Unified Linux Wine Game Launcher

This project is now part of OWC -- https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/ULWGL-launcher

ULWGL -- A clone of the steam runtime tools and steam runtime container for use outside of steam, is now part of OWC (Open Wine Components). Moving forward work will be continued in that repo

This is a work in progress POC (proof of concept) for a unified launcher for windows games on linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Linux Runtime/Steam Runtime Tools (https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools) that Valve uses for proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

When steam launches a proton game, it launches it like this:

/home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=348550 -- /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-launch-wrapper -- /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d/GE-Proton8-27/proton waitforexitandrun /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R/GGXXACPR_Win.exe

We can ignore this /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-launch-wrapper, it's just a process runner with no real value other than forwarding environment variables (more on that later).

I managed to pull the envvars it uses by making steam run printenv for the games command line. We needed these envvars because proton expects them in order to function. With them we can essentially make proton run without needing steam at all.

Next this part /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/_v2-entry-point

The first part /home/tcrider/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/ is steam-runtime-tools compiled https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools and is used alongside the sniper runtime container used during proton builds.

The second part _v2-entry-point is just a bash script which loads proton into the container and runs the game.

So, ULWGL is basically a copy paste of SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper, which is a compiled version of steam-runtime-tools. We've renamed _v2-entry-point to ULWGL and added gamelauncher.sh to replace steam-launch-wrapper.

When you use gamelauncher.sh to run a game, it uses the specified WINEPREFIX, proton version, executable, and arguements passed to it to run the game in proton, inside steam's runtime container JUST like if you were running the game through Steam, except now you're no longer limited to Steam's game library or forced to add the game to Steam's library, in fact, you don't even have to have steam installed.

Usage: WINEPREFIX=/path-to-prefix GAMEID=makeoneup ./gamelauncher.sh <proton-path> <executable-path> <arguements> Ex: WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/epic-games-store GAMEID=egs ./gamelauncher.sh "$HOME/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/GE-Proton8-28" "$HOME/Games/epic-games-store/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Epic Games/Launcher/Portal/Binaries/Win32/EpicGamesLauncher.exe" "-opengl -SkipBuildPatchPrereq"

• everyone can use + contribute to the same protonfixes, no more managing individual install scripts per launcher
• everyone can run their games through proton just like a native steam game
• no steam or steam binaries required
• a unified online database of game fixes (protonfixes)

right now protonfixes packages a folder of 'gamefixes' however it could likely be recoded to pull from online quite easily

The idea is to get all of these tools using this same gamelauncher.sh and just feeding their envvars into it. That way any changes that need to happen can happen in proton-ge and/or protonfixes, or a 'unified proton' build based off GE, or whatever they want.

1. We build a database containing various game titles, their IDs from different stores, and their correlating ULWGL ID.
2. Various launchers then search the database to pull the ULWGL ID, and feed it as the game ID to gamelauncher.sh alongside the store type, proton version, wine prefix, game executable, and launch arguements.
3. When the game gets launched from gamelauncher.sh, protonfixes picks up the store type and ULWGL ID and finds the appropriate fix script for it, then applies it before running the game.
4. protonfixes has folders separated for each store type. The ULWGL ID for a game remains the exact same across multiple stores, the only difference being it can have store specific scripts OR it can just symlink to another existing script that already has the fixes it needs.

Example:

Borderlands 3 from EGS store.

1. Generally a launcher is going to know which store it is using already, so that is easy enough to determine and feed the STORE variable to the launcher.
2. To determine the game title, EGS has various codenames such as 'Catnip'. The launcher would see "ok store is egs and codename is Catnip, let's search the ULWGL database for those"
3. In our ULWGL unified database, we create a 'title' column, 'store' column, 'codename' column, 'ULWGL-ID' column. We add a line for Borderlands 3 and fill in the details for each column.
4. Now the launcher can search 'Catnip' and 'egs' as the codename and store in the database and correlate it with Borderlands 3 and ULWGL-12345. It can then feed ULWGL-12345 to the gamelauncher.sh script.

README notes from Valve's steam-runtime-tools:

This container-based release of the Steam Runtime is used for native Linux games, and for Proton 8.0+.

For general information please see https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md and https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/sniper/README.md

Please see https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/wikis/Sniper-release-notes

Please see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/doc/steamlinuxruntime-known-issues.md

Please see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/doc/reporting-steamlinuxruntime-bugs.md

The runtime's behaviour can be changed by running the Steam client with environment variables set.

STEAM_LINUX_RUNTIME_LOG=1 will enable logging. Log files appear in SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/var/slr-*.log, with filenames containing the app ID. slr-latest.log is a symbolic link to whichever one was created most recently.

STEAM_LINUX_RUNTIME_VERBOSE=1 produces more detailed log output, either to a log file (if STEAM_LINUX_RUNTIME_LOG=1 is also used) or to the same place as steam output (otherwise).

PRESSURE_VESSEL_SHELL=instead runs an interactive shell in the container instead of running the game.

Please see https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/distro-assumptions.md for details of assumptions made about the host operating system, and some advice on debugging the container runtime on new Linux distributions.

Game developers who are interested in targeting this environment should check the SDK documentation https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk and general information for game developers https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/slr-for-game-developers.md.

The Steam Runtime contains many third-party software packages under various open-source licenses.

For full source code, please see the version-numbered subdirectory of https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt-images-sniper/snapshots/ corresponding to the version numbers listed in VERSIONS.txt.