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The Anacrusis is a brand new release from Stray Bombay, and it's another entry in the swarm-shooter like Left 4 Dead and Back 4 Blood. Running it on Linux is possible too. Interestingly, Stray Bombay was co-founded by former Valve designer Chet Faliszek who worked on the likes of Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead.

"The Anacrusis is a four-player, cooperative first-person shooter set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!"

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To play it on Linux you'll need Steam Play Proton. Here's where things get interesting: for my system, it wouldn't run correctly with Proton Experimental, as it would get stuck on a mission loading video and just freeze. However, with Proton-GE which you can get easily with ProtonUp-Qt, it worked as it should and allowed me to get into a mission. Your mileage may vary there, as I've already seen others say it works for them with Proton Experimental.

For me the bigger problem was firing any of the weapons. A similar issue I experienced in Aliens Fireteam Elite, where it caused a huge amount of unplayable stutter and it just didn't seem to go away. So right now, it makes The Anacrusis unplayable but once again, your mileage may vary, as I've seen a couple others report it works fine. There's probably a problem on my system somewhere that I just can't find - so hopefully for the majority it will work out well. Frustrating but seems specific to Unreal Engine titles and plenty others work just fine for me. I have a ticket up on the Proton GitHub, where hopefully a solution will be found.

Update: turns out the performance problem there was an issue with the KDE Compositor. Ensuring it's truly off seems to make the game perform just fine. So if you find a similar issue and you're also on KDE, hit ALT+Shift+F12 to toggle it off. You can check if it's on or off in terminal using:

qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor org.kde.kwin.Compositing.activeIt will say true or false depending if it's on or off.

Available in Early Access on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

BlooAlien Jan 13, 2022
Nice. Another Proton game wishlisted for me. I'll prolly end up buying this one to scratch that "Back 4 Blood" itch, since I still see no likelihood that one's running on Linux anytime soon.

As I've had exceedingly good luck with Proton titles ProtonDB rated Gold or better thus far, I'm fairly confident this'll run fine for me.


Last edited by BlooAlien on 13 January 2022 at 8:37 pm UTC
alejandro-bringas Jan 14, 2022
That was one of the reasons that I stopped using KDE, the KWin composer is always very inefficient in gaming, it is not the first game that suffers from that problem, there are several.
Alm888 Jan 14, 2022
Quoting: BlooAlienNice. Another Proton game wishlisted for me.
There are no such things as "Proton Games". Only Windows games. This game was developed for Windows™ and for Windows only. :P
scaine Jan 14, 2022
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Quoting: Alm888
Quoting: BlooAlienNice. Another Proton game wishlisted for me.
There are no such things as "Proton Games". Only Windows games. This game was developed for Windows™ and for Windows only. :P

Good point. But since I don't own Windows, all Windows games are just Proton games. Maybe that distinction will go away as the Deck releases and matures, but until then, a Proton game (for me) is a Windows game that works on Linux. If it doesn't, I don't care about it at all.
Liam Dawe Jan 14, 2022
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Alm888
Quoting: BlooAlienNice. Another Proton game wishlisted for me.
There are no such things as "Proton Games". Only Windows games. This game was developed for Windows™ and for Windows only. :P

Good point. But since I don't own Windows, all Windows games are just Proton games. Maybe that distinction will go away as the Deck releases and matures, but until then, a Proton game (for me) is a Windows game that works on Linux. If it doesn't, I don't care about it at all.
Wording is important though of course, and so are distinctions but we have to pick our battles and I don't think this is a productive one. It's basically the new shorthand for saying Windows games run through Proton, to just say Proton Game(s).

It's different to saying "runs on PC", since Proton is a clear target for Linux directly.
Alm888 Jan 14, 2022
Quoting: scaineBut since I don't own Windows, all Windows games are just Proton games. Maybe that distinction will go away as the Deck releases and matures, but until then, a Proton game (for me) is a Windows game that works on Linux. If it doesn't, I don't care about it at all.
I am on developer's POV here. If a developer targets a Windows release and gets revenue from a Windows version, it is a Windows sale, no matter which OS will be used to actually run the software.

Now, if a developer was to officially target Proton™ as a platform and provide full support (from refunds to technical troubleshooting), that would be another song entirely. In this case we would be right to introduce "Proton Game" term. This might still happen, albeit I don't think it would be called that. "Steam Deck Title" is more like it.
BlooAlien Jan 14, 2022
Quoting: scaineBut since I don't own Windows, all Windows games are just Proton games. Maybe that distinction will go away as the Deck releases and matures, but until then, a Proton game (for me) is a Windows game that works on Linux. If it doesn't, I don't care about it at all.

Came here to say exactly this… Thank you for confirming my viewpoint on this. I agree with you 100%. :)
dpanter Jan 15, 2022
Once you poor Nvidia users can move to Wayland, compositing shouldn't be an issue any more. :)
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