johannes.aquila
Published
Totally broken.
Program usually freezes seconds after starting a game, without any user activity. I could click the button that advances the help text about 0-4 times before this happened.
I tried almost all standard Proton versions. The only difference I observed was that with the ancient Proton 3.16, the game doesn't even start. I also tried Proton 7 with launch option "PROTON_NO_D3D11=1 %command%" simply because that seems to be a standard tweak that I have often seen.
For most attempts I set all graphics sliders to minimal effort and turned the music off. But the only thing that seemed to help temporarily was closing the help window (if I got a chance to do it before the game froze). This bought me a couple of minutes for getting accustomed to the user interface (without actually playing) before the game displayed several uncaught .NET exceptions and finally crashed instead of freezing.
Given the game's low profile, it is possible that no Proton expert has looked into this yet and that there actually exists a setting that makes this .NET game work.
Crash at game start
The Stardock launcher runs normally, but the game itself crashes immediately when started from the launcher. I tried with Proton versions 5.11-6 and 4.11-13.
Proton Experimental with no extra tinkering does not run the game at all. ("Failed to initialize player: [...] InitializeGraphicsEngine failed.") The following versions seem to work fine except for the initial audio stuttering: Proton 7.0, Proton 6.3. The following older versions seem to work fine except for the initial video, which is replaced by silence and a black screen: Proton 5.13, Proton 4.11.
Very sluggish with default settings, but runs perfectly with these settings.
Stability issues on Steam Deck; not officially supported during early access
Performance problems are due to early access.
During 45 min of play, two game crashes on a Debian laptop that does not quite satisfy the system requirements, one system freeze on Steam Deck.
This report ONLY applies to the current early access version. Apparently it worked fine on Steam Deck before. They are planning to make it work again for the final release. But during early access, they are making no promises. Apparently the false advertising on the store page was added by Steam without asking the developers.
No tinkering required other than selecting an earlier Proton version, but fullscreen mode is forced and there are volume control issues.
Only a limitation that also exists on Windows: Sound effects volume can only be changed via system volume. Music volume can be changed in relation to system volume, though.
Forced fullscreen mode on first screen. Alt-Tab for temporarily hiding the game worked in KDE, but I could not get the game to windowed mode or to run on second screen.
Could not make mouse pointer leave main screen, where the game was running in fullscreen mode. (This work-around seems to work in KDE: use Alt-Tab to hide the game temporarily.)
Does not work with recent Proton. Apparently the technology used for playing sound (MCI) is no longer supported.
