Elder Scroll Online in Linux using PROTON or WINE, Standalone or Steam Version

kenjitamura

So a heads up: On Ubuntu today's update to the unstable Padoka PPA caused flashing graphics corruption in game. Solved by purging the PPA and switching to the Oibaf PPA.

megaskinsb14_ESO

remilafo wrote: »

Hello All.

Good morning! Allow me to preface a little by saying I have been a Linux user off and on for 20+ years. I am by NO means a master or have it all down. I used Gentoo exclusively for a few years when my family and I were playing Neverwinter Nights (the original) as it had a native linux binary. After a few years, we moved to new games and thus I had to switch back to the dreadful windows.

Fast forward to the present and I've been tinkering with getting ESO running on Ubuntu 18.04LTS and after much head scratching I was able to get it mostly playable last night via Lutris. Now forgive me for not knowing exactly what versions of everything else I used cause I got myself confused with all the different things I tried. I am PRETTY darn sure I was using latest wine-staging from WineHQ repo, I know 100% I was using nvidia-415 drivers.

Again I am no genius but I follow instructions very well and learn at an uncanny pace. That being said, I tried to follow your original thread, however, once I installed Steam and installed ESO using a generic 'wine esoinstaller.exe' command I was not able to find a 'Proton' folder inside my steam directory, nor anywhere else on my machine. So, I figured maybe I have to install/run a windows game via Steam in order for it to download and install Proton. So I tried a small game, Cogs I think it was, but still found no Proton directory.

That being said, Yes I did have Steam Play boxes checked, as well as Proton 3.7 beta selected. Now, I'm curious as I think back over my many steps and roadblocks maybe I needed to install a more complex game suck as Skyrim. I would install ESO via steam however I didn't purchase it through steam, but through ESO directly. Could that be why there is no proton directory?

Back to the "I got it mostly playable", I started over completely and used Lutris to install. It complained about esync and using a wine-tgk version but it let me push through to play and low and behold it ran. I got a consistent 60 frames in the wild, and 25-35 in Daggerfall main city. Running was a bit annoying as I'd stop pushing W and he would just continue running for a few seconds.

My main questions are thus; how do I get Proton, are you still using wine-staging 3.16 (if so how do I get it without breaking other installs?) and do the vulkan, llvm7, and DXVK all come standard now with the latest wine and nvidia-415 installs since I could not find a straight forward answer or concise install/update/upgrade procedure online?

And and all help or advice is much appreciated!

randomkeyhits

If you read this thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/99fjzw/steam_proton_for_non_steam_applications/

you'll see how to run non steam games with proton, basically by copying the proton directory into playonlinux and then running the game under that.

I've got proton 3.16-4 but that may only be available by running the steam client as a beta. So far its been solid, currently enjoying a little retro play with vampire the masquerade.

megaskinsb14_ESO

randomkeyhits wrote: »

If you read this thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/99fjzw/steam_proton_for_non_steam_applications/

you'll see how to run non steam games with proton, basically by copying the proton directory into playonlinux and then running the game under that.

I've got proton 3.16-4 but that may only be available by running the steam client as a beta. So far its been solid, currently enjoying a little retro play with vampire the masquerade.

Thanks, this hopefully answers my Proton question. I'll try a more complex game, TROVE by the thread you shared, and see where that takes me. Will report back on my findings. Thank you for your time!

megaskinsb14_ESO

Just a followup. I started over from scratch, using 18.10 ubuntu rather than 18.04, installed nvidia-415, and steam. Installing Trove indeed did force Proton to install, and was able to follow the "guide" by the OP using Proton and subsequently Proton Beta to run ESO. However, I had black ground and bad artifacts when moving. So I continued to tinker. I installed Lutris and dug into the configuration and what not and found that I could use various versions of wine through it. Doing this I was able to install the wine-staging 3.16 for testing purposes, which allowed me to mimic the command line launch from the OP. I also tried various other Wine versions, including the latest 'TKG' w/ esync, w/o esync, with and without DXVK, and even installed DXVK .96 manually into the .proton directory. I did not try the .80 version, should I have?

Anyway, all of that said, launching through Lutris with the TKG, w/esync, and with DXVK netted me the best performance for my particular machine. The command line launch given by the OP was a VERY close maybe even identical performance. Constant 60 FPS in the wild, and 40-45+ with occasional 30ish drops. Very playable, however I haven't installed any addons, though I usually just use the Azurah UI and Minimap. My, degraded, performance compared to other's results could be my aging hardware. I'll list it below and get other's opinions and feed back.

• ASUS P6X58D Premium LGA 1366 Intel X58 Motherboard
• Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield Quad-Core 3.06 GHz Processor
• G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) RAM
• EVGA GTX 1070 Hybrid Video Card
• CORSAIR Hydro H70 CWCH70 120mm High Performance CPU Cooler
• CORSAIR Professional Series Gold AX1200 (CMPSU-1200AX) 1200W ATX12V v2.31 / EPS12V v2.92 SLI Certified 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply
• SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 500GB SATA III 32 layer 3D V-NAND Internal Solid State Drive
• Thermaltake CORE X9 Case

remilafo

hello

I stopped using proton and instead went with just plain old wine and dxvk. The performance is pretty sweet nowadays with Dxvk 0.96

These are the commands i use...

For the Launcher (updates)

DXVK_HUD=fps,version WINEPREFIX=/home/remi/.esopfx /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine64 /media/remi/Games/Zenimax\ Online/Launcher/Bethesda.net_Launcher.exe

For the Game

DXVK_HUD=fps,version WINEPREFIX=/home/remi/.esopfx /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine64 /media/remi/Games/Zenimax\ Online/The\ Elder\ Scrolls\ Online/game/client/eso64.exe

PS. I have the standalone version of ESO..
If you want to use proton with standalone ESO.. a command something like this is needed.

STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/remi/.esopfx/ /media/remi/Games/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 3.7\ Beta/proton waitforexitandrun /media/remi/Games/Zenimax\ Online/The\ Elder\ Scrolls\ Online/game/client/eso64.exe

Otherwise, i think steam has updated proton enough that ESO should "just work" if you have the steam version of ESO.

Cheers

megaskinsb14_ESO

remilafo wrote: »

hello


Cheers

Thanks for the reply! While I know .esopfx is your Wine prefix, drive_c etc how exactly did you "build" it? Did you copy it from a pre-existing directory? Also, what version of staging are you using, latest 4.1?

remilafo

megaskinsb14_ESO wrote: »

remilafo wrote: »

hello


Cheers

Thanks for the reply! While I know .esopfx is your Wine prefix, drive_c etc how exactly did you "build" it? Did you copy it from a pre-existing directory? Also, what version of staging are you using, latest 4.1?

yes i've been keeping my wine version and dxvk version up to date. So wine 4.1 and dxvk 0.96 at the time of this writing.

As for the wine prefix, i actually don't remember what i did for this specific one. But you can create a wine prefix in various ways.

First (i might be wrong here)
- I think wine will create a winebottle if one does not exist when starting up if you specify a specific WINEPREFIX= variable.

Second
- By default wine creates a winebottle in your home directory, you can copy that for a specific game if you wish. Also important to note that if you DON'T specific a WINEPREFIX= upon using wine, Wine will default to using it's default winebottle. Usually /home/user/.wine

Third (this is probably what i actually did because this is the method i use most)
- You can actually create a winebottle with code like this..

export WINEPREFIX=/path/to/.wine-prefix
winecfg
winetricks

you then may want to follow up with installing dxvk, which you already know how to do.

winetricks --force setup_dxvk.verb

megaskinsb14_ESO

Thanks again for the help and insight. Just to date myself a little, the last time I attempted to play games on a Linux machine was circa 2005, with Guild Wars 1, and it was atrocious. I'm more or less satisfied with how playing is going at the moment, I get the occasional stutter in certain conditions, and only if 'running'. To put it into perspective, if I'm running around in the wild and have DXVK_HUD Full on, the frametimes graph will be look like this:

___________|________|__________|________|_______|________________|____________|______

The | being what looks like a single red bar every other second or so. This is with settings on default "High", 55-60+ frames, and no addons. Highly tollerable. But on occasion its perfect with zero red bars, so I've not found the conditions to having/removing the red bars and stuttering. Going to try running outside of lutris with your suggested method and see what that yields. Thank you again!

megaskinsb14_ESO

Just a quick follow-up and conclusion. I initialized my wine prefix as suggested and I must say I'm very thrilled to report all issues are resolved. I could run around in ultra high settings and get 30ish frames in town and 50 in the wild even when raining but running just high settings yields 50-60+ frames in town and 80+ in the wild. Zero hiccups!

My running after letting off the controls was a simple

xset r off

command to correct the behavior. Thanks again for clarifying your methods! I essentially started over from scratch and then:

Installed nvidia-drivers-415
Installed Vulkan
Installed wine-staging 4.1 from winehq
Installed gamemode
Installed latest DXVK

And launched ESO with the following in an executable *.sh file:

xset r off && LD_PRELOAD=/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so DXVK_HUD=fps,version WINEPREFIX=/home/beast/.esopfx /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine64 /home/beast/Games/Zenimax\ Online/The\ Elder\ Scrolls\ Online/game/client/eso64.exe

gamemoded -d

is of course running as a daemon already, and once done playing just have to run

xset r on

to resume normal keyboard operation.

SgtSilock

remilafo wrote: »

Kanar wrote: »

Nice. How's performance and are there any glitches? Would love to get ESO running in Linux. The proton package is self contained with static libs and shipped libraries so should be portable to other distros right? (Similar to how steam ships libs for linux)

Freesync still doesn't work in Linux right?

There is a small performance hit, hmmm maybe 10-15% ... but no glitches and running imo pretty darn perfectly.

and yeah you can compile proton manually if you want, so cross distro no problem.

I don't know about freesync.

10-15% is not small lol

remilafo

SgtSilock wrote: »

remilafo wrote: »

Kanar wrote: »

Nice. How's performance and are there any glitches? Would love to get ESO running in Linux. The proton package is self contained with static libs and shipped libraries so should be portable to other distros right? (Similar to how steam ships libs for linux)

Freesync still doesn't work in Linux right?

There is a small performance hit, hmmm maybe 10-15% ... but no glitches and running imo pretty darn perfectly.

and yeah you can compile proton manually if you want, so cross distro no problem.

I don't know about freesync.

10-15% is not small lol

Dvxk and wine have update since that statement. The performance hit is smaller now.

Still, i don't see how 10-15% would be a problem, eso is not a bleeding edge game anymore. hardware from 2014 already ran eso at 100fps@1080p ..

remilafo

megaskinsb14_ESO wrote: »

Just a quick follow-up and conclusion. I initialized my wine prefix as suggested and I must say I'm very thrilled to report all issues are resolved. I could run around in ultra high settings and get 30ish frames in town and 50 in the wild even when raining but running just high settings yields 50-60+ frames in town and 80+ in the wild. Zero hiccups!

My running after letting off the controls was a simple

xset r off

command to correct the behavior. Thanks again for clarifying your methods! I essentially started over from scratch and then:

Installed nvidia-drivers-415
Installed Vulkan
Installed wine-staging 4.1 from winehq
Installed gamemode
Installed latest DXVK

And launched ESO with the following in an executable *.sh file:

xset r off && LD_PRELOAD=/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so DXVK_HUD=fps,version WINEPREFIX=/home/beast/.esopfx /opt/wine-staging/bin/wine64 /home/beast/Games/Zenimax\ Online/The\ Elder\ Scrolls\ Online/game/client/eso64.exe

gamemoded -d

is of course running as a daemon already, and once done playing just have to run

xset r on

to resume normal keyboard operation.

What the hell is all this and what does it do?

xset r off

xset r off && LD_PRELOAD=/usr/\$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so

gamemoded -d

xset r on

megaskinsb14_ESO

https://linux.die.net/man/1/xset

And gamemode it's a program to simply change the cpu governor from ondemand to performance.

remilafo

megaskinsb14_ESO wrote: »

https://linux.die.net/man/1/xset

And gamemode it's a program to simply change the cpu governor from ondemand to performance.

Installed and tested Gamemoded, this is a pretty cool software. I see and understand the value.

I read the xset thing and I don't see any use for this, what exactly are you using this for?

personman_145

Working on this now. Running wine 4.2 dev, latest nvidia drivers installed, just need to wait for the game to finish downloading in linux. Do the DXVK thing and see what happens. If this game runs well in linux I might nix my windows install altogether.

remilafo

personman_145 wrote: »

Working on this now. Running wine 4.2 dev, latest nvidia drivers installed, just need to wait for the game to finish downloading in linux. Do the DXVK thing and see what happens. If this game runs well in linux I might nix my windows install altogether.

Eso runs perfectly.. It has a the Platinum Wine classification.

Wine 4.1 Stable is fine btw..

personman_145

Looks like wine 4.1 is also dev. I want to try this with the latest kubuntu, latest kernel, latest nvidia driver, latest DXVK. and see what I get. About once ever year or two I mess with wine to see what I can do with windows games.

personman_145

Do you use reshade for SMAA? I dunno if it'll work in wine but i won't be surprised if it does.

remilafo

personman_145 wrote: »

Do you use reshade for SMAA? I dunno if it'll work in wine but i won't be surprised if it does.

I used to use sweetfx and reshare back when I was in windows but those "apps" did increase the quantity of crashes I got in ESO.

Sweetfx and reshare will work with wine yes but I found the visual quality improvement with dxvk made it so sweetfx etc are unnecessary.

So currently I don't use sweetfx and I don't think I'm ever going to. For the record dxvk doesn't make any claims to improve visual quality over directx but my personal experience with dxvk shows that dxvk does a much better job of rendering light and shadows when "cheap" tricks are used in directx, which ESO does alot of.

Cheers

megaskinsb14_ESO

personman_145 wrote:

About once ever year or two I mess with wine to see what I can do with windows games.

This sounds SO much like me. I am pleasantly surprised and satisfied with how extremely well my game is running.

remilafo wrote: »

I read the xset thing and I don't see any use for this, what exactly are you using this for?

In my particular case, maybe it was just my hardware, but when I would run for more than, say, 5 seconds when I let go of the "W" key I would continue moving. The longer past that initial 3-5 seconds the longer I would continue to move after releasing "W". If I ran from one side of town to another I would take forever to stop moving to do whatever it was I ran over there in the first place to do lol.

Normally when you type you can, for example, hold down backspace and it'll continue to erase whatever you've typed. By turning "r" off using xset, you have to hit backspace multiple times to erase what you've typed. One button press equals one backspace press. This for whatever reason was messing with my gameplay. Again, maybe just my particular hardware or Razer Ultimate Stealth keyboard's fault. Either way, this fixed my issue. Band-aid or whatever, it worked

personman_145

is there a way to copy my windows install of ESO to linux? I've tried puting it in the same folder as windows, I've tried starting it in the downloading directory under steam. Verify game files doesn't work. I'm looking at 10 more hours of download.

megaskinsb14_ESO

personman_145 wrote: »

is there a way to copy my windows install of ESO to linux? I've tried puting it in the same folder as windows, I've tried starting it in the downloading directory under steam. Verify game files doesn't work. I'm looking at 10 more hours of download.

You can copy it anywhere you want from your Windows drive to your Linux drive. Literally Anywhere. The commandline we've all talked about using allows you to define where your eso64.exe file is.

personman_145

I have ESO up and running in Kubuntu 18.10, with wine 4.2 dev, and DXVK 0.96.

The fps is awesome, if I park somewhere I can get 60-70 fps.

The only problem I'm experiencing is that the game seems to hitch a lot more in linux than windows. Particularly when streaming in new environment.

Is there anything that can be done or is that just the state of things now? Seems to me like DXVK is doing its job well, but the wine streaming might be a bit inefficient.

They are doing amazing things these days with wine, and I love it. one step closer to deleting windows on my gaming PC.

Also, I run off an SSD, so the streaming issue seems odd.

Edit: Actually nevermind. After a reboot I'm getting really good performance.

megaskinsb14_ESO

personman_145 wrote: »

..stuff..

Fantastic, glad you're enjoying a Microsoft free environment like the rest of us.

personman_145

Do I have to worry about using wine or reshade and getting banned? I hate cheaters in online games. You wanna cheat single player, knock yourself out, I think you are cheating yourself out of the joy of legit accomplishment, but I'm not the how to play your game police. When it's online and sometimes competitive multiplayer, then no way.

Is there much difference between wine or proton? Under wine I do still get some hitching. Maybe I'll just look into proton and see what I get.

JamilaRaj

personman_145 wrote: »

Do I have to worry about using wine or reshade and getting banned? I hate cheaters in online games.

No, but they may break compatibility with Wine during updates.

megaskinsb14_ESO

I get 100% smooth performance on my older hardware using just wine-staging + DXVK, Proton left a lot to be desired for my particular machine. As for Reshade I do not know what that is, long as it doesn't give you an unfair advantage I can not see how it is a bannable offensive program. If I had to guess, given the context of this thread, I'd say its something to help with game visual performance with shaders. So I would think you're good, obviously thats a personal opinion and not an official one though.

personman_145

I"m trying proton now, and all hitching is gone. Beats what I was able to set up with wine 4.2 dev and dxvk 0.96.

Performance is totally on par with windows. I'm so happy I don't have to use windows to run this game!!!

With my manual setup it was playable but not good. for some reason proton is just way way smoother.

remilafo

personman_145 wrote: »

Is there much difference between wine or proton? Under wine I do still get some hitching. Maybe I'll just look into proton and see what I get.

There is literally no difference, Proton is just hooking the linux steam into application using Wine.. It's plain as day with a command like this..

STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/remi/.esopfx/ WINEPATH=/opt/wine-stable/bin/wine64 /media/remi/Games/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 3.7\ Beta/proton waitforexitandrun /media/remi/Games/Zenimax\ Online/The\ Elder\ Scrolls\ Online/game/client/eso64.exe

The WINEPATH=/opt/wine-stable/bin/wine64 is literally telling proton to use your currently installed version of wine..

personman_145 wrote: »

I"m trying proton now, and all hitching is gone. Beats what I was able to set up with wine 4.2 dev and dxvk 0.96.

Performance is totally on par with windows. I'm so happy I don't have to use windows to run this game!!!

With my manual setup it was playable but not good. for some reason proton is just way way smoother.

This is odd, you should be having any difference at all.
Is your Eso the steam version?
if yes, then were you launching Windows steam through Wine and then launching Eso via windows steam?
else no
is your Eso standalone?

The only difference i have been able to observe between Proton and Wine, is that Proton (being build for gaming) makes the Winecfg more game oriented while Wine makes then generic. Ofcourse nothing is stopping your from fine tuning or optimizing your winecfg.