Alliance Space Guard

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Alliance Space Guard
• Steam AppID of the game: not a Steam game, and not released yet, it is only a private test build but I thought I'd investigate that since this is a one-developer game and they probably won't have time to sink into Linux compatibility at this stage

System Information

• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 580 Series
• Driver/LLVM version: POLARIS10 DRM 3.42.0 5.15.26-211.current LLVM 13.0.0
• Kernel version: 5.15.26-211.current # 1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 5 05:12:04 UTC 2022 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Full system information report as Gist
• Proton version: Experimental

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

It took me some time to realize that Steam launch options have no effect on non-Steam games, and the environment variables have to be set beforehand when launching Steam itself. I got two distinct results depending on whether I used PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, see below:

• With just PROTON_LOG=1 steam, steam-15066880814979481600.log
  
  I am sorry, I am not sure I am able to show the content of this window at this stage even though there's nothing fancy in there, so better safe than sorry. In any case; it's a pre-launch game settings window and it seems to work as expected, except for an audio issue and most importantly this "D3D < 11" issue. There is a field to select the GPU, with two choices: my AMD dGPU, and my Intel iGPU, but I get the same issue with both.

• With PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 PROTON_LOG=1 steam, steam-15066880814979481600.log
  
  The game settings window doesn't show up.

The first case was quite encouraging because I got to the game's settings window, but unfortunately it detects a version of DirectX below 11 and greys out the launch button. The game actually requires DirectX 11.0. Seeing that, I tried to use PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 which led me to this second issue, which I think is related to SharpDX (SharpDX is used to connect .NET and DirectX).

I am not sure which of those two is the closest to launching the game actually, which is why I'm presenting both.

Reproduction

Adding the game as a non-Steam game and running it with Proton Experimental (same with Proton 7) pretty much reproduces this all the time. As stated above, launch options have to be set as environment variables when running Steam from terminal for them to be taken into account for non-Steam games. Unfortunately, this won't be easy for others to reproduce because the game is in a private testing phase and can't be accessed by many players. I know this means it won't be easy to solve, but I was thinking reporting the logs wouldn't hurt, and perhaps someone can understand the errors better than I did.

Start by reviewing the two attached Proton logs and the reported behavior with Proton Experimental and Proton 7. Compare the runs with and without PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, focusing on the D3D < 11 message and the missing game settings window. Done would mean identifying a reproducible compatibility cause and a validated path toward launching the private test build.