home/yourname/filename.log 2>&1

I'm glad to hear Proton-GE has helped you. I'm just starting to play Prey myself, enjoying it so far. I like having to figure out the traversal :-)

Thank you for your help so far but I think this has gone beyond my technical capabilities. So short of just having someone try to help remotely I think I will just give up on trying to get Payday work on Proton. I'll put it on my Windows dual boot if I need.

Again I appreciate all the help so far.