Valve seems to be working on tools to get Windows games running on Linux

[2FA]

Source 1: https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamTracking/blame/6cb3db9ac4cb1f7d0bf218721f4e6f2d173c5b9b/ClientExtracted/public/steamui_english.txt#L4375

Source 2: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/valve-seems-to-be-working-on-tools-to-get-windows-games-running-on-linux/
 

 

Title and following quote are from Ars Technica.

Quote

Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems."

 

Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."

 

Here are the actual lines within the files:

"Steam_Settings_Compat"				"Steam Play"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Title"			"Steam Play Settings"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Info"			"Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems."
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Enable"			"Enable Steam Play for supported titles"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Advanced_Title"		"Advanced"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Forced_Info"		"You can use Steam Play to test games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool."
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Forced_Enable"		"Enable Steam Play for all titles"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Advanced_Info"		"You may select a compatibility tool to use with games that have not been tested or verified to work on this platform.\n\nThis may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Default_Tool"		"Compatibility tool:"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_Info_Link"		"SteamPlay FAQ"
"Steam_Settings_Compat_No_Default"		"None selected"

 

Interestingly enough, the file doesn't specify the actual OSes so there is a chance that this could work in reverse (Linux -> Windows) as well as being used for macOS. Last I remember, Valve has stated that it hasn't given up on Linux gaming so hopefully this is the solution they had in mind.

[rcmaehl]

This coupled with this

Sounds like great news!

[Bananasplit_00]

Nice, I really want to ditch Windows tbh

[aezakmi]

Imagine being able to play fallout 4 and the new doom on linux

 

oh wait Bethesda hates it.

[ScratchCat]

11 hours ago, aezakmi said:

Imagine being able to play fallout 4 and the new doom on linux

 

oh wait Bethesda hates it.

Surprising given Bethesda's ability to create amazingly performant Vulkan games such as Wolfenstein and Doom. Lies

[Okjoek]

 

[PlayStation 2]

Even if SteamOS never really went anywhere, it's not surprising to me that Valve's still committed to porting shit to Linux with little retooling.

See: all of the Valve games, the most that's modified is the graphics API and the client files needed to start the game to work with Linux distros rather than Windows or macOS.

[ignaloidas]

7 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

Surprising given Bethesda's ability to create amazingly performant Vulkan games such as Wolfenstein and Doom.

Not Bethesda's, they are just a publisher, these games were made by Id software, and they know the shit, starting with OG Doom. They even said that Linux port is easy for Doom, so we can clearly call out Bethesda on that one

[Spotty]

SINE? SteamOS Is Not an Emulator.

[vorticalbox]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

SINE? SteamOS Is Not an Emulator.

I'm 99% sure this will just be a wrapper around wine.

 

If they really want to help they should just hunker down and join the wine community to get stuff working.

[Master Disaster]

8 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

Surprising given Bethesda's ability to create amazingly performant Vulkan games such as Wolfenstein and Doom.

Wolf & Doom were made by ID not Bethesda.

[Doobeedoo]

Cool. Though in the end it needs all the games people expect and same performance as Windows to really be an alternative. 

[Sniperfox47]

5 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

I'm 99% sure this will just be a wrapper around wine.

 

If they really want to help they should just hunker down and join the wine community to get stuff working.

They've actually made quite a few contributions to CrossOver (the commercial version of Wine) to better support games. Those changes eventually get upstreamed to Wine.

 

There's a pretty reasonable chance that this will be another commercial spinoff of Wine since they have pretty close connections with Codeweavers, the makers of Wine/Crossover. Valve helped get them into the Kronos Foundation to help out with Vulkan and the 3D Portability Initiative).

 

Would probably be paired with DXVK since that has a pretty permissive lisence and has way better performance than the normal Wine OpenGL layer for DX11 and as of just recently DX10 as well. There's also the ongoing DX9-to-DX11 project that converts DX9 code to DX11 for use with DXVK which again should have substantially better compatibility and performance than the existing implimentation.

 

Wine itself would likely have lisence conflicts if they tried to bundle and wrap it.

 

15 hours ago, 2FA said:

Interestingly enough, the file doesn't specify the actual OSes so there is a chance that this could work in reverse (Linux -> Windows) as well as being used for macOS. Last I remember, Valve has stated that it hasn't given up on Linux gaming so hopefully this is the solution they had in mind.

Are there even any SteamOS/Linux only titles on Steam?

 

 

[WereCat]

I hope this will work out along with a better GPU driver support. 

[mynameisjuan]

WINE has had a huge backing and if they cannot get it to work 100% over the years I have little faith Valve will. Good at them, just make it fully clear that if you buy a windows game and run it on linux and its all fucky, you cant refund it. 

[bcredeur97]

I really want to be able to completely rid my life of windows.

Plz valve do et

[BuckGup]

Besides AdobeCC I would see no reason to stick with windows 

[samcool55]

Yes, yes, valve do it.

I mean there is already a DX12 to vulkan translator on linux and the gpu drivers are getting better as well.

Like, win32 isn't going anywhere soon and the UWP isn't exactly the best friend of game devs.

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

WINE has had a huge backing and if they cannot get it to work 100% over the years I have little faith Valve will. Good at them, just make it fully clear that if you buy a windows game and run it on linux and its all fucky, you cant refund it. 

Two parts here history lesson and why it's changing.

 

Historically WINE isnt great for games for one simple reason. The people paying the bills for it and paying for it's development are not gamers and game studios. The industries that use Crossover Enterprise don't care about graphics performance or half the features of Direct3D, they care about supporting ancient Enterprise software that abuses odd features of the APIs. Case and point until just a few months ago Codeweavers couldn't even be bothered to join Kronos which is the group responsible for developing the graphics APIs that they were porting to. If games were a priority they could have encouraged OpenGL extensions to help better map DirectX content to OpenGL drivers.

 

That's changing though. Community movements like Lutris have been contributing significant chunks of code specifically for the gaming front and Valve has been supporting them getting more involved with the API side of things, including helping them into Kronos. The Advent of low level graphics APIs also drastically improves the ability for devs to impliment even advanced DirectX features on top of a more accurate conversion while maintaining decent performance rather than a rough guesstimate of some features like they had to with OpenGL. Things like DXVK, DXUP, d3d9-to-11, and d3d8-to-9 are allowing games that run on DirectX 8 and up to run on Linux with near native performance and significantly better support and these are all fairly new community driven projects that don't even, yet, have the backing of a company like Codeweavers or Valve.

[AlTech]

4 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Cool. Though in the end it needs all the games people expect and same performance as Windows to really be an alternative. 

Even if it had all the games on Windows but with 10% worse performance I would still be up for it.

[Doobeedoo]

14 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Even if it had all the games on Windows but with 10% worse performance I would still be up for it.

That's something that I thought Steam Machines/Boxes would be though. But yeah, time will tell.

[pipnina]

If this makes it easier to report bugs in games (and as a result, get them fixed) run on Linux through WINE, I heartily welcome this initiative.

 

My personal experience with using WINE to run windows-only games on Linux has been: either the game runs perfectly (which is the case for a not insignificant portion of games), runs almost perfectly but has one flaw that will disappoint (a lot of games, most notably for me Homeworld Remastered where online game version checking will always show Linux/Windows games as "incompatible" but Linux/Linux or Windows/Windows games as "Compatible". Or Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, which crashes with a threading-related problem between 2 hours and 10 minutes depending on the size of the map).

 

Some games flat out don't work, but in general those are ones that even windows users would consider wonky or "exotically programmed" like space engineers.

 

Games built natively for the platform have always run fine for me, however.

[Boxing Kitten]

I hate having to use Windows 10 with a FERVENT PASSION, I hope this initiative works miracles because I have multiple Linux machines at home, every single time I use one it feels so fast and responsive everything is coded so clean. Then I have to reluctantly return to windows & boot up it's disgusting face to play my games...sigh. This is why I love Valve so much... for their support of VULKAN, AMD, & LINUX they know what we the people want. I hope Blizzard follows suite (friggin jerks despite being so talented)...sigh.

[vanished]

I remember when finding a mainstream game available for Linux was like finding a unicorn but these days it's honestly pretty common, from both big studios and indie devs alike.  Not as common as it could be, but still, orders of magnitude better than it once was.  I could be totally off-base with this but I attribute that change to Valve and their push for SteamOS.  If that really is the cause, I'd say with that alone, they've done more than any other entity for the cause, and now with this on top, well it's just icing on the cake

[mynameisjuan]

18 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I remember when finding a mainstream game available for Linux was like finding a unicorn but these days it's honestly pretty common, from both big studios and indie devs alike.  Not as common as it could be, but still, orders of magnitude better than it once was.  I could be totally off-base with this but I attribute that change to Valve and their push for SteamOS.  If that really is the cause, I'd say with that alone, they've done more than any other entity for the cause, and now with this on top, well it's just icing on the cake

Now it seems as if only select AAA games just dont support linux. Very few dont nowadays. Its pretty nice.