Hi all. I was hoping someone knew of some good resources on troubleshooting problems running games in Wine. How to identify a problem and steps to take when things don’t work, or partially work.
For example I use Lutris to install/play my GOG games. One game, Temple of Elemental Evil, seems to be picky about running under one version of Wine or another. It seems to be happy running under lutris-GE-Proton7-43-x86_64, but crashes on startup on any other version of lutris-proton I have tried. It also won’t work on the regular lutris, or fshack versions. So why this one in particular? I haven’t done anything to it to make it stand out. But I don’t understand enough to identify what is going on.
Or if a game simply won’t run at all, I can look at the error logs and sometimes identify what is keeping it from running, but don’t know what to do to fix it. For example Soulbringer opens an initial configuration window before launching the game, but when I click play, nothing happens and the error log says “PATCH.DLL” failed to initialize.
Was just hoping for a good resource to help me understand how to diagnose and fix these problems when they come up.
Thanks!
Can’t remember any specific documentations, but based on what you commented, first, you need to check if the game requires either DirectX or Direct3D. If it does, you need to check if your computer is compatible with Vulkan (which wasn’t a straight forward search, when I dug on that), and if it is, install DXVK (if it isn’t, you need to hope that OpenGL won’t be too laggy).
Regarding error logs. what I do is read through the log if things start misbehaving, and try to identify any oddities in the log (such as the aforementioned DLL not initializing), and try to fix by myself. And if I don’t know how to proceed, I search for the error followed by either “wine” or the game’s name on Google, and check places such as WineDB, Reddit (oopsie XD ), ProtonDB’s page for the Steam version of a game (if available), Stack Overflow’s satellite sites, game forums such as GOG’s, Steam’s, or even GameFAQS.
And if I can’t get the game running properly or at all with Wine or its variants, I seek source ports, wrappers, engine emulators, etc., for that given game. Some may even be playable on Android, so possibly you can get them running on WSA equivalents on Linux, or even Android-x86 or BlissOS through VMs if you’re adventurous.
Hey thanks for the response! While I wasn’t asking about those games specifically (just giving example of bizarre things I have come across), you did give me some helpful hints on directions to go. I have used engine ports/wrapper on like the doom and quake games but didn’t think that there might be others out there. I don’t know how common it is to do that. I suppose I can always also ask here or on a Lutris/Proton specific magazine/community as well. Folks here in the fediverse seem helpful.
Oh, right, a few more things: Some times, there may be wrappers, source ports and/or emulators for engines (e.g. JoiPlay and GZDoom) or even overarching groups of games (e.g. for ScummVM). Also, you often find such tools on Github, Gitlab and/or Source Forge. But that makes you need to dig quite a lot, and often having to be mindful of engines used, as well as where and when the game was released.
And as a side note, maybe I should compile a list at some point, although that will be quite an expansive list, so it could take a while.