Proton
Proton
All information regarding running and developing S&Box on Linux will described here.
Running
To run s&box you need to set Proton to recent version. To do so, right click s&box in Library and click Properties
:
Choose Compatibility
> click Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool
> Select Proton Experimental
.
Currently Proton Experimental
works best; depending on Proton and s&box updates newer versions of GE-Proton
may also work.
To load in any map you'll have to increase maximum number of memory map areas a process can access. To do so temporarily (until next reboot) run in terminal:
You can also apply this setting permanently by running in terminal:
In case of s&box not launching, you may also need to set Windows version reported to s&box by Proton to Windows 10. To do so install protontricks either by your distro package manager or by flatpak.
If you don't have flatpak installed you can learn how to setup here
Then run the following command in the terminal:
Run protontricks (shortcut or protontricks --gui
from terminal) and choose s&box prefix:
Then select Select the default wineprefix
and subsequently Run winecfg
. In the new window choose desired reported Windows version:
You can also do so from the terminal. In case of system-installed protontricks run:
Or, in case of flatpak installation:
Activating Vulkan API
Apart from DirectX, s&box does also have experimental support for Vulkan API. Vulkan offers better performance with Proton, especially on weaker devices (such as PCs with iGPUs and Steam Deck), but there are currently problems with rendering of textures, water and UI elements. To turn on Vulkan API add the following to your s&box launch options.
When run first time with Vulkan, game may stutter quite considerably, or even not run at all (there will be only black screen). It happens when necessary shaders are built in the background and saved to disk. You may either wait until shader compilation is complete or turn off this functionality - this will result in smoother gameplay for the price of slightly higher GPU utilization. To do so add the following to your s&box launch options.
Developing
Creating your first addon
sbox-dev
At the time of writing (Jan 2022) you can launch s&box development executable. Please note this is unstable and you will likely crash or have random issues.
Steam > Library > Right Click S&Box > Click Properties > General > Add -tools
to Launch Options
To run s&box developer mode, you will need to set-up Proton prefix:
System-wide protontricks (from package manager):
- Install DirectX dependency by running in terminal:
- Run sbox-dev.exe:
Flatpak protontricks:
- If you don't have flatpak installed you can learn how to setup here
- Install a DirectX dependency with
- Run sbox-dev.exe:
S&box dev mode should start and stay open until you close it (or it crashes). After closing, should Steam still display s&box as running, you have to exit out of steam completely to stop it.
Troubleshooting
How to use the proton logs
Proton logs sometimes could help solve issues with games not launching or working properly under proton. Proton logging can be enabled inside the launch options of s&box:
If you want smaller log files but still keep useful information use this launch option:
By default it should generate a file inside your home directory $HOME/steam-590830.log
but it can be modified as well:
Game is randomly crashing or locking up after playing for an amount of time
This is an unknown cause, but adding PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1
to your launch options seems to fix the problem
Input (e.g. movement) does not work
This is probably caused by having multiple keyboard layouts, adding -input_button_code_is_scan_code
to your launch options fixes the problem