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A small update for those interested in keeping up with the news surrounding Steam Play and Proton development.

In September, we spoke to Linux game porter Ethan Lee where he went on to mention how he would like to officially work on Steam Play's Proton. Not long after our article went up, he ended up speaking to Valve so things started moving pretty quickly. All was quiet, then, at the start of this month he wrote a post on Google+ to mention that he was working out some sort of contract to officially begin working on it.

Teasing on Twitter only a few days ago, Lee showed off RAGE running with FAudio and then last night he said this on Twitter:

Oh, by the way, for those wondering about my _official_ work, starting tomorrow I'm working on Proton in an official capacity, in partnership with CodeWeavers. Task #1 is FAudio integration!

What exactly is FAudio? In Ethan Lee's own words:

FAudio is a new, accuracy-focused reimplementation of XAudio2 and its relative libraries (such as X3DAudio, XACT, and XAPO). Part of this work includes a COM wrapper that mimics the Windows XAudio2 DLLs, allowing Windows games to use FAudio for audio support instead. 

At the moment Wine is reimplementing XAudio2 with OpenAL Soft, and the other libraries (including X3DAudio) are currently stubbed. In addition to the feature gaps, there are also various accuracy issues that come from wrapping a low-level audio API around a high-level API (as we found ourselves while making FNA, hence the creation of FAudio).

The idea is that FAudio would both fill in large gaps left by the current Wine implementation as well as make the existing implementation much more accurate, and in a perfect world, remove the need for the DX redist for audio support.

This should allow many more games to work properly in Steam Play, which is why it's such an exciting project.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam Play
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Faattori Oct 16, 2018
I wonder if this audio rework will be upstreamed to Wine.
I hope so.
Liam Dawe Oct 16, 2018
Quoting: FaattoriI wonder if this audio rework will be upstreamed to Wine.
I hope so.
I would assume so, it's all open source so there would have to be a good reason why it wouldn't be accepted. Since he's working with Codeweavers, it would make sense.
mao_dze_dun Oct 16, 2018
Hopefully, Skyrim and Fallout 4 will have working audio, soon.
rustybroomhandle Oct 16, 2018
Warframe has a bug for me where the audio will get all garbled after an hour or so, like it's suddenly under water. Hopefully this will fix that too. It's a minor annoyance as it's easy to make go away, but still would be nice to have fixed.
Faattori Oct 16, 2018
Quoting: rustybroomhandleWarframe has a bug for me where the audio will get all garbled after an hour or so, like it's suddenly under water. Hopefully this will fix that too. It's a minor annoyance as it's easy to make go away, but still would be nice to have fixed.

I have this too and I wondered if this is a common thing. Looks like it is.
Zlopez Oct 16, 2018
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Quoting: rustybroomhandleWarframe has a bug for me where the audio will get all garbled after an hour or so, like it's suddenly under water. Hopefully this will fix that too. It's a minor annoyance as it's easy to make go away, but still would be nice to have fixed.

I'm experiencing the same with Warhammer End Times: Vermintide. The audio is really bad after playing it about an hour.
M@GOid Oct 16, 2018
Speaking of Proton, now its possible to finally play one of the few Valve games that were not ported to Linux: Alien Swarm. It would be nice if Liam take a look at it.

Also, Left 4 Dead 1 still doesn't work for me.
ageres Oct 16, 2018
Quoting: M@GOidAlso, Left 4 Dead 1 still doesn't work for me.
But the whole Left 4 Dead 1 is included into Left 4 Dead 2.
Arehandoro Oct 16, 2018
Good on him, happy he made it :)

Although he says in partnership with codeweavers instead of Valve... interesting.
M@GOid Oct 16, 2018
Quoting: ageres
Quoting: M@GOidAlso, Left 4 Dead 1 still doesn't work for me.
But the whole Left 4 Dead 1 is included into Left 4 Dead 2.

Yes, I know. But that wish to have everything running here is strong :-)
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