name, clicking ‘Properties...’ and then ‘Browse...’ in the ‘Local
Files’ section.
>> If any of that seems a bit confusing, don’t worry; we’re going
to go through an example of getting an awkward game to run
properly using these techniques.
6
AN APOCALYPTIC ADVENTURE
It’s time to take a trip into the forbidden wastelands
of lawlessness and chaos. No, we’re not talking about
rebooting into Windows. We’re going to take a look at what it
takes to get the post-apocalyptic, first-person, role-playing
game Fallout 4 running under Linux. Don’t worry if you’re not
a fan of that particular game (heathen that you are) as we’ve
chosen this one because it provides a good example of getting
something a bit tricky to run properly.
>> We had purchased the game and played it under Windows,
and as it was already present in the Steam library, we installed it
by selecting it and clicking the install button.
>> Remember, as this game isn’t approved by Valve, you have to
enable installation in the Steam Play settings, as detailed earlier
on. This led to a 3 9GB download that took ages and made the CPU
fan spin quite fast while it was doing so. Steam and Proton added
all of the components that the game needed to run, so we didn’t
have to make any use of Protontricks in this instance.
>> At that point, all we had to do was to click on ‘Play’ to launch
the game and it did launch as expected, but there were some
problems. First, the sound was crackly and distorted for the
introductory movies and entirely absent for the game itself.
>> Second, the mouse kept moving in a crazy way, making
the game unplayable as well as silent. Still, early signs looked
promising for what is a technically demanding game. Leaving the
game to find some fixes, we hit upon another problem, because it
had hung rather than exiting cleanly.
>> Taking the last thing first, the hang-on-exit problem was
solved, in the short term, by process-killing the running game.
We did this by pressing Alt+F3 to open a virtual terminal. From
here, we typed top to view all of the user processes on the
system in Top, seeing Fallout4.exe as the first item. killall -9
Fallout4.exekilled the process and pressing Alt+F 7 got us back
to the regular desktop.
>> On subsequent runs of the game, we learned to close down
cleanly by exiting to the main menu (rather than straight to the
desktop) and quitting the game from there. Little workarounds
like this are fairly common when you’re running a Windows game
under Proton.
>> Searching ProtonDB, it turned out that the sound problems
we encountered are common for Fallout 4. The solution was
to cut and paste WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”xaudio2_7=n
,b” PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command% into the
launch options of the game. A quick jump back into the
game confirmed that this had largely fixed the sound,
but it took regressing to an earlier version of Proton,
rather than the default experimental build, to make it
work perfectly.
>> The mouse problem was a little bit more
complicated to track down. Sure enough, the suggestion,
repeated over and over in ProtonDB, to add the line
bBackgroundMouse=1 to an INI file turned out to be the
right one, but we initially had difficulty locating the file
because it was duplicated in multiple locations, and it
was impossible to figure out if what we were doing was
having any effect.
>> Eventually, we discovered that we needed to alter
the Fallout4.ini file located in the compdata folder, within
the simulated My Documents Proton folder, rather than
the identical file within the game directory itself.
>> At this point, we customized a character
and ventured out into the apocalyptic wasteland,
experiencing performance that was similar to running
the same game on the same hardware via the Windows
partition. Success!
Steam can offer a gaming experience that is ergonomically
closer to console gaming through what it calls Big Picture
Mode. This pushes Steam into a full-screen mode with
controller support. We have tried it out and we liked what it
had to offer.
Big Picture Mode is invoked by clicking on a small icon
at the top of the screen, and the first thing you’ll notice is
that every element of the user interface is jumbo-sized for
better legibility on typical TV setups. You navigate around
this interface using the mouse or a controller – all from the
comfort of the sofa.
However, we found that the hardware support wasn’t
quite as slick as the interface undoubtedly is. For example,
there is no clear way of specifying which screen should
be used for the actual game playing. The most common
workaround is to temporarily make the target screen your
primary display, or set up display mirroring.
Similarly, there was some work needed to get the
controller working properly in the games. You may have to
experiment here to find a well-supported setup. Top marks
for the interface, but room for improvement for ease of
hardware configuration was our verdict.
GET THE BIG PICTURE
>> Download in progress. Keep an eye on transfers like these
because they can consume a lot of bandwidth, CPU time and storage.
JAN 2022 MAXIMUMPC 65
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