Coat McMutton
Published
For the first start, the Ubisoft Connect overlay and notifications had to be disabled to be able to get past a black launch screen, but could remain enabled on all subsequent starts.
For multiplayer, Ubisoft Connect had to be installed via Lutris (lutris-6.10-7-x86_64), which then installed its own Steam instance, from which the game could be played in multiplayer once the ports (18000/uPnP) were forwarded.
Minor occasional flickering of some foliage. First few minutes take longer to reach stable and acceptable FPS (50-60) with strong stuttering, likely due to shader caching as I have experienced with other modern titles.
Singleplayer was possible by installing from Steam without any tinkering (Proton 6.3-5).
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%
Wouldn't even get to the launcher without flags.
Mild crackling at start and end of mission text voice-overs.
Without using the launch flags the game would launch and play normally, however the anti-piracy measure would fire, causing units to die very prematurely. With a clean install and launch flags set, this was fixed - may have to add d3dx9 overrides via winecfg, that was necessary on one machine but not on the other. System3 support mentioned that the game not finding the directx9.dll in the system32 folder caused this issue on Windows at least once.
Proton-5.9-GE-5-ST GloriousEggroll
Made sure to set "Windows 10" instead of "Windows 7" via winecfg.
Floating rocks and foliage. Enabling and disabling shader pre-caching via Steam settings fixes this for one session.
Game wouldn't launch saying my GTX 1080 didn't support DX12. Updating the driver to 440.X fixed this.
Wouldn't start without PROTON_NO_D3D11, and had no intro cinematics, both of which were expected. However, very early in a game (before turn 20) it would throw several different kinds of problems at me:
----- AI getting stuck choosing a strategy for a battle, softlocking the game as I couldn't advance the turn due to the ongoing battle, nor get the battle to conclude. I was able to circumvent this by playing the savegame on another machine, but I suspect this problem would have occurred with many, if not all, other battles - the battle this occurred on was the very first of that game. I tried preventing this by setting my CPU governor to "performance" instead of "powersave", and although this bug did not occur while the "performance" setting was active, I'm not sure that my sample size is large enough to draw a reliable conclusion (played the savegame for 20 more turns with ~3 more battles).
----- Crash to desktop. This occurred after setting the CPU to performance mode.
----- UI elements becoming unresponsive. Hovering would play an animation, clicking play a sound, but the game would not actually react to the click with gameplay. This applies to all buttons, including the main menu. This too occurred after setting the CPU to "performance", but I'm not sure if that is relevant or if it would have happened either way. Was fixed by restarting the program, but happened again in a later, different turn.
The program and savegame worked flawlessly when using dualbooted Win 7. Trying other parameters for Proton either didn't do anything or needs testing more rigorous than mine to be noticeably helping.
Backup */steamapps/common/Evil Genius 2/Launcher/eg2.exe and replace it by copying and renaming */steamapps/common/Evil Genius 2/bin/evilgenius_vulkan.exe to */steamapps/common/Evil Genius 2/Launcher/eg2.exe
Cursor would stay invisible when switching back to the game.
Had to force Experimental, otherwise it would not recognise my card's DX12 capabilities.
1080p in a 3 monitor setup. Has significant stuttering during gameplay on first startup, but settles in as buttery smooth after roughly 20-30 minutes - note that this is only the very first time starting the game, consecutive play sessions do not suffer from this problem. Alt+Tab can result in losing mouse capturing in any window mode ("Window", "Fullscreen", "Exclusive Fullscreen") for a few minutes after tabbing back in. This fixes itself after a few minutes, but can be circumvented by toggling the setting to "Window" before tabbing out, then to "Exclusive Fullscreen" after tabbing back in.
There seem to be no bugs that are exclusive to running the game with Proton.
On startup, after the opening logos, the main menu is only a black screen with music and a working mouse cursor. This can be remedied by repeated keyboard input (alternating Escape and Space works for me).
Game detects unsuitably low settings. Resolution has to be set manually by modifying the render.cfg file.
Game would not start with nouveau driver. Installing Nvidia's proprietary 418 driver solved this.
With experimental or older versions (such as 5.x), after a multiplayer co-op game concluded, the lobby would "crash", saying the other player had disconnected. This was consistent after every game, making a co-op campaign impossible. Using 8.0-x fixed this.
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%
Changed line in steamapps/common/Riftbreaker/conf/initial_config_win.cfg 'set render_system "dx12"' to 'set render_system "dx11"' to be able to start without crash.
Every launch, zero to two of three systems (usually just one) would fail:
- Minimap texture missing
- Projectile particles missing (flamethrower, certain enemy types' attacks; regular bullets still show up)
- Markers missing (hidden cache markers (x still shown on minimap, so can be worked around), hostile mines, meteor shower impact markers)
Larger waves caused FPS drops. May be a native problem though, not necessarily Proton-specific.
I found playing without markers or weapon particles bearable enough not to bother with further tinkering, only restarting when the map bugged out.
Played on experimental branch.
Game crashed when waking machine from screensaver mode.
Game would not start until system was rebooted after its installation when using default Proton. Achievements would not unlock without switching to GE.
