Gaming • Re: Worth it?

Others may work fine on the first day, but after an update they suddenly stop working. Again others may have strange problems that don’t show up on Windows.

Yes, that is possible. just like an old game I’m playing Mafia (2002) (which is hands down my #1 gaming experience), which is a DirectX8 game, I noticed in more recent versions of GE’s runner for Lutris (I’m using the latest v0.5.17) that while the game works basically, it no longer plays the ‘.bik’ video files in the game (I can get them to work occasionally, but no sound etc.) As you can see it’s trying to play but there’s no sound and it’s on an unreadable screen and basically completely unusable (so your best bet is to press ESC to skip this one and then get back into the actual game and it seems to be fine as far as the graphics generated by the game).

but… if I switch back to a slightly older runner (i.e. GE 8-12) everything works as expected again. the latest is GE 8-26, to which Lutris responds by default. so I’m assuming something went haywire regarding this game sometime after GE 8-12 (my newer games don’t seem to have any obvious issues with GE 8-26).

I also noticed that DXVK is not used by default in that game, as it uses WINED3D by default instead, which works worse than DXVK (as you can visibly see that the frame rate is sometimes noticeably worse when using WINED3D versus DXVK). but I found a workaround for that too, as I can force DXVK onto it by replacing a ‘dll’ file (specifically d3d8.dll from DXVK v2.4.1 (32-bit)) in the ‘windows\syswow64’ folder ( which is for 32-bit DLLs, while ‘system32’ is for the 64-bit stuff and since this game is 32-bit, I’m only replacing it in the ‘syswow64’ folder). but I suspect that when DXVK is updated in the future, the dll I replaced it with (currently of DXVK v2.4.1) would be mixed with a newer DXVK in the future which I suspect is not correct as you can see . Lutris doesn’t have a symlink (I think that’s what it’s called) to the ‘d3d8.dll’ file (so it loads DXVK v2.4.1 from the folder Lutris downloads it to), but neither does d3d9.dll etc, so it seems fine for most games, as most games probably use DirectX9 or newer, but Mafia uses DirectX8.

but in the end I used another method for now that is probably good enough/better overall, and requires less effort, which is the ‘d3d8.dll’ file from here… https://github.com/AlpyneDreams/d8vk / releases; basically i put the d3d8.dll file in the root of the game folder and let ‘wine configuration’ use it for the ‘game.exe’ (which is the main exe of the game to start the game) then it works fine GE 8 -12. you can see this appear in ‘MangoHud’ as… ‘DXVK d8vk-v1.0’ (when I used the things I mentioned above with DXVK v2.4.1 appearing as ‘DXVK 2.4.1’).

NOTE: I used to use Crosire’s ‘d3d9.dll’ file on Github (which converts from DirectX8 to DirectX9 calls) in the root of the game folder and then just let the game use that file, which worked in principle, but I guess what I mentioned above is a bit more correct as it apparently has more proper DirectX8 support etc.

so ultimately the game works fine once it’s set up properly (and you can always use older GE runners if you need to by getting it from Glorious Eggroll’s Github site) (I also use a widescreen solution etc for it so that it displays correctly at modern resolutions such as 1080p so the image is not stretched and even gives greater draw distance so you can see buildings etc much further in the distance which every vaguely decent PC can easily do nowadays, but that’s beyond the point I was making here).

ps I know my tests are working because you can see that ‘DXVK_HUD=version’ shows what it’s using, along with MangoHud stuff etc, but when it used WINED3D that ‘DXVK_HUD=version’ was in the ‘environment variables’ section ‘ of Lutris as it works doesn’t exist because it doesn’t use it (but right now I see ManguHud says it uses ‘WINED3D’). but once you get DXVK running, those environment variables work as expected.

I can run all my games without any major problems (snippet)

Same. but I don’t play online games because everything I play is mostly offline only. but i like it so much because you can play a game and never have to worry about forcing online crap to play it.

Statistics: Posted by ThaCrip — Sun Sep 29, 2024 1:27 PM