onegen
Published
It's an Electron app, what d’ya want?
If you're having troubles, you probably have something wrong with NVIDIA drivers. Can't think of another way to mess up an Electron app.
gamemoderun ENABLE_VKBASALT=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command%
This game didn't go well with Pop! Shell. First launch caused my entire environment to be unresponsive, and ALT-TAB is quite impossible in fullscreen mode. I resolved this by using "Full Desktop" mode instead. Not ideal, but good enough.
((see performance)) Menus were a bit unresponsive before applying launch options (gamemoderun my beloved). Worked as expected afterwards.
Performance was not so great OOTB -- I had issues with screen tearing and wonky controls and choppy animations. It was playable, but hardly ideal or enjoyable, hence the thumbs-down on tinkerless. This problem was fixed for me by using launch options noted in this review, which made controls smoother and solved problems with the screen tearing. I switched from default to GE Proton afterwards as an experiment, which further improved smoothness of camera movements and animations.
Requires tinkering, if you don't want desynchronisation issues every other minute. After applying, I played several online games and it had no problems. Manual variant: Copy the file .../steamapps/common/AoE2DE/vc_redist.x64.exe to .../steamapps/compatdata/813780/pfx/drive_c/windows/system32 (game install path, ... is by default ~/.steam/steam), then navigated to this [system32] directory in a terminal and executed cabextract vc_redist.x64.exe and then cabextract a10 (sudo may be required, depending on folder permissions). This is Windows cabinet extractions, you likely have these commands available already. Nothing too hard, but if you want to simplify this task, there is a shell script for it: https://github.com/ardba/proton_aoe2de_mpfix/blob/main/run.sh
Due to cheating concerns...
...game will only ever run on Windows, and logging in with an unsupported system can get you banned. Not only is the game [likely] borked in its core, the game won't let you try and will black screen you. Guess because Linux is used by programmers, it is also a hacker paradise..?
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 gamemoderun %command%
Glitches in vegetation
5 FPS avg., 20 FPS max. (menu)
The game started without any issues, though it was completely unplayable on my end. I hate to go against the majority here, which says the game runs mostly fine, but I wasn't as lucky.
At default settings, the game ran at 20 FPS highest, but barely 10 FPS during gameplay with visual glitches here and there, especially with the vegetation. I tried various Proton versions, best performance I got with GE-Proton7-49, but no glory. My game isn't the highest of ends, but the game ran at steady 60+ FPS on Windows 10 (dual-boot).
Stuck at "Launching"
The game never starts, it only remains on "Launching" indefinitely. No logs anywhere, no errors thrown, no cores dumped, just "Launching."
Experimented with several Proton versions, even GE, but nothing changed.
Couldn’t start, stuck at "running"
Game would not start, Steam would only show the game as "Running" with no window. Tried both modes, tried several Proton versions incl. GE.
Attempting to run the bat scripts with wine returned a "page fault on read access" unhandled exception.
Borked launcher, would run well otherwise
gamemoderun PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command%
The new EA launcher cannot be properly executed, preventing the game from launching. Game is executable by "going around the launcher", which can be done by means I erm-- ahem cannot discuss here 🏴☠️ ahem, but if you get it to run, the game runs perfectly fine, no issues, no bigger performance problems. Even mods work just fine, only problem I found is the inability to take screenshots (pressing 'c' will take an empty photo).
gamemoderun %command%
Minor, infrequent crackling
Sometimes struggles with new areas and effects, but these issues quickly disappear and get less frequent over gameplay
No issues even when farming for hours
This game started to struggle on Windows 10 (dual boot), so I gave Linux a shot, and somehow, graphical problems and occasional lags present on Windows didn't appear here! I wasn't expecting that but I'll take it!
So the game runs well, and it didn't crash once, even during longer gathering runs. It's graphically as flawless as it can be on my end, and completely playable. It has its downsides compared to Windows though. One big loss is the Vulkan shaders processing. It can take around two hours to fully complete, and the processing itself puts my CPU to 100% load, so it's best left when I go AFK. I rarely let it complete fully, because there are many things in the game that I don't need to load, or am fine loading as the game goes. You can tell when such an effect is loaded, as it causes some performance drop when it comes (usually 3 seconds or so). This downside has its upside though — open world areas feel more smooth than they ever did on Windows due to all the things being pre–loaded.
Unless you have 10 hours before you start it…
Game takes insane amount of time to start. First it wants to pre-render Vulkan shaders -- left it overnight, computer whirring and fans on 100% -- and it still was far from done. Not letting the shaders fully pre-render leads to many lags and FPS drops. The launcher takes forever to open, check for non-existant updates and then the loading screen also takes too long.
