Stixter
Published
Music works and loops on original and windows tracks but only for the first one played. Changing music packs, switching stages, restarting, dying or progressing to the next stage causes music to stop until the game is relaunched
Sound effects work perfectly however, even after playing for a few levels
Performance suddenly tanks after about 27 minutes of gameplay with lots of frameskip and unresponsive (keyboard) controls. Only happens while actually playing the game without standing still, even on 1x screen size with no animations and smooth scrolling disabled (Win theme). Relaunching the game gets around the issue but it's quite annoying especially on the longer stages
Using dgVoodoo2 fixes it, and I found it easier to test for by warping to level 147 "Force Field" and pressing DOWN to idle on the conveyor loop
Game crashes if music plays for a little under 6 minutes, regardless of music pack and across different levels/tracks. A workaround is to stop the music in advance by i.e restarting the level
The game freezes on launch for exactly 30 seconds if a paused audio stream is up (tested with mpv) before continuing as normal. Doesn't freeze during level transitions or while playing though, and only happens on Pipewire (no easyeffects/wireplumber); Pulseaudio is fine
I wanted to add this to "Tinker Steps: Other" but didn't get prompted for it: Installing dgVoodoo2 for DX6 by following the instructions on PCGamingWiki and changing the launch parameters to WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw=n" %command% (per issues for other games on proton github) fixes the performance issues over time (didn't encounter any even after an hour), fixes controller support through Steam Input (nonfunctional out of the box even on Windows), and also decreases CPU load dramatically on the game process (130% vs 50%). It does add a watermark though which can be disabled in the config file
protontricks 855860 annihilate
WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/855860/pfx/" winetricks dotnet45
I ran these two commands to install dotnet45 with wine 7.2, it may help if you close Steam and don't launch it until both commands have run successfully. The install sometimes fails or freezes, if it does try running both commands again
After launching the game from Steam I got a rundll32.exe error before the initial setup, "The application could not be started. Do you want to view information about this issue?". Selecting "No" and ignoring the error got the game running after the initial setup was done. This only happened on the first launch
Attempting to install dotnet45 via protontricks claimed it was already installed, but after launching the game gave an error about .NET not being installed. Winetricks (after Steam's first-time setup) did install dotnet45 but the game didn't run. Installing it on a blank prefix as shown above worked for me though
Controller support is okay on a DualShock 4. It works after enabling Steam Input and switching to the Gamepad profile via Steam's Controller Settings (it was set to keyboard+mouse by default), but the game ignores my inputs a lot and logs them on the console instead (F11). This makes navigating the menus and dashing without the dedicated button quite difficult at times
The game stutters and starts consuming more memory during the start of a match and when fighters spawn. In particular, the "Escape From Precint 9: Detention Block A" campaign causes RAM usage to hit 8 GB on the second area making my system run out of memory... strangely, the game process is reported as the one using the most (resident) RAM at 1 GB via htop, and shared memory isn't using it all up either
