Ailesha
Published
Works fine, with most issues likely due to the game being early in development
Some texture mishaps happened during the opening area. I haven't played too terribly long in the game itself, though, so I don't know if it'll repeat in there or if it was an isolated incident exclusive to cutscenes or something.
Got a steady 60 FPS in the opening areas, but only 15-20 FPS on the main island.
Like others, I ultimately had to grab the instructions from lucianolev in order to get things working, including the SecuROM registry import every time I want to start up the game.
On top of that, I had to force Proton 5.0-9, as I have GloriousEggroll's environment set as the global default and it was hanging on a ProtonFixes window.
Lastly, I also had to remove the Crysis/Game/Localized/Video/Trailer_* videos, as they were extremely slow and made it impossible to actually reach the main menu in any semblance of a reasonable timeframe.
Alt-Tab technically works, but the game doesn't properly minimize. Luckily, I have a second monitor that I can load everything on and use to type this while the game itself continues to run on the primary one.
It takes forever to load menus, often sitting on a black screen for up to a full minute before it finally displays anything. However, once things are loaded, performance is easily acceptable. The opening area ingame is easily over 90 FPS at maximum detail.
Nowadays, "But can it run Crysis?" apparently refers to the broken-by-design DRM functions rather than actual hardware limitations. Abolish DRM and the meme would all but disappear entirely.
Native Linux version works fine
It's recently started crashing on startup, but only the first time or two after booting/rebooting the computer. It doesn't happen on every boot and I have no idea of the cause but it always becomes stable after a couple tries so it's not that big a deal.
Works great running on Xubuntu 23.04 with the full conversion to Pipewire. (Ubuntu and its flavors all come with Pipewire by default since 22.04, but only with the PulseAudio default backend. Other backends like ALSA and JACK aren't installed by default, and Bluetooth audio support is broken without extra packages too. DST uses the ALSA backend for audio, so if you run into issues in Ubuntu 22.04+, try checking if the pipewire-alsa package is installed.)
Works perfect out of the box
Only minor thing is that the game screen glitches when it's alt-tabbed out of, but instantly fixes itself once it regains focus. It's only noticeable if you're streaming or recording the window, so most people won't ever notice it. Works 100% fine otherwise, so
5.9-GE-5-ST GloriousEggroll
The opening movie will crash the game, so after enabling WineD3D, click "Config" in the launcher, select the "Graphics Settings" tab, and uncheck "Movie Display" to bypass it.
All graphics options appear to work fine. I've set it to maximum detail and fullscreen 1080p without issue. Also, this isn't really a bug, but it should be noted that only the ESC key can be used to exit the game from the main menu. There's no gamepad equivalent, at least on my XBox 360 controller. It threw me off for a minute.
Just a small test
Only did a small test to make sure things work. Didn't actually play the game itself yet, but it appears to work fine. No issues as far as I can tell.
Disable on-demand patching in launcher, wait an hour for patching after each update, and Alt-tab and force close via Steam and you're fine.
VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json DXVK_FRAME_RATE=120 mangohud %command%
First off, I had to disable "On-demand patching" to get it to run relatively smoothly the first time around. Subsequent patches after weekly updates still run into a lot of pausing, but at least the first time around was smoother. Beyond that, downloads as a whole were slow. I have a gigabit connection and it took 3 hours to download the nearly 30GB of game files. My friend on Windows downloaded it all in no time, so it's clearly an incompatibility with Wine/Proton. Once ingame, it's fine, though. I was getting 375 FPS on my RX 6700 and had to manually limit the FPS before entering or else the performance alone would make it hard to Alt-tab out and use other apps. Once that was stabilized, I could properly limit the FPS ingame, but I'm leaving the environment variable anyway just in case.
The game consistently freezes on exit. No progress gets lost from it, near as I can tell, but it's still annoying to have to go over to Steam and click the Stop button to actually close the game.
There was a minor issue where my friend and I would see chat logs of the other disconnecting and reconnecting, but I'm not sure if that's an issue with Wine or if it happens across Windows clients too. There's no tangible lag when it happens, so it seems a nonissue in the end.
Without these tinkering steps and the knowledge that the launcher can potentially freeze, that alone can easily drive people away. However, once aware of all that, it can be as fun as any F2P MMO can be.
My launch arguments are because I use a dual GPU setup with a GTX 1050 as the secondary GPU for recording/streaming encoding purposes. The game detected both GPUs but defaulted to the 1050 and refused to let me change away from it for some reason, so I just made Linux hide it via the environment variable. None of my launch arguments are actually important for most people. The game can be run without issue on most setups without tinkering with them.
Menu is laggy, freezes on loading screen
I can get through the menu and can see and select my characters, but when trying to go into NGS, it gets partway through the loading screen and then freezes. I can still hear the BGM going but the video is just frozen and closing out via my distro's taskbar gives me the "App Not Responding" dialog so the game is definitely frozen up. Haven't tried going into the original PSO2 content, but I don't expect it to be much better if the menu is this laggy.
It works flawlessly so long as you can deal with variable speeds
It might also be slow in Windows. I'm not entirely sure since I don't have a Windows machine to test on, but there's times when it would speed up and slow down significantly depending on number of objects it was rendering.
On the plus side, being an arcade game, the slowdowns made it easier to steer during those times, but those times tended to end quickly and the variance can easily throw someone off their momentum.
RADV_PERFTEST=rt %command%
I was able to get 25-30 FPS by using the Alt-X menu and setting TAA-U Preset to "Performance" but even with tinkering, the severe graphical artifacts just make for a horrible experience. I also had to use GloriousEggroll's Proton because MangoHud simply refuses to work in Proton 7.0-5 for me across multiple games, including this one, and Steam's built-in FPS counter is way too small.
Works great out-of-the-box on Proton 5.13-1
There's a known issue with SWTOR when it comes to camera control that happens even on Windows. The workaround is to adjust the camera speed to something other than the defaults ingame, then exit, navigate to [PROTON_PREFIX]/drive_c/users/steamuser/Local Settings/Application Data/SWTOR/swtor/settings, open up [ACCOUNT_NAME]_Account.ini, find the Controls_CameraRotationSpeed setting, and change it to something lower than 0.1. I set it at 0.06 and it's working great.
It slows down when entering somewhat crowded areas, which is something I didn't expect given the age of the game. Dunno if that also happens in Windows or not. Works fine otherwise, even on the highest settings.
Works fine out-of-the-box, with most bugs being caused by the game itself and not related to Proton in any way.
Each time the game is launched, Alt-Tab doesn't work the first time it's used, but Alt-Tabbing back into the game, then Alt-Tabbing out again will allow it to work fine until the game is restarted.
Crowded areas will get pretty slow, but overall, it's perfectly playable.
Starting with Chapter 2, it starts crashing on cutscenes if the graphics settings are too high. This appears to happen even in Windows, so it's a bug with the game, not Proton. A post I found on the official forums from 2012-2015 recommended setting graphics to minimum, with the exception of turning on Bloom (which automatically changes one of the Shadows settings to High) to at least have decent graphics and I can confirm this works here too.
There were also warnings that this may no longer be enough starting around Chapter 10. I can't confirm or deny the Chapter 10 problem, as I haven't played that far in, but I can confirm that doing the workaround does at least work past Chapter 2.
There's a known issue with SWTOR when it comes to camera control that happens even on Windows. The workaround is to adjust the camera speed to something other than the defaults ingame, then exit, navigate to [STEAM_LIBRARY]/steamapps/compatdata/1286830/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Local Settings/Application Data/SWTOR/swtor/settings, open up [ACCOUNT_NAME]_Account.ini, find the Controls_CameraRotationSpeed setting, and change it to something lower than 0.1.
The equivalent to most game's defaults should be around 0.05 (i.e. 50%), so you should be able to adjust it from there for your own preferences.
Just install and run. Works perfectly as far as I can tell.
I didn't test multiplayer, but I can verify that single player works without issues. There's an old issue from Wine where the background music can't properly initialize & throws errors everywhere since it expects a physical CD in the drive for that, but it can be solved by navigating to where the game was installed, opening "./se4/Data/Settings.txt" and changing "Allow CD Music" to "FALSE". Save it, then you can start the game normally without any issues.
Completely unplayable. Launcher works, but the moment you go into the main game, it freezes/crashes depending on which version of Proton/Wine you're using.
Assuming you edit the text file to disable music and set the resolution properly, it should be okay.
I had to edit SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/SpaceEmpiresV/SE5/Data/Settings.txt and change Allow Music to FALSE or else the game will cause problems past the main launcher.
Obviously, this means no background music is available, but other sounds work fine.
A few lines emanate from various planets and stuff. They don't really get in the way, though.
I experienced issues with the default graphics settings. Using the settings in the game's main launcher, I had to change the resolution to either match my screen's native resolution or otherwise set it to Windowed in order to avoid problems with Xfce panels appearing on top of the game, as an example.
Also, changing the Display Driver option at the top causes problems, so it's best to leave it on the default.
Lastly, the launcher will fall back to the background when a window is closed. I suspect this might be a conflict with Proton/Wine and Xfce's focus-stealing prevention, but I haven't tested further. It's easy enough to just click the window button on the panel or use Alt-Tab to bring it back to the foreground and it doesn't happen in the main game, so I consider it a minor issue.
The previous report by VinnieSift does mention the Tutorial causing crashing. I haven't tested it, so I can't verify whether or not this is still a problem. I can verify that both Quick Start and New Game does work fine.
There's also some errors that appear that reference being unable to load a file that has no filename. Often, multiple ones will appear at once, but closing each of them out will eventually get back to the game and it appears to function without issue, so it's likely just a glitch caused by differences in filesystems between Linux and Windows.
Native/CE version works fine, but it's a shame the full version is broken
It defaults to the CE version for Linux, but forcing a Proton version to install the Windows version makes it default to the "full" version of the game, which simply doesn't work. The devs have stated in the past that there's libraries in that version that aren't compatible with Linux and that it'd require a major retooling to replace the libraries that don't work. Apparently they decided that the scaled-down CE version was their "retooling" which leaves the full game to rot away unplayable.
I'm playing without any expansion packs or mods & haven't done much testing due to the main issue I'm running into. Due to my older system, I have graphics set on their lowest, but the updated graphics card still lets me play at around 40-50FPS, which is about the same as what I get in Windows. Anyway, my issue is that movement of any kind gets extremely jittery as the game loads new textures & stuff. It smooths out once they're all loaded, but this is one thing that didn't happen during my playtime in Windows. As such, I can't recommend playing this game on anything but the fastest systems until the caching issues are figured out.
For nVidia users like myself experiencing stuttering issues & jerky movement, it's due to nVidia's drivers limiting the shader cache to 128MB. Adding "export __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP=1" to my ~/.profile cleared this up real quick. Performance is on par with its Windows counterpart. I have noticed the launcher remaining behind afterwards like other people, but as stated, it's easy enough to kill via the task manager.
Playing via Steam Play results in an error message saying it requires 256 colors. I tried the steps here: https://wiki.winehq.org/256_Color_Mode and ran it through the latest staging branch of Wine but still didn't work. From the debug logs in the terminal, it seems it uses a weird fullscreen method that currently isn't supported by Wine & by extension, Proton. So as of yet, it's completely unplayable.
It's just not playable. Too slow loading, crashes abound, and just poor performance all around.
6.1-GE-1 GloriousEggroll
You do not wanna resize the window at any point. Like with everything else, it'll slow down tremendously.
Lots of freezing throughout the entire thing. Opening up a character, exiting back to the main menu, exiting the app itself. If you minimize it, it'll sometimes even crash when it tries to exit.
It likes to crash if you alt-tab out for too long.
The unofficial English patch doesn't work either.
General lag when interacting with other players. The same happens with my friends playing in Windows, so it's just buggy netcode, not exclusive to Linux/Proton.
When using Proton 8.0, it crashes on startup with a "Fatal error." No additional information is given in the error message. Using Proton 7.0, it works fine and can be enjoyed with all its wackiness.
