BabylonAS
Published
The release of Proton 5.0 didn’t make the game playable again. For now, your only hope is still Proton 4.2-9.
I’ve tested GalCiv3 recently under newly released Proton 5.0-1, and the net result was no different than with 4.11 --- the game’s splash screen (which is pitch black, by the way) opened for a short time, followed by the game’s internal “Looks like the game crashed” window. Disabling ESYNC and FSYNC doesn’t appear to work, and the game is also oblivious to switching between DXVK and WineD3D.
I’ve disabled Stardock’s launcher because 1) it’s not necessary to have it running when Steam’s client exists and 2) it’s reported to be glitchy.
Proton 4.2-9 remains the latest version of Proton that can still run the game. The game can sometimes crash under DXVK (and will apparently crash on loading too big maps), but is otherwise playable. Disabling DXVK leads to graphics anomalies (incorrect star background, transparency in UI elements, custom ship designs not having icons).
After all, it works. With a couple extra links, and perhaps a better video card than my iGPU.
I’ve disabled ESYNC following one of the reports here so I could avert some issues with it, in case there would be any. The game starts without ESYNC but I haven’t checked if the performance is significantly different.
The game doesn’t run normally via Steam because once started with Steam Play, Stardock’s launcher is run in the Game folder instead of the game’s base folder and can’t find the executable (which is at Game/StarControl_DX11.exe), hence the Play button is grayed out. I’ve worked around it by creating links to all folders (AdventureStudio, Assets and Game itself) in the Game folder. I’ve also disabled the glitchy launcher screen with /nolauncher, as I do for other modern Stardock games, but this doesn’t have to do anything with that specific problem.
Aware that Star Control: Origins used to have problems with VC Runtime, I’ve installed vcrun2017 via protontricks, but seems like it’s probably not necessary.
Some of the textures, or rather objects themselves, didn’t appear, mostly on planetary resource gathering and boss battles (invisible ships made fights harder), but it could be in fact due to me using integrated graphics (which could have run out of memory) and thus might not have to do anything with Proton.
When I have started the game for the first time (which was with fullscreen enabled), the game didn’t cover the entirety of my gaming screen, but was offset towards the bottom right corner. Possibly not exclusive to Star Control as I have experienced something similar while trying to run GalCiv2: Dark Avatar (from GalCiv2 Ultimate’s installation, added as a non-Steam game in my Steam library --- for some reason it used regular Wine instead of Proton).
I expected the game to lag, given my integrated graphics, but didn’t expect that the entire operating system will sometimes lag as well. As a result, Steam’s FPS sometimes has nothing to do with reality --- is that the stuttering reported previously?
No crashes, but rarely the game would hang with a constant significant CPU usage; not sure if this is a bug in Proton or within the game itself.
Praise Jeff!
