Steam Play Compatibility Reports | Hacker News Reader

Steam Play Compatibility Reports

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91 pointsJeaye31 comments

If you haven't been following it: "Steam Play" is the product name for Valve's repackaging of dkvk and Wine together inside their Linux client. (Lots of the code is open sourced at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/

>Steam Play allows you to purchase your games once and play anywhere. Whether you have purchased your Steam Play enabled game on a Mac or PC (both Windows and Linux), you will be able to play on the other platform free of charge.

I've been using it for a few games, and the experience is great. There are lots of folks finally deleting their Windows setups and moving to Linux full time because they can finally play their AAA titles on Linux without any installation hassles.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly Valve's planned impact. Like everybody else who builds atop another's platform, I think they're nervous that Microsoft could decimate their business on a whim.

I'd have to look to dig up an interview link, but I'm pretty sure that's what kicked off Valve's Linux-based "Steam box" initiative several years ago. They looked at Microsoft's moves towards a curated app store in which Microsoft has full control and they wanted an alternative distribution method.

Well then it's really great that Microsoft is going around buying up things like LinkedIn and GitHub, so that people who base their livelihoods on those products are similarly secure. /sarcasm

Github has drop-in replacements. Windows...not so much.

It's not a joke to Valve.

I'm probs gonna wait a bit on it, Rainbow6:Siege and other multiplayer titles should give this a go or nogo, hopefully a Go, atm they don't work due to the ubisoft installer thingy.

Once R6 has migrate my Windows VM will be deleted.

It's probably true for a few other people aswell, Multiplayer and third party launchers need to work.

The issue with multiplayer games isn't the game usually it's the anticheat. In R6:S case BattleEye; who have stated they only provide Linux clients for games which officially support Linux.

Maybe, they could also start supporting Steam Play games using Proton considering it's a native (ie, native to the steam platform) solution or detect and block the platform. Otherwise you'd have people getting banned for doing nothing wrong, which is something BE and all anticheats want to avoid at all costs.

Anticheat is an orthogonal problem, the issue is not having the system run but a completely separate stack of detections to build & maintain

Not quite, the problem is that Anticheat regularly bans emulation software, ie Wine, and they don't really want to do anything about it. They could simply flip a switch and Wine would work with their Anticheat. Plus, they do have a separate stack for running on Linux in case the product supports Linux, so that's no excuse either.

The same problem with Player Uknown Battlegrounds, and many other titles. It seems like once they can fix this, they will have many more titles that work.

Rainbow 6 Siege uses Direct3D 11, apparently. I hope that more titles add Vulkan support - I presume that would make the job of a Linux compatibility-layer, considerably easier.

I suspect their rating system doesn't factor in hardware differences between the platinum reports: two of the games in their top 27 have serious issues with AMD graphics cards as far as I can tell.

Wolfenstein: The New Order appears to only run for people with Nvidia graphics cards and crashes on boot with a fairly fundamental OpenGL error on AMD. (You can actually see this if you click on Wolfenstein on their website, every Nvidia report is platinum and every AMD report is "Borked").

Skyrim runs at maybe 40 fps on my Vega 64 at 1600x900 high settings, which is an absolutely insane loss of performance (on Windows it could run at >100 fps @ 2560x1440) and puts it into "not playable" territory for me. Again this issue doesn't seem to exist on Nvidia.

Are they sure these are issues with Linux compatibility? I have at least 10-15 games that are simply unplayable for me on Windows due to crashes or other buggy behavior.

In addition to that, there are plenty of games that once were fine but now aren't and visa versa.

Off the top of my head:

Dead Island - Pretty much anything by Deep Silver will crash often, this is no exception.

Watch_Dogs - Crashes frequently and unpredictably enough that it's too frustrating to play.

Mirror's Edge - Requires user to modify game files in order to run on AMD hardware. If the user validates game files or re-installs they must perform the file modifications again.

Gauntlet - Crashes frequently or boots you from online games to the point that it's unplayable.

Bulletstorm - Requires a deprecated Microsoft gaming service and does not work. Game was still being sold after Microsoft shut down it's service. They recently launched a remastered version and did not give free upgrades to existing owners (as most often happens).

Grim Fandango Remastered - Crashes almost like clockwork. States it has controller support but... no.

L.A. Noire - Requires the user to make a registry change, provided by a user in the Steam Forums, before it will even load the pre-launch configuration screen.

DIRT Showdown - Just crashes silently.

The Flame in the Flood - Use to work fine, now it launches and then force minimizes itself. If restored or maximized, it will immediately minimize. Game is "playable" via Aero Peek using Xbox controller and hovering mouse over the taskbar icon.

BioShock - Use to crash immediately on startup, now it works fine.

Air Forte - Has never worked.

Note most AMD issues are tied to the opengl compatibility profile. Up until the just released mesa 18.2 that profile was stuck at 3.1, now it's at 4.4.

Can you elaborate on this?

This is described in detail in: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/OpenGL_Context#OpenGL_3....

Up until 18.2, if using 'compatibility' profiles with mesa, you'd be stuck at opengl 3.3.

This is solved; I'm already running 18.2 and game compatibility through Proton has indeed improved.

To be fair I could not run Wolfenstein: The New Order with an AMD card on Windows, and from what I read online it's a common problem. I don't think this is a Windows/Linux issue, the game just doesn't play nicely with AMD across the board.

If the game works where Windows works and fails where Windows fails while running on Steam Play, I think it's fair to give it a platinum rating.

I had the Windows issue for a while too but eventually verifying game files fixed it. I'm mentioning this precisely because I am in a position where the game works on Windows but doesn't on Linux, if it worked on neither that would be okay (well definitely not _okay_, but not WINE's fault).

It might have more to do with drivers.

My Ubuntu 18.04 install just updated a ton of drivers from the PPA that ubuntu recommends: http://ppa.launchpad.net/paulo-miguel-dias/mesa/ubuntu

So I'm hoping to hear of improvements in a few days.

This is useful. Up to now I'd seen the spreadsheet being collated on /r/linux_gaming but even at a few days old that was starting to get to be a sprawling mess. This site has a winehq style medal system and captures drivers etc for each report which makes it much easier to peruse and digest.

It's also encouraging just how many games are gold and platinum.

First, this is a great, thanks.

Second, hijacking 'CTRL-F to focus' makes searching through all the data extremely unpleasant.

Edit: There are multiple complaints about this on your discord. Maybe give us a little checkbox? Something we can disable if we'd prefer to do it a different way?

> Second, hijacking 'CTRL-F to focus' makes searching through all the data extremely unpleasant.

Also, don't think you can work around this bug by disabling javascript... you get a completely blank screen if JS is disabled. This is not good design.

It took a moment to realize the term Steam Play is a bit overloaded here. It refers to titles that are cross platform and apparently more recently it refers to the Proton-based emulation layer as well.

I think it's intentional; this way if you can see a title being "Steam Play" you can simply assume it'll run on your system. If it were differentiated then you'd have "Steam Play as in real crossplatform" and "Steam Play but we emulate".

Eliminating differences IMO would reduce confusion for the average user, they don't want to care about it. They want to click "Play" and have the game run.

Cross platform as Tekken 7's Linux port?

Somewhat tangential. I have a few games that really push the edge of my laptop's capabilities. These games often have Windows and Linux support (without Steam Play). I find myself installing and testing them all on both OSes to see which works best.

Is it generally universally true that Windows will always be the faster option? If not, is there a market for capturing "which os is best?" somewhere?

i was initially excited at the idea of running steam play for windows titles but there are major issues.

- steamos locks you down to titles that are pre-approved, such as doom -- doom still runs with a wine mouse overlay bug that causes the cursor to freeze instantly on clicks.

trying to get around the lockdown, I decided to run steam in devuan with vulkan libraries and the beta client.

- titles like borderlands 2 run fine, as they are natively supported. - titles such as fallout new vegas still freeze before load. - doom now freezes at 99% load and does not progress, also requires the renderapi forced parameter for Vulkan.

its also worth mentioning that Valve assumes users outside the SteamOS arena are aware they need to install vulkan. they do a good job reminding users of package dependencies on first launch, however.

Not fond of the infinite scrolling.

I'd rather have a plaintext table that actually has all games listed.

Because of this, the site seems only useful if you're looking up a specific name.

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