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I Managed to Make Fallout 4 Work in openSUSE Leap.

Ugh, this again.

So, openSUSE Leap 15.5 being an enterprise-like system with slow moving releases, it’s been something of a chore to set up for a laptop, especially one where I occasionally want to play Windows games.

Even after installing the vulkan packages and Wine Stable 8.0, and the media codecs from the “Packman” repository with “opi”, when I launched Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition this time, I ended up with no voices and no soundtracks.

When I ran it with wine Fallout4.exe, it complained that it could not find a Windows Media Audio codec for gstreamer.

This seemed an awful lot like the problem I ran into with Debian 11 in 2021 where Microsoft just bumps old games for no reason except to harass Wine and Steam Play users with new Windows 10 APIs that do something that already existed, only worse and differently. Pointless APIs. Garbage that needs WMA when the thing just opened and played MP3 files before! But…….with the added bonus that the game would run for a minute or two then crash to the desktop after lagging a bit.

When I got to looking into it, I noticed that openSUSE Leap also didn’t have the faudio packages installed, but that didn’t fix it either. So I tried installing libavcodec56, nope.

Eventually installing libavformat56 and libavformat57 got the sound working, but still crashes.

After a while, I found that it works better on KDE on X11. In fact, KWin in general feels faster and more responsive under X11.

So, possibly XWayland issues? Older versions of stuff than Fedora had? Who cares, I just want my game to work.

Eventually KDE will solve enough of these Wayland issues that I can go ahead and start using that session. It seems they’re pretty close already. Probably by Plasma 6, it’ll be production-machine worthy.

Eventually, after turning off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, textures to high, resolution at 1920×1080, and “God Rays off” whatever those are, those seem to make it crash in Wine too, it worked.

I installed vkd3d (the Direct3D to Vulkan stuff). I don’t know if this build of Wine uses them. It only works with Direct3D 12 in any event. Which most Windows games I’m interested in don’t even need.

I also realized that the screen will dim and turn off and the screen lock will come on, so I disabled all of these in Power Management and Workspace Behavior/Screen Locking.

While I’m gaming, the thing is obviously plugged in, so I just left power management for when it’s on battery.

I’ve had a lot more luck, obviously, with Linux native games, and retro gaming, than getting Windows garbage to work in Wine.

Bethesda games were crap code before Microsoft got in and started re-arranging it all and making it depend on newer APIs.

This is the company that already broke their games more with patches than when they shipped. In Skyrim, they had a patch that made the dragons fly backwards.

I don’t think it’s fair to pin the blame on these binaries on Wine as they’ve always been real “SPECIAL”. 😉