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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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Avehicle7887 Oct 16, 2018
I wish him the best on this job, his Linux work over the years has been amazing all the way. Although I'll always prefer a native build, I came to tolerate Wine for some of those pesky Windows only games :)
ziabice Oct 16, 2018
<3 Ethan Lee, for you only love reactions! <3
SuperKey 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.

WAIT! Are you able to run Warframe with Proton?


Last edited by SuperKey on 16 October 2018 at 9:56 pm UTC
oldrocker99 Oct 17, 2018
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I have been able to get a few of the Windows games I had bought back in my dual-booting days, and am able to run BioShock (the original), Oblivion, Banished (no sound), Bejewled, and one or two others. It's been a crapshoot; some games run perfectly, some won't run at all, and some just are silent.

And it will only improve.
no_information_here Oct 17, 2018
I can only imagine that whatever Ethan works on will be a great success. We have been so lucky to have amazing dedicated devs working on linux gaming lately. I hope Ethan finds Wine/Proton coding rewarding!

(Whatever happened to Aaron from Knockout Games? Haven't seen much from him lately.)
rustybroomhandle Oct 17, 2018
Quoting: SuperKey
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.

WAIT! Are you able to run Warframe with Proton?

Yeah, the launcher is borked, but luckily some genius made a bash script that replaces the launcher. ;)

Follow the instructions here:
https://gitlab.com/GloriousEggroll/warframe-linux/tree/steamplay-proton

Game works really well, and the above script usually handles updates well too. I do sometimes have to add a "--firstrun" launch option in Steam after some big updates (just for one run), and also sometimes after big updates I have to replace Launcher.exe with the fake script again as Steam will overwrite it.
Arehandoro Oct 17, 2018
Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: ArehandoroGood on him, happy he made it :)

Although he says in partnership with codeweavers instead of Valve... interesting.

Codeweavers are the big Wine contributors, so it does fit nicely for direct Wine work. As for what "official" means in that regard is not really clear. Also not important.
Quoting: Kristian
Quoting: ArehandoroGood on him, happy he made it :)

Although he says in partnership with codeweavers instead of Valve... interesting.

Yeah,and presumably if he is working with Codeweavers and not Valve then technically he will be working on Wine and not Proton(or Steamplay). Just a technicality, since the changes he makes to Wine will end up in Proton.

I know, not complaining here, I was just pointing it out after he mentioned he was working with Valve to sign a contract :)
Whitewolfe80 Oct 17, 2018
Quoting: GustyGhost
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.

Eh it's one of those things that would have been nice for the sake of completeness. How different, architecturally, is L4D1 from L4D2?

Its not same engine just new assets and vo hence why it was easy to add the original l4d to l4d 2 without any engine changes.
Whitewolfe80 Oct 17, 2018
Quoting: SuperKey
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.

WAIT! Are you able to run Warframe with Proton?

Yeah you are also able to run with with Portwar s script that is a stand alone installer i use the portwot script from the website to update and play world of tanks on linux.
BrazilianGamer Oct 17, 2018
Dude, this is AWESOME News. #Hype
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