Linux, Steam's Proton and BeamNG.drive

Steam announced yesterday they're distributing a new version of the Steam client to linux users with a modified version of wine, called Proton, with a goal of providing compatibility for Windows games to Linux users.

Embedded in the aforementioned announcement was a link to a Steam announcement regarding platform-specific wishlisting. If you use Steam on Linux, you can edit your preferences to indicate your interest in Linux compatible games, but add Windows-only games to your wishlist to help "vote" for games to be considered for for future Steam Play compatibility!

I'd mostly given up praying that BeamNG.drive would transform into being compatible with Linux, but this gives me hope. Setup your wishlisting & vote for future compatibility.

 

it is still unknown whether or not beamng will come to Linux, so i wouldn't bet on it

 

From what I've seen, so far BeamNG doesn't want to run on any distro. It crashes after you select 'Launch game' in the launcher.

IF someone wants to, you can scroll through the list of games that are being tested by people who use different Linux distros; so far, "pure" Ubuntu seems to have the most luck in running them:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...SMVQ-5BA2WoHBGAScw96MgLj1ONA7Cx0tyGa/pubhtml#

 

Yes, I've been watching the project for years & understand the BeamNG developers' position on this. I also know BeamNG hasn't worked under wine since, I don't know, version .62 IIRC. This work on wine to expand the library of games that work under Linux is being done by Steam, not the BeamNG devs, so it is from this announcement my hope is renewed to some day crash cars into stuff in BeamNG.drive.

 

bump.
Beamng.Drive can now run on linux !

Of course, it runs worse than on windows... And you can't run it with proton (for now at least).

What you need to do to play is :
-install the latest driver for your GPU (for nvidia on ubuntu you need to add the graphics ppa and then use the additional drivers utility to install 396.54 as of today, version 390.xx will NOT work)
-install wine-staging : https://wiki.winehq.org/Download
-install DXVK : https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
-install Beamng through the linux version of steam
-launch beamng by clicking on it's .exe (you can't launch it from steam)

 

Wow, esync has a big impact on this game! Sadly it's still quite unknown to the public (at least I didn't know about it and there's not a lot to read about it on google) (and I had to install Lutris to get it, which sucks).

At this point (with DXVK and esync), the performance difference comes down to GPU drivers on Linux really, so it doesn't change that much between games.
But still, if anyone could do this comparison it would be greatly appreciated!

 

just a little chime-in here, with my r9 390 and i5-4690k

latest radv/dxvk gives framerates that are comparable to windows on ultra - ~60fps on west coast USA, ~80+ on other maps

wine version is self-compiled using tkg's pkgbuilds with some extra tweaks besides esync

bit of an issue is how spawning new threads, i.e. vehicles, bogs down wine for ~20 seconds while it figures out what to do with them

bananabench shows a theoretical realtime vehicle limit of 6 - windows gives me at least 12.

apart from the apparently lower maximum possible cpu utilization (which i haven't actually tested) it's problem-free.

I accidentallied my windows partition (not that I was really planning on using it again) so a literal actual direct performance comparison would be "as time and motivation permits"

 

AMDVLK gives ~<60fps in most maps with ~30fps on west coast USA

big, big difference from RADV

haven't bothered to figure out installing AMDGPU-PRO at this point.

 

after putting in a second video card to test some unrelated hardware acceleration things, beamng has decided to use it for rendering, for some reason. not too convenient, and i don't see any obvious way around it.

 

Slight bump to this, but it is informative. BeamNG does now actually work on Linux using Steam Play with the Proton 3.16-5 Beta version.

 

Does someone managed to get a Logitech G27 to work with Linux?

The game is running fine, but I think I have the non-writeable bug. When I try to edit the controls, they are not saved. Does someone have any idea how to resolve this ?

 

This is working fantastically on my machine! I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 with an NVidia P106-100 (essentially a GTX1060 6GB) with the 390 series drivers and proton 3.16 (3.16-7 if I recall correctly). I didn't have to muck around with source lists or anything. I just used Ubuntu's built-in driver utility ($ ubuntu-drivers devices) and nvidia-390 is working fine for me.

I get an occasional crash, but the game is playable and I'm thrilled. Sorry to bring this thread back to life, but thanks to all who posted their advice I gave this a try and bought the game finally.

 

Did you use optirun on the game's executable through command line, instead of through Steam's launch options?
With Steam's launch options, I could confirm that my NVIDIA card was turned on when the game ran, through my desktop's bumblebee indicator applet, but the game itself still said that it was using my Intel card.
I suspect that was the case since Steam's launch options would only launch the game's launcher (that menu with start game, clear cache, verify integrity, etc. buttons) with NVIDIA card, but the launcher itself would end up launching the game with Intel card.
I thought the game was only having trouble in detecting the card's name, but after running the game with and without optirun, I could see no performance differences, which I believe meant that the game could not be run with optirun through its launcher.
I have yet to try running the game's actual executable with optirun, since doing so means I have to resort to using system's wine installation instead of Proton, as I have no idea how to use Steam's shipped Proton through command line.
--- Post updated ---
Okay, got it to work with NVIDIA card by launching the game's executable directly like this:

Code:

env WINEDEBUG=-all \
WINEARCH=win64 \
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.steam/steamapps/compatdata/284160/pfx" \
PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 \
optirun \
$HOME/.steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 3.16\ Beta/dist/bin/wine64 \
$HOME/.steam/steamapps/common/BeamNG.drive/Bin64/BeamNG.drive.x64.exe

Added the backslashes for readability, however it can be executed with or without them from your console.

284160 is the game's Steam ID, so that command uses Steam's own compatibility directory for the game as its wine prefix.
Enabling PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE is a common suggestion in https://www.protondb.com/app/284160. Apparently necessary to load huge maps.

Con, no Steam integration.

 

Update! Much wonderful performance with nvidia-xrun. I highly recommend it over bumblebee for Optimus laptops. Due to how it works, the resulting performance is very close, if not on par, to machines with NVIDIA as their primary GPUs. I suspect there is only slight extra load to the CPUs due to having to run tty1 alongside another tty which household a running nvidia-xrun.
The only downside that I found is, switching over to tty1 while a game is running will pretty much crash the game, since doing so will "pause" the NVIDIA card, and games pretty much do not like such behaviour.
BeamNG have an option to "pause in background". I haven't really tried it myself, but perhaps it may just work if you minimize the game before switching to tty1?

On a side note, I personally think this game runs smoother than in Windows. Then again it's been a long while since I played it in Windows, so I might have remembered wrong (I'm still on the same laptop though).

-- edit --
I can't use URLs on my post yet, so I can't link nvidia-xrun, but it should be obvious when you look it up.

 

That option only makes the game at lower fps (30?) & possibly use less resources when you're Alt - Tab'd out of the game