I've been fiddling [External Link] a looooot with my Steam Deck since I got it. The whole reservation thing and launch of the Steam Deck felt a lot like the launch of the original Raspberry Pi for me. I felt the same excitement and giddiness all over again.

From all the previews, technical overviews and having followed Valve's linux gaming adventures, I knew what I was getting into and still... even then I was blown away when I got it in my hands.

This device is a huge deal for gaming and pushing openness in software and hardware.

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Quoting: iiariHaving not tried this yet, can someone tell me how the Bottles approach works vs a solution like Lutris and why one would use one vs another? Thank you!

At a high level, lutris is a general purpose application launcher and installation frontend for various types of apps. Wine is just one of its available runners and setting up wine prefixes is not its primary purpose. It has community made installation scripts for many games and utils that make it really easy for users to get their favourite app up and running. Applications first approach.

Bottles is completely focused on wine prefix creation and management. You set up a "bottle" and then launch the desired apps. Wine prefix first approach.
The killer features of Bottles are being able to "bottle up" and export it so other people can easily import it in their Bottles app and versioning of the wine prefix. You can save the state of your bottle so if you mess something up or simply want to rollback to a previous state then that's all possible with one click.
If you use the flatpak version of Bottles (which is highly recommended) then you get some great out of the box sandboxing preventing things from leaking out of a bottle into your personal folder or the rest of the system.
It comes with easy ui toggles to enable the usual suspects like dxvk, vkd3d, FSR, DLSS, etc... common windows dependencies installers are one click away.
Launcher scripts for the popular game launchers are included with protondb like ratings (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze) but the whole library of lutris installer scripts is missing for now. They should be mostly compatible however, in the future it's very likely bottles will be able to make use of the lutris community installers.

My personal use cases for Bottles so far were running "normal" windows apps or setting up a bottle for windows itch.io games where I can quickly and without hassle launch many itch games and then rollback if they make a mess (+the out of the box sandboxing with flatpak, with flatseal you can toggle off the network access for bottles to network sandbox as well). Or I set up an external windows game only to add it as non-steam game to the steam client. For any other application that already has a neat lutris installation script, lutris still is the most comfortable and easy solution to keep up to date.

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Quoting: AkienThat sounds pretty interesting! I was indeed looking for an alternative client to access my itch.io games as I'd like something that works while in Steam UI mode.

I gave it a try, and currently GameHub seems a bit too rough, at least when it comes to its packaging options. Both the AppImage and the Flatpak are labelled as unstable, and indeed I tried the flatpak on Steam Deck and it:
- Broke Plasma Discover
- Doesn't seem to support Steam or Itch

And the AppImage depends on a specific version of the gio-2.0 library from Ubuntu Bionic, doesn't work on my Mageia desktop, and probably won't on the Steam Deck either.

Thanks for testing it out! That's very interesting feedback.

I've been using the flatpak version downloaded from github which I installed like this:

flatpak install GameHub-bionic-0.16.2-1-dev-448a0bd.flatpak

for Itch to work you need to point it to the itch config folder (usually it's ~/.config/itch) and it should detect the games and let you install them.

But yeah... gamehub is still rough but the auto cover downloader and steam shortcut creator is super handy instead of doing it manually and hunting for the game logos.

The AUR gamehub-git package is quite better for sure.

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Hi Liam, could you also maybe test GameHub [External Link] on the Steam Deck through gamescope to see how it behaves ? It has itch.io, gog, Humble Bundle, emulation integration and there's a cool feature with an "Add to Steam" button that automatically adds non-steam games into the client with cover picture and all. Pretty cool stuff.

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Quoting: scratchiNice! I want to give it a try now, can you zip up the code and upload it somewhere? Please help :)

You should be able to find a mirror of the repo by searching a bit. I already had it pulled from github before the takedown. Checkout the correct branch if you want to build for Vice City or 3.

This is on Manjaro KDE with Wayland.

At the root level I had to apply:

 diff --git a/premake5.lua b/premake5.lua
index 531f92ea..987e72b3 100644
--- a/premake5.lua
+++ b/premake5.lua
@@ -354,7 +354,7 @@ project "reVC"
 
  if _OPTIONS["with-opus"] then
  filter {}
- links { "libogg" }
+ links { "ogg" }
  links { "opus" }
  links { "opusfile" }
  end

libogg is wrong.

In vendor/librw apply:

diff --git a/src/gl/gl3device.cpp b/src/gl/gl3device.cpp
index b1036c0..5184e17 100644
--- a/src/gl/gl3device.cpp
+++ b/src/gl/gl3device.cpp
@@ -1689,8 +1689,8 @@ static struct {
  int gl;
  int major, minor;
 } profiles[] = {
- { GLFW_OPENGL_API, 3, 3 },
- { GLFW_OPENGL_API, 2, 1 },
+ //{ GLFW_OPENGL_API, 3, 3 },
+ //{ GLFW_OPENGL_API, 2, 1 },
  { GLFW_OPENGL_ES_API, 3, 1 },
  { GLFW_OPENGL_ES_API, 2, 0 },
  { 0, 0, 0 },

To force GLES selection.

I compile it like this:
premake5 --with-librw --with-opus --lto gmake2
cd build
// export your compiler flags like MAKEFLAGS=-j5
make verbose=1 O=. config=release_linux-arm64-librw_gl3_glfw-oal

The binary will be at the root level in bin/ and copy the content of gamefiles/ over your game directory.

I have an overclock for the pi 400:
arm_freq=2100
gpu_freq=750
v3d_freq=750
over_voltage=6
Also using the pure kms driver:
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d-pi4

If I find some time I'd like to figure out how to force the use of wayland instead of xorg (using glfw for wayland). There's a small part that depends on X11 input constants which should be replaceable. Wondering if it would help performance.

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This is unfortunate. :cry:

All this aside, it blew me away to get Vice City running on my Raspberry Pi 400



1024x576 running at 20-25 fps, The framerate seems more stable by forcing GLES instead of OpenGL (just by commenting out the OpenGL profiles in the code).

Very cool!

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Quoting: lejimster

Quoting: popsulfrThat proton also has ARB shaders toggle which might smooth out the experience for Nvidia users with dx9 games. I'll try to add more dx9 translation option when the other projects get to a good state, I was experimenting with dx12 and he dependency part is there but the proton wine is just too old I'd need to continue this on the latest wine version. Why dx12 ?
Well it might just be another option for dx9 see https://github.com/megai2/d912pxy [External Link], which is quite interesting and gives some pointers on what to improve in vkd3d to get it working. For comparison purposes it would also be handy to test dx12 translation and make it available for games on Steam.

As for Gallium nine, there's the issue of the overlay not working which is kind of a dealbreaker. There's no gallium steam overlay option heh, the naive approach would be to use an opengl context to present the image produced by gallium this way the steam overlay can hook onto it. Doesn't look very good for performance though which was the whole point with gallium nine.

Well, I can live without the overlay on some titles. If I need stats I can always use GALLIUM_HUD.

Maybe its something Axel might be able to help with.

Anyway, thanks for the work your doing.

Well, the overlay has more than just performance meters, screenshots, community integrations, steamworkshop, controller rebinding, etc...
So, I'm looking into getting something to work with the steam overlay and gallium nine.
Axel ?

Quoting: massatt212This Gallium-Nine is The SHIT
everything is sooooo smooth, just a few games not working like darksiders II death edition and lord of shadows 1

Nice, it would be really useful if an issue could be filed for those games to get some more info if you're up for it of course.

I have to confess that I don't have AMD hardware to be able to test gallium nine, so this is a bit of a blindfolded development romp for me haha
More testers are always appreciated, I'll switch over to dhewg's out-of-tree gallium nine which might fix some issues.

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Quoting: Nonjuffo

Quoting: Hubro

Quoting: ripperI don't understand how you can install a GOG Windows game through Steam. In the screenshot in the article, the game is already installed, and you create a shortcut to run it through Steam. That's OK. But how do you install it, from a GOG installer, using Proton?

Good question, I was thinking the same thing. My assumption was that the game downloaded from GoG didn't need an installer, but was just extracted from an archive and executed directly.

Try using innoextract: https://constexpr.org/innoextract [External Link]. The latest GOG installers might not work with it yet. Most likely also available through your package manager.

Innoextract is handy but the easier way is to add the gog installer as shortcut and install the game into your steamapps/common folder. Then you update the shortcut to point to the game's executable.
There's an annoying bug with paths with spaces where you have to manually correct the paths but if you go change the launch options it resets it back if you didn't close the panel beforehand. It's still a bit jank but it works otherwise, now I'd like for %command% to work in those shortcuts as well already opened an issue about it.

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Quoting: lejimsterI don't know what I'm doing wrong, but haven't had any success running any external games on steam. Usually when I add an executable it doesn't fill in the location points correctly. But even after editing the launch options I still haven't had any success..

Unless I'm just unlucky with the games I've tried. Maybe I will try another.

On a positive note, I found that somebody has gone to the effort of integrating gallium-nine into a proton build [External Link], which works very nicely on Alan Wake and Borderlands (the two games I've tested so far).

That proton also has ARB shaders toggle which might smooth out the experience for Nvidia users with dx9 games. I'll try to add more dx9 translation option when the other projects get to a good state, I was experimenting with dx12 and he dependency part is there but the proton wine is just too old I'd need to continue this on the latest wine version. Why dx12 ?
Well it might just be another option for dx9 see https://github.com/megai2/d912pxy [External Link], which is quite interesting and gives some pointers on what to improve in vkd3d to get it working. For comparison purposes it would also be handy to test dx12 translation and make it available for games on Steam.

As for Gallium nine, there's the issue of the overlay not working which is kind of a dealbreaker. There's no gallium steam overlay option heh, the naive approach would be to use an opengl context to present the image produced by gallium this way the steam overlay can hook onto it. Doesn't look very good for performance though which was the whole point with gallium nine.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: GuestThis is just shit.

Solid feedback, thanks.

He's right, tho.

Very helpful.

I feel sorry for you. If it helps, their comments look a bit embarrassing among all the other more constructive posts :)

I thought your speculations were quite interesting and companies are continually trying to push the envelope in this regard (see Onlive, Parsec, Sony's streaming to desktop ...)
The biggest hurdle is always the internet speeds and their reliability in offering fast response times.

I made my own ventures into personal cloud gaming by using steam in-home streaming and Wireguard. I'm quite in awe in how finely optimized the streaming part of the client is, even in 4G most titles are still quite playable. FPS games are still a bit too much though for such a loose connection. Also seriously impressive how fast and how much data Wireguard can push securely to make this possible, we got one impressive vpn on our hands there.
It would be great if the streaming client could be open-sourced or they at least get out a client for popular arm boards like the raspberry pi.
A bit of a shame that moonlight seems to be the only option while requiring nvidia and windows. Yet Steam's in-home streaming seems even better than nvidia's solution.

But yeah, I don't know how many people make use of the in-home streaming but I'm seriously impressed that it also holds up over the internet.

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