HGL
generous-apricot
Proton not supported in Heroic Launcher, but yet it works on stores, and not my own games?
Hello Heroic Community 🙂
Using a Steam Deck. Any non-digital store game added to heroic, using Proton Experimental gives the following error when launching:
fsync: up and running.
wine: RLIMIT_NICE is <= 20, unable to use setpriority safely
[S_API] SteamAPI_Init(): SteamAPI_IsSteamRunning() did not locate a running instance of Steam.
[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed
Googling any of the issues in the Heroic launcher issues on Github brings back recommendations to not use Proton to launch games from Heroic as it's the Steam tool, and use Wine-GE.
I can accept this but something doesn't feel correct. Even if it's not officially supported, What I still don't understand, is how can I download something from EPIC/Amazon or GoG store, select the compatibility as proton-experimental and it works flawlessly from Heroic and in Steam Game mode... and yet when I've added the game myself, to consolidate my library, it always throw the same error above?
Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!
1 Reply
These "errors" you're seeing there aren't actually errors. Open up the logs for a game installed from Epic/GOG/etc. and you'll see those same messages
Proton isn't supported for a couple reasons:
- We can't predict what it does
- Proton isn't intended to be used outside of Steam. As soon as you try to use it, it may work flawlessly, it may not work at all, or it may do everything in between. There are cases where it's required to get a game working, and there are plenty of people using it just fine, but that still doesn't change that, in principle, it can't be relied upon
- It's limited in which "prefix operations" work on it
- If you would try installing any d3dcompiler from Winetricks for example, or simply modify DLL overrides, you'll notice that it just doesn't work. Proton does all these things just different enough to not work when not done "the Proton way"
- Proton's logs aren't helpful
- As you've seen here, these log messages are all you get from Proton. There's nothing in there that tells you why a game might not launch, and these messages confuse people trying to find a solution themselves (you're not the first to mistake these for actual errors). Getting to the actual log files requires jumping through a couple hoops, especially on Steam Deck / Flatpak in general