I bought E:D a few months back, but couldn't get it to run at all. I can't remember what versions I tried, so not much help to be honest, but it was an easy refund for me. If this thread takes off with any advice for getting it running, I might give it another try.

Just tried my installation here, still runs just fine. I have the Steam version and use SteamPlay/Proton for ED.
I've setup protontricks and with that I installed dotnet40 into the prefix (`protontricks 359320 dotnet40 win7`). Note that you need to start the game once before running protontricks for having an existing prefix folder.
My launch options are `WINEDLLOVERRIDES=rundll32=d gamemoderun %command%`, though the dll override is just to prevent a rundll message box in case the prefix got updated.

Sorry to necro this thread, but is Elite still working for anyone else?
I wanted to get back to playing again but the game kept crashing within about 5-10 minutes so I decided to try and reinstall it. So far I've tried with Proton 4.11-3, Proton 5.0-9 and Proton 5.0-9-next, each time wiping the pfx directory (and the files in the directory containing pfx) and launching the game from Steam two times before running protontricks. As for protontricks, I've tried the following (following the procedure just mentioned before each, meaning 12 attempts in total):
protontricks 359320 -q dotnet40
protontricks 359320 -q dotnet40 win7
protontricks 359320 -q dotnet472
protontricks 359320 -q dotnet472 win7

None of the installs work; Proton 4.11-3 segfaults every time and Proton 5 silently dies, both before showing any window.
Installing with Proton 5.0-9 and then running the game with Proton 5.9-GE-5-ST does show the launcher window, but it freezes when clicking the log in button.

Is it just me or is anyone else having similar issues? More importantly, does anyone know of a solution?

P.S. I've also edited all the .config files to make sure they include <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> (both as the single supportedRuntime and with the line placed right above the original one).

P.P.S. I would have normally just used 5.9-GE-5-ST but it doesn't seem to work with VR and I just got my Valve Index, so I'm not giving that option up! ;)

Last edited by Cybolic on 1 Oct 2020 at 10:59 pm UTC

This is going to sound dumb, but try only installing the dotnet package you need (I think they just need 4.0). I haven't played in almost a year, but I remember having a number of issues when I tried installing newer dot net, specifically 4.7.

I also had a number of issues with proton, but regular wine worked fine. Might be worth trying it with wine. I'm not sure how VR works though, I don't own one.

Hot damn, I solved it! After starting over yet again and ending up with a pfx preset that was missing everything in the windows directory and constant errors when installing .NET I decided to see what file-relevant ENV options might be affecting this and the answer turned out to be ESYNC!

So, what I did was:

1. Deleted the 359320 directory
2. Set PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 %command% in the game's properties in Steam and ran it again (which failed as expected)
3. Ran env WINEESYNC=0 protontricks 359320 -q dotnet472 win7
4. Ran the game, and now it works again!

So, as my ulimit is set to infinite, I'm guessing this is actually a kernel issue in 5.8.11 (Arch), but at least it's back to working again :D

Quoting: denyasisThis is going to sound dumb, but try only installing the dotnet package you need (I think they just need 4.0). I haven't played in almost a year, but I remember having a number of issues when I tried installing newer dot net, specifically 4.7.

I also had a number of issues with proton, but regular wine worked fine. Might be worth trying it with wine. I'm not sure how VR works though, I don't own one.

I already tried that one (as mentioned). It's good advice regardless, but not the issue in this case. And no, regular Wine and the Glorious Eggroll versions of Proton don't work with VR, unfortunately.

Hey Cybolic. I just re-installed my PC yesterday, clean install. I fired up Elite Dangerous, let it fail, then I used the bottom-most of your commands - protontricks 359320 -q dotnet472 win7. After a few minutes, it finished, and I ran Elite:Dangerous okay.

I'm on Manjaro and choose the Cinnamon desktop, but otherwise, just using fairly stock install. It's using Proton 5.0-9.

That was all in 2D mode - I chose the Horizons option when starting the launcher. Lemme go try VR mode and see if it works.

Edit: Just saw your update, which you made while I was playing/testing Elite for you! Incredible timing. Glad it's working!!

Edit2: Although I'm on kernel 5.8.11-1-MANJARO, and I didn't have to do any of the esync stuff you did. Odd!

Last edited by scaine on 3 Oct 2020 at 2:10 pm UTC

Hey scaine, did VR mode work for you?
2D works for me as well, but in VR I'm consistently getting the Elite splash screen and then SteamVR crashes, both when starting the game from desktop Steam and from the SteamVR dashboard; tried the SteamVR beta from yesterday as well with the same results. No info in the terminal, no error messages, just a black headset screen and the "SteamVR needs to restart" popup dialogue.

I'm honestly considering a reinstall as well at this point :/ My motherboard might be the culprit though, it's an MSI Big Bang XPower-II, which needed special kernel boot flags for years and Manjaro still won't boot on it. I keep seeing "ioctl (SFEATURE): Broken pipe" in the terminal output from Steam (in general), which is what's fuelling my suspicion.

Yeah, I just played over an hour in VR there, so definitely working okay. I had some issues getting the mouse to show up in menus, but after finding the "in-game cursor" option in the Graphics options, that's working now too. Seems fine overall, I'm sorry to tell you!

Well, at least I now know not to direct my disappointment at Frontier, but at my system.
Thanks for the report, scaine :)

Now that I'm back on Mint, I had to redo all this. I'm just here to say - holy shit installing dotnet472 takes AGES!! It's been running for about 20 minutes. You get so used to Linux installs taking like 30 seconds, then, out of the blue, you have to deal with how Windows installs things and it's just... urgh.

...and... it's done. Took nearly 40 minutes. Goddam. But it's working again, so that's something!

@Cybolic, I wonder if your protontricks is simply out of date? Since I've done two fresh installs, I've had to install it again from scratch, so maybe that's the difference?

From the https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks page, it says you do this to upgrade protontricks:
pipx upgrade protontricks

Worth a shot?

Last edited by scaine on 11 Oct 2020 at 12:21 pm UTC

E:D runs very stable but I'm unhappy with the performance on my GTX 970. I also have the impression that a year ago it ran much better. It stutters noticeably when you fly near or inside large structures (space stations for example). You can actually switch off the AA right away with old Nvidia hardware. The edge flickering is not nice.

In the past the Steam Controller also worked very well. But for some time now it hasn't been working properly for me.

How does it work on AMD systems or with new Nvidia cards?

Quoting: scaineNow that I'm back on Mint, I had to redo all this. I'm just here to say - holy shit installing dotnet472 takes AGES!! It's been running for about 20 minutes. You get so used to Linux installs taking like 30 seconds, then, out of the blue, you have to deal with how Windows installs things and it's just... urgh.

...and... it's done. Took nearly 40 minutes. Goddam. But it's working again, so that's something!

@Cybolic, I wonder if your protontricks is simply out of date? Since I've done two fresh installs, I've had to install it again from scratch, so maybe that's the difference?

From the https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks page, it says you do this to upgrade protontricks:
pipx upgrade protontricks

Worth a shot?

I'm on protontricks 1.4.2 using the Aur package, so that should already be the latest version; I think my system is just cursed :P
I think I'll wait until I've built my new system and then check again as I strongly suspect that there's some miscommunication happening with the Valve Index due to my ancient motherboard (it's from 2012). Installing dotnet can take up to two hours on this system as well - too much trouble right now.
Thanks for the suggestion though :)

Quoting: The_AquabatI just saw a video of Jason Evangelho (he talked about gamingonlinux.com on Forbes) complaining exactly about this that he couldn't get this game to work.

I had the main problems with the Frontier Launcher and the registration process, which almost drove me crazy. There are also many Windows users who have problems with it. And incompatible Net environments are also a problem under Windows. Since about a year ago I've noticed that problems I'm having with Proton are also reported by Windows users. So I thought at first that Nier: Automata had problems under Proton until I realized that everything is much worse under Windows.

In the long run encapsulated environments such proton are indeed a good way to deal with this. But you need testers and developers who can create configurations that are adapted to the individual games.

By the way, the Steam Controller had a similar problem. The system would have worked much better if it hadn't been left to the community to create custom configurations for each game.

I hope Valve will learn from this and will invest more in the next try. Then Steam Machines could still be a great success. But for the time being there is still a lot of basic work to be done and Valve is on it.

Hey @Cybolic, you still having issues with E:D?

I played a bit of Noita today on the new 5.13 proton, finished up, then went to run E:D - it's crashing on startup. Forced 5.09... same issue!

So killed the pfx folder, and re-ran protontricks 359320 -q dotnet472 win7 - but it failed quite early, maybe about a minute or two into the process. That's when I remembered this thread and your comment about kernel versions. Turns out, Mint runs 5.4.0-51 out of the box at the moment. And since I'd just re-installed Mint, I was still on that when E:D was working. But a couple of days ago, I downloaded and applied the mainline kernel 5.8.15-lowlatency. Related?

Well, despite a full remove/re-install of E:D on that later kernel, even when forcing the earlier Proton version, I couldn't get it working at all.

So I've gone back to kernel 5.4.0-51-generic... and while protontricks crashed early the first time I ran it, I realised that I was still on Proton 5.13. So I deleted the pfx directory again, re-ran E:D forced to Proton 5.09, wait for it to fail, and then ran Protontricks... and that script is now working. It's been running for around 15 minutes so far, so probably another 10 minutes or so, I'll know if this is the issue!

Fingers crossed. Bit of a pain if it is the kernel though, as I'd have to reboot every time I want to play E:D! But at least we'd know what's causing it to fail, which is something.

EDIT: Yep, I'm in. So kernel 5.4 with Proton 5.09.

Last edited by scaine on 17 Oct 2020 at 2:44 pm UTC

You might give this a try for 5.13 for omitting the dotnet installation:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/150#issuecomment-709907404

It didn't worked for me because login isn't supported yet, but may be your setup fits.

PS: I remember that I initially just installed dotnet40 instead of dotnet472, thus just running `protontricks 359320 dotnet40 win7`. Is version 472 now a requirement?

Quoting: jensYou might give this a try for 5.13 for omitting the dotnet installation:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/150#issuecomment-709907404

It didn't worked for me because login isn't supported yet, but may be your setup fits.

PS: I remember that I initially just installed dotnet40 instead of dotnet472, thus just running `protontricks 359320 dotnet40 win7`. Is version 472 now a requirement?

Now that it's working, I think I'm just going to leave it alone, Jens. However, yeah, it's great news that they're making headway into the .net libraries.

As for 472, I have no idea - I stole that command from Cybolic's reply early in this thread - it worked, so that's what I've been using! :)

Quoting: scaineHey @Cybolic, you still having issues with E:D? [...]

Well, it runs in pancake mode on kernel 5.8.13 using Proton 5.13 (after going through a couple of reinstalls of Proton and the Steam Linux Runtime) but I haven't checked if it runs in VR or whether it will crash after a while. The current prefix was from a Proton 4.11 install with dotnet472. Will check and report back about VR.

UPDATE: VR is still a no-go for me, on Proton 5.13 as well; it still consistently crashes after the Frontier launch video.

Last edited by Cybolic on 17 Oct 2020 at 5:58 pm UTC

The alternate wine-mono installer I had referred to above had been updated. I can login now and with it VR also works for me with Proton 5.13. That said I just briefly started the launch and docking tutorial and played like 5 minutes in game.

Note that I started with a fresh prefix.

Last edited by jens on 18 Oct 2020 at 9:50 am UTC

Quoting: scaineHey @Cybolic, you still having issues with E:D? [...]

New build, new install and now using Proton 5.13-2 with wine-mono and I can confirm that the damn thing works in VR, including using my X52 Pro HOTAS :D

The reprojection is a bit much though so I hope those new Radeon cards become available soon :)