Advice for Linux gamers using Proton with this game (A bit of a read)

[Roy]

A little background first. I have fought with Space Engineers for a long time to try to resolve my constant almost random crashes to desktop with missing texture errors in the vrage logs. Crashes on loading into the main menu if the intro videos are enabled. Issues with the "scene too complex" errors popping up even when not in experimental mode. I had to repeatedly purge my download cache, perform integrity restores, the works. And it was still unstable and practically unplayable. I would have to reinstall to get a stable game and after I had played it for a while it would return to unplayable again. Unmodded.

The first hunt was into hardware. My system is an Intel system with 24 cores, 64 gb ram, and about 2 TB of storage running the debian 12 bookworm version with an Nvidia RTX470. I knew it wasn't the system hardware as it all resolved as good via independent testing. Upgraded to all of the latest drivers, including the Nvidia proprietary driver. Not enough. The next was to try the vrage.platform.windows.dll file copy fix from the space engineers MDK /bin64/ location into the /bin64/ location on the game folder (overwrite the original file. It has to get redone with each patch). This fixed many of the visual glitches and weather related lag. Better, but it was still unstable.

I finally looked at Steam and how it uses resources with the assumption that the proton environment isn't configured correctly. This is where the alleluia moment occurred. Steam's proton only uses 2 cores and 3 threads by default. For every game. It's trying to run today's games in a hardware configuration from the 1990's. I'm making the wild assumption this is done to ensure stability on their steam boxes but it hurts the performance greatly for standard PC users using Proton (any version newer than 7 as I've tried all of them including experimental during my attempts at a solution)

This is where the advice kicks in for all of those who TLDR: Type in "-useallavailablecores" on your launch parameters for your games.

This resolved all of the crashes to desktop without warning. No more "scene too complex" errors. I can load into and out of the game with intro's enabled without a crash. I can load save games, exit the save to menu, and return to a different save or load a new game without crashing. I can now load the character customization screen repeatedly from the menu without dumping to desktop. This simple command to enable use of all cores resolved this game's stability for my system and helped all of the other games in my library load so much faster/better. I can even use mods with this game and now run normally in experimental mode. So much improvement it hurts to think how much time I spent doing the rest of the troubleshooting.

This I share for my fellow Linux gamers and space engineers. This little launch command addition is a standard command for Proton but is not enabled by default. It has greatly improved this game as well as all of my others. Good luck!

[Kennebel]

I am running on Pop!_OS (derivative of Ubuntu 22.04), and I have been able to get many Steam games to work on various versions of Proton, but nothing I try will convince Space Engineers to go past the splash window before it opens full screen.

The splash little box/window shows, and after a short bit, I get a "Steam is not responding" pop up with a "Force quit" and "Wait". Waiting does nothing, clicking wait just makes the pop-up go away for a few seconds, and then i eventually have to use the force quit option as the splash window is a 'top most" and I can't do anything else.

Tried all combinations of the following suggested options, and all of the available Protons including Proton-GE:

gamemoderun WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 %command% -skipintro -useallavailablecores

I know this isn't your problem, but just wondering if you have seen any other suggestions out there. :)

[Roy]

I don't have as much experience with the Pop!_OS. It can't be too different from the ubuntu builds. Here is a link to the protondb that might help since it has your OS specific advice on it:

https://www.protondb.com/help/improving-performance

Here is another link to their database for the game itself. The people posting there list their options and symptoms to help identify a problem similar to your own:

https://www.protondb.com/app/244850

I can't use the feral gamemode for my own system. Doesn't work at all. By the way, you might want to move the AMD fidelityFX SuperResolution command "wine_fullscreen_fsr=1" command out of the middle of the command for the feral gamemode. I think it's supposed to go "gamemoderun %command%" then the next command.

The last that I heard about the FSR command was that it was making performance worse for gaming. Maybe the updated it and improved it but I'm using intel based hardware on my system so I don't use it on my current system.

I'm using the following command for my system:
-useallavailablecores -skipintro -nosplash
It loads but I have a minute long delay ever since the signals update where the unskippable and invisible (without directx11 commands running) vrage logo is supposed to appear before the main menu appears. Outside of a few CTD's due to mods and strange glitches in the programmable blocks, things work fine.

FYI, I'm running proprietary nvidia drivers compiled on my system instead of the stock drivers from the repositories. It helps but alters my perspective a little bit. The repo drivers didn't support my card when I was building the system. I didn't have much choice but to build it from source.

I don't feel that I've been much help but I hope that I have steered you into a good direction.

Edited this to add another link for your information. I'm running the repo version of steam so it might make a difference on your system.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/11lshve/differences_between_steam_packages_explained_repo/

[Kennebel]

Originally posted by Roy:

I don't have as much experience with the Pop!_OS. It can't be too different from the ubuntu builds. Here is a link to the protondb that might help since it has your OS specific advice on it:

Thanks for the extra things to try. Using the "nosplash" stops the "force quit/wait" from happening, but the game still never launches. Tried all of the available Proton = Proten-GE options. :( I was trying things at random, which is why taht "gamemode" bit, but I haven't installed that tool yet, so wasn't doing anything. :)

How odd that every else works fine, but this is the only one being stubborn.

[Roy]

This is the curse of directx game engines. There is a linux discord to try if you wish to go further but I only have one more bit of advice. I had forgotten it earlier or I would have included it into my first reply.

Steam likes to make its own secret user account when it installs. Sometimes, like it did on my system, it forgets to give itself permission to access its own folders/subfolders. I have had to go into the /home/.local/share/steam folder and give new permissions to the folders after every steam update so it will read/write the steam common redistributables (show tools in your games list to see the software.) properly. This comes into play with Space engineers because it loads them every time it starts the game.

The symptom I was seeing was that it would download the files on every startup and attempt to load them at the start of space engineers. It would succeed in downloading but would quietly fail on writing to the harddrive so I didn't realize it was failing until I opened the location and it was 0 bits of data. This led to several dependencies running on old files or not at all. Dot-Net && directx are just 2 of them and are pretty necessary for space engineers.

I select that /home/.local/share/steam folder, adjust the permissions for all users to read/write allowed, and apply to all subfolders and files. Just make sure steam isn't loaded when you do this.

Fixing that permission issue gave me much better performance and stability in-game. It now has a single CTD in the first few minutes of any game save load and sometimes during the menus themselves. Reloading the game after the first CTD lets me play for hours if I have time to do so.

Good luck on your quest! I hope you find the solution!

[Brother Ray]

You guys ever find a solution to this?

[Roy]

I have heard nothing back from the original poster and assume they have either found their own solution or have given up on attempting to play SE.

[Kennebel]

I gave up. I tried everything mentioned here. I tried everything mentioned in the Official Discord, Linux channel. I tried everything I could find in every internet search I could think of.

Ran wine/protontricks so many times I started to get nauseous. :) I’m waiting for a newer version of Pop!_OS that is based on Ubuntu 24.04 to see if that helps compared to the 22.04 it is based on currently.

[glabifrons]

Kennebel, I ran SE on Linux for years before ever trying anything custom. It used to be pretty crash-happy, with the game crashing about 2/3 of the time before I could get to or past the main menu. Once past the menu, it was quite stable.

Then I wanted to try in-game scripts...

I fought the same fight for longer than I care to admit trying to figure out which set of instructions were right/current/well-written-enough, as many would result in errors, incompatibilities, or the game simply not launching.
One seemed to work, but had other problems (can't remember, was around a year ago) so I just abandoned the idea of getting in-game scripts working and went with vanilla Proton and have been running it ever since.

As far as waiting until the next OS is released, the OS shouldn't matter much as Steam brings in a virtual environment (in a crude container) and layers Proton on top of that.
Try renaming the proton/Wine environment for this game to force it to create a new one, switch to Proton 9, then launch the game.
This environment is $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/244850/
Some instructions say to delete this. DO NOT DELETE THIS unless you've copied all your game saves out of the subdirectory
$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/244850/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/SpaceEngineers/Saves/ followed by your Steam userID number.

It'll take quite some time to launch on the first start-up as it's building out the entire Wine virtual environment (equivalent of installing windows) before it even gets to the point where it can launch the game.

With this setup, the splash screen works, the intro and background video clips don't (they stopped after Proton 7 for some reason), and you won't have in-game scripts. If that's OK with you, it should run fine after this.

It's worth a shot. Worst case, it doesn't and you simply delete the newly created 244850 subdirectory and move the original one back.

100% of my game time (hover your mouse over my username) is in Linux. I've never installed Steam on Windows (or MacOS).

[Brother Ray]

Proton-GE works great for performance and stability but the copy issue is still there. It's really going to need developer attention, I think.

[glabifrons]

I've never had to copy the vrage DLL, but in some Proton versions (8.x IIRC), I had to copy in the Microsoft version of the xaudio2_9.dll file to get sound to work properly.

[Kennebel]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

...
It'll take quite some time to launch on the first start-up as it's building out the entire Wine virtual environment (equivalent of installing windows) before it even gets to the point where it can launch the game.
...

Maybe I just didn't wait long enough before. I'm at 1.25 hours so far, and the pfx folder is slowly growing, so maybe there is hope. This laptop is less than a year old and can launch gimp/blender in a few seconds, so not under-powered. Patience. :)

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by Kennebel:

Maybe I just didn't wait long enough before. I'm at 1.25 hours so far, and the pfx folder is slowly growing, so maybe there is hope. This laptop is less than a year old and can launch gimp/blender in a few seconds, so not under-powered. Patience. :)

Yikes! By "quite some time", I meant like several minutes on an old system. I've not timed it, but I know that the newer the Proton version, the longer it takes as the more stuff is copied into the virtual windows environment.

What CPU and GPU does your laptop have?
What kind of storage is SE installed on? (SSD, spinning-rust HDD?)

[Kennebel]

Almost 3 hours, and the pfx folder is almost at 500MB. I can see it increase in size each time i check, so it is doing something.

13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900HX (x32 effective threads)
32GB ram
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU
2TB SSD (partitioned to 1TB for daul booting, 44% used)

The old pfx folder from the isntall is 1.1GB so I have an idea of time left at least.

[Kennebel]

Modern games like BG3 and other things run perfectly fine on regular settings.

SpaceEngineers runs like a dream on high settings on the Windows side of the dual boot.

[glabifrons]

That's 5.5X faster (overall performance) than my CPU and 60% faster single-thread performance!
Your GPU is a bit over double mine as well.
That's a sweet laptop!
I can't imagine why it hasn't finished populating the Proton environment yet, that's shockingly slow.
What filesystem are you using?

If it's still going (I hope it's done by now), what does the following command put out?

mpstat -P ALL 10 1

What does the second pass of the below command put out?

iostat -k /dev/nvme?n1 /dev/sd? 10 2

(you might need to install the sysstat package if you don't have those commands)