Katze (they/them)
Published
Cannot force un-fullscreen (running on awesomewm).
Not running with basic CLI tinkering.
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 PROTON_NO_D3D12=1 %command% --cores 1
The game starts up just fine (it will take five minutes to load on first boot even from NVMe), the progress bar finishes just fine, and the game sounds starts, but the window just stops refreshing alltogether.
The last line of its output is:
Loaded game data in 108.4 seconds.
I will chalk those performance issues up to the game though. The way this game works probably means that a large chunk of its logic is shoved through a Lua bytecode blob twice so I understand that it may be choppy on occasion.
Apparently this game requires libc5 or something which is a hassle to get running on any modern system (YMMV) so using Proton is easier. Given that WINE (and by extension Proton) is built in part to allow running programs made for very old versions of Windows (i.e. it also aims to aid software preservation) it kinda makes sense that a game that's been updated the last time over a decade ago would work better in that environment than one that's built around maintenance (by means of distro updates).
Either way, using Proton was pretty much plug&play; go to the game compatibility settings, check the compat checkbox, choose pretty much any Proton version, start playing.
I still very much appreciate developers putting in the time and effort to build a Linux version (especially nowadays that it's often just the click of a button to do so), and here I know it used to work once upon a time, it's just that time has moved on since.
does not work
window with small progress bar pops up, game exits, end of story
I had to switch from Proton GE (7.55-1) to whatever Steam supplies (8.0-1). GE only yielded a black window with no content or audio.
Grey window followed by crash report window.
Doesn't work. I tried using wined3d, forcing a specific D3D version (it seems D3D11 is required), but everything either results in the game not starting at all (disabling D3D11), showing a dialogue about unsupported hardware (forcing wined3d), or the grey window and the crash report.
The fps are just too low to be bearable overall. Even if you're used to 30 fps gaming (my condolences), this game will hurt you.
env DXVK_ASYNC=1 DXVK_FRAME_RATE=144 DXVK_HUD=gpuload,devinfo,version,compiler,fps,memory %command%
Input is laggy whenever actual framerate is below what the game itself is expecting. By this I mean that input gets laggy during framedrops (which.… is probably the least of your problems when it happens) as well as when running with either no framerate cap or when trying to cap the framerate using the DXVK_FRAME_RATE envvar (or via config file). If your hardware gets to about 45 fps you may be able to deal with input lag by setting the game-internal (not the DXVK or other) fps limit to 60 and hope for the best. If you have 60 most of the time (framedrops excluded) then a game setting of 60 should remove all input lag. If you're down to 30 fps usually you may want to set the game setting to a 30 fps limit.
Note that this game stores its entire data within the game directory under "Documents" (i.e. not in the compatdata as you would expect from a game running under wine/proton). This means that reinstalling the game without restoring that directory causes: loss of any settings such as graphics and controls, recompiling the game-internal shaders, however your character and such will stay there (although it took reloading the server list twice for me to show back up, don't worry, it's all online so it shouldn't be gone ever)
Performance degrades to slideshow levels after a few minutes.
Only when using the DX12 backend so make sure to use DX11. Performance doesn't differ much, so DX11 is just less crashy at time of writing.
The GitHub issue has some background information if you're curious, however the gist is that the game is barely playable (says the person with over 40h in it). When starting the game up you will have framedrops whenever some new stuff is loaded, which is to say whenever you walk into a densely populated area or some more elaborate dungeon you will experience a lower framerate with some heavy drops. This means going from consistent 60fps to 30fps with occasional multi-second episodes of 5-7 fps. This makes fighting nigh impossible, however this only affects the moments when the game is loading something so playing should be possible overall, just be prepared for the initial framedrop. The real problem however is what happens after the game was open for 5 minutes or more and you've been travelling about for a few km. At that point you will face the wrath of aggressive texture unloading (my assumption) and you'll have to deal with wonky fps that may be a perfect 60 (or more, whatever floats your screen), but will drop down to an unstable 45 just by wiggling your camera left and right by like 10°. You will see cutscenes with predetermined camera positions load half the background assets on every single camera switch, and you will feel this kind of thing when trying to play. Basically you'll be dealing with a variable framerate that is somewhere in between 2 and 50 most of the time which is just not playable for a shooter of all genres. Basebuilding is somewhat okay, but even the inventory assets and build menus themselves have significant load times so even when you just open the build menu you may be waiting 1-2 seconds for it to load the menu and then another 1 second every time you switch categories. It's just bad. As far as I can tell (and I've been late to the party) Proton 7 was pretty much smooth but some update half a year ago shot that version which means now you will need to play with 9.15 or newer (I prefer GE, but Steam's Experimental build works fine too) unless you want to have broken lighting, pure black textures, or just a straight out broken game (i.e. <9 doesn't start up at all, >8 && <9.15 has a lot of texture issues and such, and >7 generally has the described performance issues). I don't know where people pull the "-force-vulkan" CLI argument, because the game itself is DX11 and DX12 only, so it doesn't (and simply can't) do vulkan itself, so that option won't help you (as the DXVK overlay will happily confirm). Stay away for now I guess.
Occasional flickering of textures.
Occasionally drops out of multiplayer, however similar problems exist on my friends' end and they're running Windows, so I assume it's just the game being RoR2.
All issues seem to be cross platform.
Occasional low-key flicker, but not even that noticable.
Exactly as you would expect. (note: only tested Coop, not PvP if that's a thing).
Checking my launch options they do include "-hz=60". If, like me, you have a 144Hz screen and you do not want this game heating your room more than it already does at 60Hz you can try setting that, but I honestly don't remember whether that actually worked or not.
Before manually full-screening the window (running a tiling window manager the window is force-tiled before that) there is a cursor offset the size of my horizontal taskbar. Not a big deal if you know it though, just full-screen the game properly if your WM doesn't by default.
The usual Unreal Engine input lag where a drop in framerate makes mouse movements awkward.
Matchmaking breaks with DNS64, make sure you disable that if you use it.
Works fine via Proton. Beatboxing with tilted weapons. Doesn't make any sense but is fun.
Sometimes the mouse pointer does a funny and you have to open and close the map repeatedly to be able to actually look around again, however you can rest assured that this issue is present on Windows too, so nothing Linux specific.
I've read about other people having issues connecting to the game servers, however this only happened to me with one specific server (i.e. same IP every time) other servers worked fine when the matchmaking was gracious enough to shuffle me onto those. tcpdump showed properly arriving UDP traffic (although I don't know the protocol, so there could well be missing packets, it being UDP I have no way to tell by looking at the outer layers), and given I've tried two different network configurations one of which is a literal public IPv4 directly routed to my device I doubt it was a problem on my end. The traffic for that one server also did get routed to somewhere in the US via Cogent so as someone who's literally running an AS I am 100% confident with putting all the blame on Cogent and so should you. The game (and the Linux version in general) is probably fine. It's definitely fun. If anyone who is affiliated with the server providers reads this: move away from Cogent, even if just on principle, they're the worst. Oh, also, this game won't work if you're using DNS64. The game specifically makes ANY requests to DNS but when given an AAAA record it just dies trying to connect instead of falling back to the A record. If your game can't handle IPv6 (which it should, but that's a different topic) at least make it use IPv4 specifically instead of imploding, kthxbye
Anti Cheat breaks the game on GNU/Linux
Your game environment is abnormal. Please restart the machine and launch the game again! Error Information: [1-1011-12301]
The AC is stored in QRSL.exe as far as can be determined and according to this user there seem to be kernel-level AC drivers involved: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/wk4udd/comment/ijz8lp7/ In any case Steam Deck support has already been officially said to not happen which paints a pretty clear picture IMHO: https://twitter.com/ToF_EN_Official/status/1555670612005343232
