Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI still don't see Valve funding any work to get Soft-Denchi, DMM Game Launcher, or Buddy Launcher to work in Wine (not Proton, because these games aren't sold on Steam), but I would be very happy to be proven wrong. DRM is such a huge blocker for visual novels, even beyond the codec issue.

Having things fixed in upstream Wine is Valve's favoured outcome. They don't want to have to maintain a wildly divergent code base all on their own. That's why they give money to CodeWeavers. DXVK is the exception: it was never going to be included with Wine, and performed way better than wined3d, so Valve brought it in-house.

Japanese non-Steam visual novels aren't going to be a priority compared to other low-hanging fruit, sure, but if the unimplemented-in-Wine functions that those games use are holding people on Windows - especially if they're also used by other software - then Valve are going to be perfectly comfortable giving a bag of money to CodeWeavers or Collabora and saying "make this work, please."

You make a very good point about divergent code. However, the games themselves work fine under Wine. I know this because DRM-free visual novels and visual novels encumbered with PlayDRM (which does work in Wine, for now) perform fine. Admittedly, there are issues with codecs and fullscreen is usually broken, but the latter is easily worked around with Gamescope. There's really not much to visual novels most of the time.

It's not the games that are broken—it's the DRM. Specifically, it's Soft Denchi, because most digital visual novels are encumbered with it. I'm not a Wine developer, so I could just be talking nonsense here, but I don't think implementing whatever ActiveX functionality Soft Denchi DRM wants is likely to have much overlap with other games. As I understand it based on the WineHQ page, DRM schemes are very particular and finicky. Then again, I'm almost certain that nobody fixed PlayDRM on purpose, and apparently that wasn't working before ~2018, so maybe..?

I don't know how much ActiveX comes up in other games, but I guess I'll continue to hope. And on that note, you seem to imply Valve is interested in getting software in general working, or is that a misread on my part? Adobe Suite in Wine would be nice...

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Quoting: kuhpunktThey fixed some Proton stuff for Diablo 4 a few months ago - that's not on Steam (yet) - and yet they fixed it.

The reason I think DRM support in Wine is different from D3D fixes and whatever else is because of this section from the WineHQ page I linked above:

QuoteIn an effort to make copy protection more effective (i.e. resistant to cracks), the methods used by many copy protection products have become complex, difficult to understand (obfuscated), and hard to debug. In some cases Wine would need to be altered to allow for almost rootkit-like functionality of programs to get some of these copy protection schemes to work. To support copy protection Wine developers have to contend with undocumented interfaces, code obfuscation, and maintaining compatibility with *nix security models.

If we look at why Soft Denchi fails to work in Wine (great report from fallenguru on WineHQ, it seems to be because Soft Denchi wants to register a watchdog service that runs at all times from system boot on Windows. It seems to require privileged access based on an ActiveX control (?) that Wine can't provide—at least, not without a lot of work.

This doesn't seem like something you can inadvertently fix; you would need to go out of your way to do it. The reason I think Valve is unlikely to do this is because Valve has already expressed, at best, indifference to selling visual novels on Steam, and at worst, hostility to English localizers who publish their games on Steam with no clear communication or standards on what content is permitted.

Quoting: JAST USAHowever, after months of talks, Valve rejected Full Metal Daemon Muramasa for distribution on Steam, banning it from their platform. We at JAST have always been transparent with Valve, ensuring the quality of our games does not suffer when we must adjust content to fit the requirements of Steam. We hoped we could resolve Valve's concerns amicably and ultimately deliver the game to the many fans waiting on Steam, but Valve is firm in their decision.

Our case is, unfortunately, not unique in the industry. An increasing number of visual novel games are getting unjustly banned from Steam, with no recourse. This creates an environment where publishers don’t release games like Muramasa because the risk is too high with Steam's heavy-handed hold on the PC market, stifling the medium and forcing publishers to adopt self-censorship to survive.

Japanese language visual novels are also quite niche, which is in comparison to a much more popular game like Diablo 4.

Supporting only Soft Denchi (which would fix 90%+ digital visual novels) is work that's difficult and only benefits a very niche audience even among Linux players which Valve doesn't seem to want on their platform.

Again, happy to be proven wrong, but those are the complete reasons for why I don't expect support from Valve.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAnd on that note, while I appreciate Valve's work on Proton and the Wine ecosystem, I know the work they're funding isn't going to help me out with the games I most play—visual novels. Most Japanese language visual novels aren't published on Steam, so Valve doesn't have a reason to care about them.

That's not really true.

Valve aren't using Linux to make more money. The vast, vast majority of their money comes from customers that use Windows. Valve are using Linux as a strategy to ensure the survival of Steam against Microsoft misbehaviour: they need their customers to be able to be Steam users that don't use Windows rather than Windows users that don't use Steam should Microsoft make Steam-on-Windows non-viable in the future. Anything that keeps their customers locked to Windows, including but not limited to games that aren't on Steam, is an obstacle to that plan.

Valve can't rely on hardware manufacturers or game developers to make it happen - the Steam Machines demonstrated that - so they're just brute-forcing it themselves.

While I can certainly agree with that, how many of Steam's customers are Japanese, anyway? It's a pretty tough market to break into, from what I know. Hell, Microsoft knows firsthand with Xbox. I understand it's a survival strategy they're doing to retain customers; I don't know if there exist many Japanese customers to retain.

Japanese publishers just don't sell their games on Steam, and Valve often doesn't want English localizers to sell their games on Steam either: https://jastusa.com/page/the-state-of-muramasa

I still don't see Valve funding any work to get Soft-Denchi, DMM Game Launcher, or Buddy Launcher to work in Wine (not Proton, because these games aren't sold on Steam), but I would be very happy to be proven wrong. DRM is such a huge blocker for visual novels, even beyond the codec issue.

Based on this page, getting DRM to work in Wine is some of the most unfulfilling and demanding work, effectively ruling out community contributions, too.

I'm not hopeful but very willing to be surprised.

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This all happened before I started using Linux in 2020. I spent a lot of time last month reading all about Wine, DXVK, VKD3D, WineD3D, Wine-Mono, Media Foundation, and plenty of other stuff, and it's truly insane how much work has gone into these Windows compatibility layers.

The interesting part is that not all of it is part of the Wine project. DXVK is its own thing (some Wine developers were actually on bad terms with the DXVK developer at some point and don't like how it re-invents a bunch of stuff already in Wine). FAudio is a completely separate project again, which replaced the XAudio implementation in 2017 that nobody was a big fan of and improved audio API compatibility considerably.

And on that note, while I appreciate Valve's work on Proton and the Wine ecosystem, I know the work they're funding isn't going to help me out with the games I most play—visual novels. Most Japanese language visual novels aren't published on Steam, so Valve doesn't have a reason to care about them. Japanese publishers like DMM, DLsite, and Digiket are responsible for publishing the vast majority of digital visual novels. And they're almost always encumbered by DRM. DRM that is so particular to these publishers that Valve has no reason to fund work to make it compatible.

But that's not the only issue—we've also got codec patents to think about. Valve can't do much about this even if they wanted to, because the laws prevent them from writing software which can include decoders for particular audio and video codecs. So, to get around this, Valve is re-encoding the encumbered audio and video for games into free formats which they can legally decode and storing them on their servers. Obviously, this only works for Steam games...not visual novels.

We're at a point where Wine is so compatible with games that the blockers are gigantic walls like software patents and anti-cheat. For Anti-Cheat, all Valve can do is write their own, bundle it with the native Linux version of the Steam client, and hope developers will use it. Well, they already tried that, and it's not really working. Now, it's in the hands of Anti-Cheat vendors and developers to support Wine.

And I suppose the software patents issue could be solved if Valve just sold every game in the world.

So, it's good. I just buy visual novels without DRM (which usually means physical) and Wine usually works great, assuming I pair it with Gamescope. Gamescope is another project that Valve, Joshua Aston, and Sourcehut worked on to solve windowing issues, and it works pretty damn well.

And uh, sorry if you've heard it all from me before.

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Quoting: mr-victory

QuoteOffice 365 support on Wayland.

What? This is huge! Did CodeWeavers just nuke one of the largest blockers of Linux adoption? The branch of Wine used by Crossover is open source, I am sure someone will find a way to replicate this without CrossOver.

Hasn't Microsoft Office worked in Wine for a long time? I used it two years ago with CrossOver. It was finicky, but it worked.

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More from the developer:

QuoteWell, I mean, that’s kind of how I feel, is that it’s not a good look.

Ultimately it comes down to who supports that platform better: unity or Valve? The answer is hands down Valve.

If that were to change, it’s not a big deal to add native linux support back. This is the first game I’ve done in the last decade without said support, and it feels odd.

But I also recognize that for every game I’ve released with a native linux build, if you switch to using proton instead, you get a better experience. In general with almost all games that are Deck compatible, the proton version runs better.

It’s a truly odd timeline in some respects, but on the other hand if Linux was ever going to go truly mainstream, it was going to have to do so with compatibility at a very low level. I’m more amazed that it has turned out to be possible and so performant across the board.

Ultimately, the takeaway is that there's nothing wrong with Vulkan. It's just that DXVK does a better job of writing Vulkan calls than commercial game engines like Unity.

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You can get a lot of MangaGamer games for an extra 2 (2!) cents off if you buy from their official store: https://mangagamer.org/vnfest/

They also have some more visual novels not for sale on Steam, some of them adult. Same goes for JAST.

If there's one game in this sale that's worth picking up, though, it's Muv-Luv. I really didn't expect that game to be so good...but after completing Muv-Luv Alternative, I just, man. That was an experience I'll never forget. Muv-Luv and Muv-Luv Alternative (the sequel) are on-sale for more than 50% off.

What starts off as a romantic comedy becomes one of the most gripping dramas I lost a lot of sleep over.

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Quoting: KlaasSorry for the slight OT, but whenever I see something like
 
's/Chivalry2Launcher.exe/TBL\/Binaries\/Win64\/Chivalry2-Win64-Shipping.exe/'
I wonder why it isn't known that you can choose which character you use as separator for sed.
Something like
 
's%Chivalry2Launcher.exe%TBL/Binaries/Win64/Chivalry2-Win64-Shipping.exe%'
avoids escaping every / in a path.

Edit: Okay, maybe not % since that is used by steam, but it's completely arbitrary.

I've spent the past two or three days working on a ~100 line bash script that probably shouldn't exist.

Personally, I hate bash scripting and just try to get it working in whatever way possible that isn't likely to break due to some edge case. Of course, it's bash scripting, so that's pretty much impossible.

(on the other hand, I like bash scripting for the power and flexibility, but goddamn I spend so much of my life escaping characters)

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This finally fixed the scaling issues, not being able to move windows, and Steam crashing my entire desktop whenever I clicked "Exit Steam".

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThanks for that script—that might become my preferred way of installing/updating dxvk outside of Lutris!

Note that the script is only building dxvk and vkd3d-proton (on Debian). You need to install them separately (and adjust the build scrript to your distro as needed).

I think winetrick verb copies dxvk dlls, while I prefer to use symlinks instead as above.

Ah sorry for my reading comprehension haha!

Yes, the winetricks verb copies them. Lutris bundles DXVK and VKD3D-Proton with its runtime, so that might actually be the easiest way of using and keeping up with DXVK.

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