Stella
Published
as usual, customized the controls. back grip buttons for enabling potato mode, hotbar on right trackpad, customized dpad
in multiplayer i had several occurences of the game just freezing
character creator crashes the game. just quickly press next to get through it
Oh boy, i would never have thought this would run as well as it does.
performance optimization: set everything, i repeat, EVERYTHING to the lowest possible setting. add some console commands to the back grips for even more fps. templates for this can be found on community layouts.
Overall, it runs at between 30 and 40 fps with these modifications. Not bad.
multiplayer: i was able to log into a player-hosted server (albeit without battleye), entering the password was the most tedious part of this, as the password is invisible and you cannot see if you typed in the right thing with the touchpad.
singleplayer: runs fine without significant issues
The game was working fine 4 months ago, see my previous report. However, now when I try to make a new Singleplayer game, it always crashes as soon as you try to enter a world. I've tried it 6 times overall in countless variations, and it always ended with a hard crash. DON'T BUY IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS ON THE DECK
--launcher-skip -skipStartScreen
Game as-is works fine, but I really wanted Dualsense Haptics. Previously I had no luck with standard proton versions. When turning off Steam Input, the Triggers would work, but not the feedback as it's supposed to be. Then I tried different Proton versions like this one here https://github.com/ClearlyClaire/wine which actually worked on my Desktop PC. No luck here, but I was not ready to give up! Finally, now it works with this Proton: https://github.com/verbumfeit/proton-ge-custom-dualsense/releases/tag/GE-Proton8-4-Dualsense
It's super easy, you just download the .tar.gz, move it to the ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d folder, unpack it using 'extract here' and after that you need to restart Steam (or the Deck) for it to show up. Then simply select it as you would any other Proton with Cyberpunk. Make sure Steam Input is disabled and Dualsense is connected via cable. Haptics should now work.
Before update 2.5, controls were OK but a bit clunky. The game features sequences where you clean bones and those are very hard to do on Steam Deck, due to the input area being so small on the tiny screen.
After the update, all the button mappings on the joystick had changed and it became such a chore to play this game that I immediately uninstalled it. I'm not sure what they changed but it used to be much better
Performance is utter trash, in the lower twenties. Even with forced FSR from gamescope i could barely reach 30 and the image would get extremely blurry
crashes on windows too, not necessarily fault of the deck…
FSR3 has been patched and will now work flawlessly with this game.
You'll need to use a launch option to be able to enable it: VK3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_2 %command%
Then you can enable FSR3 in the ingame settings. This produces fps between 50 and 60.
Forced Microsoft sign-in was difficult to navigate. Had to fill it out 3 times before it let me into the game.
pretty bad stuttering. doesn't manage 60fps even on the lowest settings without fsr. Turning on fsr, with windowed mode and 1024*768 gets it up to 60fps, but the game looks pretty terrible (blurry and and stretched) with that setup.
frequent crashes, so far ~3 in 3 hours of gameplay. I've played it on windows and it's not as crashy there.
I cannot recommend this due to numerous issues with performance, launcher and stability.
Consistent, severe stuttering and frame drops as low as 12fps
My experience playing this game has been rather bad so far. No matter what graphics setting, fsr, frame cap, gpu clock, windowed or fullscreen, the game has severe stuttering and frame drop issues on deck.
About every 1 to 2 minutes, you either get stuttering/lag or fps will drop, usually into the twenties, but i've seen it drop as low as 12. This is unacceptable for a deck verified title!
I've read so many forum posts from people who had the same problem on the deck, and I can confirm that it's an issue. The stutter/lag/fps drop seems to be related to either shader compilation or loading, since cpu usage will spike sharply.
I haven't played enough to tell if the problem will resolve itself over time, but i've managed to make the stutters a bit better by locking fps to 30, setting fsr to quality, and turning everything down to the lowest possible setting. I read in some reports that increasing vram size and swap file can help, I personally haven't tried this, but doesn't valve's 'verified' badge mean the game should run fine on the deck without any tinkering? Why is the responsibility to fix the game offloaded onto the consumer here?
Microsoft DRM BS initially didn't let me into the game for some reason (with a random error message of being logged into too many devices?), but I restarted it and that fixed it
Using the low preset, I am able to achieve 25-30fps in most game areas using 720p resolution. Battery performance and small text is a non-issue for me, since I always run it docked.
I skipped the ~10h download stage by copying over the game files from another install ;) I highly recommend doing that as well, it saved me so much time.
I had a weird issue with not being able to select the symptoms my disease would develop. Not with mouse, touchscreen, or anything else. It just didn't open and was blocking game progression.
This went away after forcing Proton experimental.
-nolauncher
Gamepad controls don't work half the time. I wasn't able to interact with the game at all reliably except for the touchscreen. The graphics options etc. open, but i wasn't able to select or change anything. This was completely unplayable.
How to fix ===>>>>> Force the windows version by checking 'force the use of a specific proton compatibility tool' in the game's options. This will download a 4 GB update, after which I was able to play normally.
You can also use -nolauncher as a launch option in Steam to skip the launcher.
heavy stuttering when moving to new areas
Alright; for starters: the native version was completely unplayable for me. Only proton worked ok-ish.
However, using DX12 will result in heavy graphics artifacting, overflowing RAM, and sound glitches. I changed the version in the graphics menu. the game works ok-ish now with dx11 enabled at 30-40fps
no dx12 means you don't get XESS which could help with performance tho :/
right trackpad was weird and kept overshooting the mouse.
The gamepad controls are simply awful. I dunno who came up with them, but the game is so much better with mouse, or at the very least trackpad.
as usual, customized controls, set right trackpad to mouse, and enabled gyro
can be mitigated by turning up UI scale to the max
Seems to run just fine on the deck, at 40fps stable with medium-lowish settings. It looks prety but isn't very demanding.
I played it once on the go, i turned down all graphics settings, and set fps cap to 20. At these settings, I could have played around 5 hours with a single charge, which is fantastic.
adjusted community layout for the greater range of inputs supported on the deck
I cannot for the life of me understand why this is marked as "unsupported". Everything works fine from what I can tell, I changed absolutely nothing, was able to launch the game, go through the launcher, and play normally. Even mods work. The resolution was set wrong, but that's an easy fix.
I still recommend to skip the launcher though:
-browse local files with steam
-enter the Game folder, then the Bin folder
-Find the file: Sims3LauncherW.exe and rename it to something else
-Rename Ts3W.exe to Sims3LauncherW.exe
This way Steam will think that it's launching the launcher when you hit play. When in actual fact, you're launching the game.
No significant problems. Some UI elements can appear cut-off but that happens on Windows too. You can use -nolauncher to skip the launcher. I ran the game at locked 40fps, it's very rare the framerate dipped below 40. It was a very good experience.
some small changes, such as set left trigger to act as a toggle, for QOL
Worked just fine out of the box. This game has some microstutters on PC hardware, but none of that is present on the deck.
If you like to skip the legal disclaimers, intros, etc, and go straight to the game:
Run the game with the -nolegal command line argument.
it only shows KB/M prompts
Go to Options -> Control -> Control Configuration
Delete all key bindings one by one using "backspace" and bind only the gamepad buttons.
To elaborate:
- Highlight "Jump", press backspace 3 times (to delete Space/R Mouse/A Button), press enter and then press the controller button that was assigned to that action (in this case, the A Button).
- Repeat for each binding (except Up/Down/Left/Right/Walk/Sneak, that's already mapped to the left thumbstick axes by default).
This way you get messages like "press A Button to Jump" instead of "press SPACE to Jump".
You can check out the default gamepad controls here: https://tombraiders.net/stella/walks/controls/TR7controls.html
skiplogos
OK so, I've only played like a couple hours at this point. But I really wanted the Dualsense Haptic feedback for this game. Previously I had no luck with Clearly Claire's Proton as was recommended in other protondb reports. (https://github.com/ClearlyClaire/wine) However, I tried this Proton now instead which is a bit older https://github.com/verbumfeit/proton-ge-custom-dualsense/releases/tag/GE-Proton8-4-Dualsense and got an error about 'Windows version needing to be 1903 or higher'. I fixed it by clearing out the Proton Prefix. To do that, you need to go to your compatdata folder and delete the folder witth the ID of the game, in this case 1659420. Be careful though as it contains your saves, make sure to make backups before you delete the prefix! Now the haptics work (triggers worked fine with every Proton) and I'm very happy.
