Valve officially confirm a new version of 'Steam Play' which includes a modified version of Wine

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: edo

Quoting: NatedawgI think this is great news!

I can see this discouraging some developers from making a Linux port, but these developers will likely be the same ones who are on the fence about making a Linux port anyway. The ones who have been natively supporting us will likely continue to do so.

Knowing the Linux community, I 'm pretty sure we will still make it a top priority to support publishers like Feral / Aspyr / etc.

but now there is no reason to not buy a game because it doesnt have a linux version, feral business model is in danger.
We will see how things goes.

You seem to be assuming that Proton magically makes/will make everything work perfectly. This is still just Wine doing the heavy lifting in the background, and plenty of things will still be broken. A dedicated port means actual guarantees that all features work on the target OS at release and will be supported going forward. Those are no small benefits.

To give a real-life example, it took years before Guild Wars 2 on Wine became truly playable for me with only one graphical glitch, and recently it started crashing randomly every few minutes. Continued support would mean I can buy the game with confidence and not be locked out of it randomly from one patch to the next. That would make me more likely to keep spending money on it, instead of gambling with a purchase. Unless and until Valve or anyone else manage to make Wine perfect, there is absolutely still room for native ports.

Yep, I agree completely with this. A native port is typically guaranteed to work, especially a quality one from a AAA porting house such as Feral/Aspyr/etc. I just tried a few games with Proton. It's a nice tool, but it still has quite a ways to go, will probably be several years before it works most of the time, and will probably never work flawlessly. :)


Last edited by Natedawg on 23 August 2018 at 6:51 pm UTC

So I see in SteamOS I can use Steam Play when enabling the beta participation. However, I cannot access the "Enable Steam Play for All Titles" that is available in the desktop app. Is this hidden somewhere? Anyone figured out how to turn this on in SteamOS?

Also, Doom 2016 is flawless under Steam Play. Mind boggling that this is actually happening.

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestYou might as well be a Microsoft employee at this point...

And, considering how you are propagating this Proton™ thing, you may be Valve®'s employee… :S:

See, those two things are not equivalent insults. Because, like, Valve is on our side (more or less), while Microsoft is our enemy (not more or less, but quite specifically). So, "might as well be employee of our ally" is different from "might as well be employee of our enemy".
This is perhaps only tangentially relevant, but if you don't (want to) grasp that basic point, I don't trust what else you have to say on the topic.

So far, I've played Doom (doesn't seem to save, however), Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (I like quirky racing games, sue me. Can't seem to load the configuration tool), Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (no issues) and No Man's Sky (no issues), all at acceptable frame rates and graphics settings. Pretty sweet.

My system - Linux Mint 18.3 64 bit, Cinnamon 3.6.7, Kernel 4.15.0-32, Intel Core i7 - 7800x & 3.50GZ x 6, 16 Gib Mem, Geforce GTX 1070, 8Gib.

Quoting: GuestUntil the Linux/SteamOS icon is shown on a game, it has no official Linux support, you have no guarantee it will run, and you have no right to post negative reviews when it doesn't.

You'll still have a right to a refund on Steam, provided it's within 2 hours of game time; which should be enough time to test most games.

I just gave Doom a try tonight, and got a black screen. (Nvidia 326.24 driver) I fixed this by adding this as a launch options: +r_renderAPI 1

Right click on the Doom game on the steam client, -> properties -> set launch options and paste in the above.

That option forces Doom into Vulkan graphics mode.

Worked here, FYI.

Quoting: GuestSo now that I've had time to think about this news more, I thought I'd try add more discussion points.

Disclaimer: I personally find it odd that people are praising Valve so much here. Valve didn't make wine. Or dxvk. Or actually any of the tools that make this possible. They're just packaging it into Steam.

Uh, I think they did make dxvk. Didn't the main DXVK guy just turn out to have been paid by Valve all along? Your general point is taken though. Most of the software this relies on (like Linux itself) is a community effort and we owe, and have owed all along, our thanks to the hardworking members of that community.

QuoteAnyway, so the first point for me is that nothing here couldn't be done before, and wasn't already being done before. Wine could already be used, and what whitelisted games I have already ran completely fine anyway on a vanilla wine with no extra patches. Furthermore, some games that run on that vanilla wine don't run with Steam Play, likely because the latter is based off an older version of wine - and this I consider a "con" of Steam Play. It's not very likely to get updates in a hurry, and a lot of games benefit from those updates.

That's not so great. But this is after all a beta, and they do seem to be paying people to make improvements. I expect it to get a bit more solid before they move this to main Steam from beta Steam. I don't get the impression that it's based on a very old version--Wine-related development is just moving at such lightspeed right now that the bleeding edge is significantly ahead of even quite recent stuff.

QuoteAs a "pro", this does package everything nicely into Steam and avoids a lot of hassle for people who just want to push a button. I'm really not the target audience for this - I run gentoo, I like bleeding edge, I like customisation.

You may not be the target audience for this, but I don't think that's relevant. The point is that the target audience for this is a lot bigger than the audience of people like you--and, the audience of people like you are mostly already using Linux anyway. People are stoked about this because there is a perception that it is tactically significant in the struggle to increase Linux desktop/gaming market share, and similarly a perception that in the longer term if we want games we need that market share. I'm a fan of this as a tactical move helpful to Linux adoption. Of course it may not work, plenty of moves to promote Linux use have failed in the past. But it's a good shot, and seems likely not to be an isolated one. It also at the same time promotes Vulkan, and IMO increased Vulkan use is good for, well, every platform that isn't Windows--even MacOS, whether they want to realize it or not.

QuoteAnother "con" however, is that something like this already exists! Lutris, for example. And many games really only work properly with different wine versions, different overrides, that sort of thing. Wine can be a bit of a temperamental beast, and needs coaxing to get it running sometimes, which Lutris handles far better (and doesn't need Steam to do it). appdb.winehq.org already has what I consider a "whitelist" - a community run lit of games that work nicely. Maybe there are plans for something similar here - it's still early days to know what the longer term plans are for Steam Play.

Doesn't need Steam to do it . . . no, you don't get it. Look, I'm not the target audience for this either, because I don't really have any non-Linux games and I have too many Linux games owned or wishlisted to ever really worry about the titles I can't get natively on Linux. But I'm a lot closer. Here's the thing: My games are on Steam. I'm going to be using it anyway. Having to fiddle with Lutris, much less vanilla Wine and different Wine versions and go find some whitelist half-ass maintained by some community I've never heard of and on and on when all I want is to relax and play a game . . . not interested. If I can buy a game and run it on Steam just like with any other game, I'm there--or I would be if I wanted any Windows games.

QuoteOn the matter of support, I personally would prefer eON over wine.

What's eON?

QuoteTo end on a "pro", the real news for me is apparent financial backing for some development effort. The wording makes me think that's what most of the effort from Valve really is (other than Steam packaging): financial backing, so if Valve employees are doing a lot more then I do apologise! This means that hopefully development will generically improve on things like dxvk and vkd3d, which helps the wine experience in general, for everybody, not just Steam users.

I for one would be far less approving if they were doing some kind of sequestering thing where they made their own private fork or whatever and weren't passing changes upstream. But they seem to be acting pretty responsible about it and like good open source citizens.

Haha, cool I just launched Call of Duty Advanced Warfare to see if it works. Flawless.

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: stretch611Consumers are more likely to be ignorant of the lawsuit…

Precisely!

Quoting: stretch611…and even if they know about it they are more than likely to side with Valve…

Guess what will happen when Steam refuses to launch after the Windows™ Update? My bet they will run towards Microsoft® and Valve® with their sticks and stones and demands to "fix it back". And what happens next? Microsoft® won't budge and Valve will be unable to do anything.

If the US were the only significant venue that existed, you might be right. Valve would sue in the EU. And China, probably. The EU courts have a LOT more teeth with respect to this kind of anticompetitive behaviour, and would right now probably gleefully nuke MS just as a side amuse-bouche to the trade war.

Quoting: mirowell I am not pessimistic about this, surely it will do lots and lots of good.
I am just afraid that too many people will blame "linux" for the less performance and more bugs, not understanding that this is not a native build, that there is dx->vulkan translation and .dll emulation aka at least one additional layer which makes things slower and more buggy.

That is a point, actually one of the most solid "con" points I've seen. Something like this happened with the Steam Machines only it was about bad ports.