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Valve has announced today that BattlEye support on Linux with Steam Play Proton has expanded, with new titles available.

As previously announced, currently all developers need to do to make it work is to email BattlEye. That's it. However, developers will still of course want time to test, so it's not exactly an instant thing. Still, it's fantastic progress and now even more games can be enjoyed.

The current list of support titles has expanded and is now:

  • Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
  • ARK: Survival Evolved
  • Arma 3
  • DayZ (avoid the launcher, use the second option Steam gives)
    • DayZ also needs a higher max_map_count, you can up it temporarily by doing:
      ​sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576
      And permanently:
      echo 'vm.max_map_count=1048576' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/vm.max_map_count.conf
  • Unturned
  • Planetside 2 (use "--disable-gpu" as a launch option, otherwise launcher is blank)

Hopefully by the time the Linux-powered handheld Steam Deck starts shipping in February 2022, that list will expand. I'm still personally hopeful we can see the likes of PUBG working.

You should no longer need Proton Experimental either, since Proton 6.3-8 released back in late November pulled in the BattlEye support.

In related news, Proton Experimental itself was also upgraded recently making Final Fantasy XIV playable, there's a fix for Marvel's Avengers showing prompt about outdated drivers on launch, a fix for eFootball PES 2021 and 2022 crashing on launch, a fix for audio in Mass Effect 1 from Mass Effect Legendary Edition and also improved compatibility with binary Nvidia drivers.

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38 comments
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Seegras Dec 3, 2021
Quoting: GeoGalvanicI can't even begin to imagine testing out that many games, especially re-testing every new release of proton

I don't. Well, I did, but I don't retest.

It's more like, when I have a new game, I try to run it, if it doesn't I categorize it as "CrashesOnProton" and try later. Nowadays I usually check protondb.com first before I buy, but sometimes I buy bundles from HumbleBundle, and then this happens. I also submitted a lot to protondb.

Also, I did some work with wine, so I was actually specifically interested to have some windows games for testing. https://github.com/Seegras/wine it's completely behind master now, and the stuff I worked on would need to be totally reworked, as wine has completely changed the way internal dlls are supposed to work. It's this code, by the way: https://github.com/Seegras/wine/tree/master/dlls/xlive (the wine project didn't want it in main ... thinking of it, maybe proton would like it, especially since GWFL is discontinued now?).
Purple Library Guy Dec 3, 2021
Quoting: SeegrasThat latest proton upgrade lead to 30 more titles running out of my 152 that weren't running with proton before. It's now down to 121 (out of my 1915 games or thereabouts that aren't Linux-native).

I might be able to get some of these 121 to run (11 of them want Windows Live, so xliveless would help), I just didn't bother yet.
That's almost 94% working, on a pretty big sample. That's pretty sweet, really getting into the kind of territory where people might not be getting upset with the Steam Deck for refusing to play things. And there's still a couple months of Proton improvement until launch.
Of course I don't know how many required fiddling to get working.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 December 2021 at 11:28 pm UTC
STiAT Dec 4, 2021
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord <3
elmapul Dec 4, 2021
even if it was just sending an e-mail, the fact that those companies even bothered to send it is an HUGE deal, it shows that deck may indeed make a difference
Perfect! Now We need more efforts with the WMF codec problem.
slaapliedje Dec 4, 2021
I need Conan Exiles support... people say it is working, but it stopped after they updated their launcher for me.
14 Dec 4, 2021
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Great news about ARMA 3!

Also applicable to me is Final Fantasy XIV. It works with Glorious Eggroll, but I'd rather keep to standard release stuff when possible.
It's good to see that more popular client-side anticheat systems are finally running on GNU/Linux, but this is not my biggest blocker. My menace is instead DRM.

The biggest area that I am still disappointed with WINE/Proton in is Visual Novels. I haven't yet come across a visual novel on Steam that doesn't work, but Steam doesn't have a lot of Visual Novels. More importantly, most of the visual novels do not have the option to read the story in Japanese. And most crucially, I've not been able to get Textractor to work through WINE on most games (aside from Higurashi? which actually crashes when I try to insert a hook now), which makes looking up words significantly harder.

I experimented briefly with trying to get Textractor to run through the same Proton version as the one running the Visual Novel, but I just couldn't figure it out and gave up. I suspect that the reason it doesn't work is some kind of obfuscation due to DRM. I tend to use Gazou-OCR, which has worked great so far (much better than KanjiTOMO ever did for me, for instance), but it's annoying to use on a GNOME desktop and often inserts bizarre spacing, making lookup more of a chore in Yomichan.

There is perhaps some irony that the only way to get Textractor working is to run the visual novel through WINE, and running it natively on GNU/Linux won't work.

The only visual novel experience that has been great on GNU/Linux is DLSite games. They give you a serial code, you start the game, you put it in, and it just works. Textractor inserts hooks without any trouble. The worst experience has to be DMM, which unfortunately has the biggest library of Japanese VNs. To play a game, you have to download a separate Soft-Denchi (software battery) runtime, which is purely DRM designed to watch you from the time you boot into the operating system. You're able to install it, but WINE is not able to successfully setup the UCManSVC service. So, when you open the game, it doesn't prompt you to login to DMM; it just crashes. So nothing from DMM works on GNU/Linux. They also have an even more invasive form of DRM which requires internet access to play the games.

Perhaps the worst part about all of this is that, after checking with some local Kopimists, I found that the cracked versions of these games work perfectly well on GNU/Linux. At least DMM lets you know whether the game requires DRM to function before you purchase it, unlike Steam. DLSite also tells you whether PlayDRM (the DRM that works with GNU/Linux) is required for a game, although not all games require it. I have yet to find a DMM game that does not require either invasive form of DRM.

Finally, buying a VN on disc may not work either. The most common form of DRM, AlphaROM, does not work with GNU/Linux. After spending several hours messing with aaru and mdf/mds in an attempt to copy the disc, DRM and all, and get it to work virtually, I found that visiting the SETTEC site and inputting a code that came with the game let me download a "profile" that I could put in the game directory to run the game. So, while it doesn't work on GNU/Linux, SETTEC (developers of AlphaROM) give you a way out. No guarantee as to how long this activation method will continue to work.

And then there are, of course, visual novels like Rewrite which require Japan's version of Windows; I doubt these will work on GNU/Linux. Changing your locale on Windows won't even bypass this because they don't want anyone outside of Japan to play the game; you need to download Japan's version of Windows from the outset.

So, my advice to anyone who wants to play Japanese visual novels on GNU/Linux is to buy from DLSite, maybe Steam if it has a Japanese version and you don't mind using Gazou OCR for lookups (or know the language well enough already), and be careful about buying physical.
dubigrasu Dec 4, 2021
Quoting: SuperTuxDo I have to write out an entire essay on these places to cover every angle in the hopes someone doesn't pick on some little bit? Even if doing so half the people will reply anyway...
Oh man oh man, I know exactly how you feel
Eike Dec 4, 2021
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I have never played DayZ (but watched some of it when it was new).
What should I expect if I tried it today, as a beginner?


Last edited by Eike on 4 December 2021 at 9:32 am UTC
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