Any fixes for the white smoke bug in linux/proton?

[Chaussettes]

Heyo, recently took the time to set up GWX and everything works perfectly on linux after some minor tweaking. The only bug I've been able to notice so far is the smoke from ships is white instead of black. This can be difficult to see far in the horizon and it would be handy to fix it if a fix exists. I know this is an old bug with linux SH3 but I am wondering if anyone has found a fix yet or if I'll just have to live with it. Thanks.

[Hooston]

I use Wine and Linux and my smoke is black. Proton is a fork from Wine. You are using the Vulkan graphics driver whereas I'm still using good 'ol OpenGL because my laptop is so old. So I'd guess it's a bug related to how Vulkan works, or possibly how Proton calls it. You could try looking posting the bug on the silent hunter 3 page at www.wineHQ.org but the game has no maintainer I'm afraid. Also try playing with the particle settings in the game menu, you never know... i think Ctrl-P turns the particles off?

I run Linux from an unwillingness to spend money on new hardware just because of Microsoft's marketing department. My problem is that I'm now getting very regular crashes since the introduction of the pipewire audio system in Fedora Linux. There's a bunch of pipewire updates and it all gets better, then Wine updates and it gets worse again. Very frustrating. The root of the problem is my laptop is now 13 years old, so nothing is tested for it and bugs creep in. Which I guess is why the non-evil parts of Microsoft go along with their marketing people...

[Chaussettes]

I use Wine and Linux and my smoke is black. Proton is a fork from Wine. You are using the Vulkan graphics driver whereas I'm still using good 'ol OpenGL because my laptop is so old. So I'd guess it's a bug related to how Vulkan works, or possibly how Proton calls it. You could try looking posting the bug on the silent hunter 3 page at www.wineHQ.org but the game has no maintainer I'm afraid. Also try playing with the particle settings in the game menu, you never know... i think Ctrl-P turns the particles off?

I run Linux from an unwillingness to spend money on new hardware just because of Microsoft's marketing department. My problem is that I'm now getting very regular crashes since the introduction of the pipewire audio system in Fedora Linux. There's a bunch of pipewire updates and it all gets better, then Wine updates and it gets worse again. Very frustrating. The root of the problem is my laptop is now 13 years old, so nothing is tested for it and bugs creep in. Which I guess is why the non-evil parts of Microsoft go along with their marketing people...

Does the game work with modern versions of wine? SH3 is very picky with proton and you pretty much have to use proton 4.11-13 to get the game to run. I havent tried it with normal wine yet. I use Linux Mint as well so my wine version is a couple major versions behind wine 8 for now.

[Jeff-Groves]

Can you post a screen shot of the smoke?
Any other effects do the same thing like smoke from Gun fire or ships burning?

[Chaussettes]

Can you post a screen shot of the smoke?
Any other effects do the same thing like smoke from Gun fire or ships burning?

Sure. This is what all smoke in the game looks like normally, even non-ship smoke like from town factories and stuff. It's hard to see but it's there.

https://i.imgur.com/IWvPLLq.png

Additionally, I found that smoke (including deck gun smoke) within 1km of the sub does get rendered as intended but fades to white after a minute or so. Damaging ships outside 1km of the sub does not produce any dark smoke at any time.

https://i.imgur.com/0dclOX0.png
https://i.imgur.com/BoPvaPz.png

I'd like to test out the game using my system's wine installation but everytime I've tried to run the game with it, it doesn't do anything, so I cant get a normal wine version running. The above screenshots are taken using proton 4.11-13 on steam, as it's the only version of proton I know of that doesn't cause significant problems for SH3. The white smoke is the only bug I know of. I have also tried using a smoke mod to change the smoke, but this doesn't do anything and just renders as white as well.

https://i.imgur.com/6ddFPTJ.png

[Jeff-Groves]

What smoke mod did you try?
I wondering if it has something to do with the Alpha channel .

[Chaussettes]

What smoke mod did you try?
I wondering if it has something to do with the Alpha channel .

It was "sobers real smoke dark brown SH3" https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=1490

[Jeff-Groves]

That's just 2 tga files.
Try removing the Alpha Channel on those and see what happens.

[Hooston]

Silent Hunter 3 has always run reasonably well under all versions of Wine. The starting point for information is wineHQ https://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=3793
Wine is not the most friendly thing in the world to set up. Hence Proton I guess. I heartily recommend you look at a howto guide, e.g. https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Wine-on-Linux


If you got the game from Steam then search the Steam SH3 community https://steamcommunity.com/app/15210/discussions/ , there used to be some step by step instructions for Linux/Wine there.



In brief:



Wine uses an area of the user's home directory for each wine installation. This is referred to by a system variable called a WINEPREFIX. The default location is the hidden directory .wine. There's a subdirectory drive_c in there which is all your windows files in the usual windows directory structure.

To set it all up type the following from the terminal:
winecfg

This also allows you to tailor the system behaviour for each installed application.
I don't know what proton does with its files, to use an existing Proton installation you might have to do something like
WINEPREFIX=~/.proton winecfg

You have to install your applications just like windows, so use commands like
wine 'install.exe'
There's a utility called winetricks which lets you add more dlls in your virtual C drive to get stuff to work. For example the Vulkan implementation of directx would be installed with

winetricks dxvk
Which might get you back to your white smoke bug! BEWARE - it's hard to go back!



To get widescreen working in SH3 you need to run winecfg, select the libraries tab and override d3d9, msvcp71 and msvcr71. This makes wine try to use local versions of these dll's in the SH3 directory which have been messed with to get widescreen working.


It's not so hard once you get used to it.... Honest...

[Chaussettes]

I have fixed the white smoke bug myself by installing d9vk component via winetricks. This appears to fix all smoke and it all appears like normal once again.

You can do this by using `winetricks --gui` in a terminal and selecting:

Select the default wine prefix
Install a Windows dll or component
Scroll down to d9vk, tick the box and press ok


The protontricks package in your distribution's package repo can be used to do this for the steam version of SHIII.

However, one issue that I now have is all 2D art except the main menu is now rendered black. The career room and crew management screens all now have a black background. I'm certain a fix exists as I've done some testing through Lutris that fixed this issue and also fixed the white smoke issue.

https://i.imgur.com/F4Eubb2.png

[Chaussettes]

Thinking I'm going to give up on trying to fix the issue and just play it as-is. While d9vk fixes the smoke issue it introduces new ones with the black background issue on the crew management and mission prep screens. Every other game I try installing dxvk on also runs better in general but always has some horrible side-effect that makes it unusable. The white smoke isn't game breaking, just a minor inconvenience that I can work with at least.

[Hooston]

The Vulkan drivers seem to be more trouble than they are worth in this case. There's nothing in SH3 that needs the latest shaders. Have you tried a rollback to d3d9.dll? I'm not sure if proton will be happy with that or if you will just end up using Vulkan anyway.

[Chaussettes]

The Vulkan drivers seem to be more trouble than they are worth in this case. There's nothing in SH3 that needs the latest shaders. Have you tried a rollback to d3d9.dll? I'm not sure if proton will be happy with that or if you will just end up using Vulkan anyway.

I've been using a wineprefix outside of steam to test the game, so I can just remake the prefix to get back to regular d3d9. But yeah vulkan seemed to fix the smoke but the other issues it caused are too much.

[millnate]

Silent Hunter 3 has always run reasonably well under all versions of Wine. The starting point for information is wineHQ https://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=3793
Wine is not the most friendly thing in the world to set up. Hence Proton I guess. I heartily recommend you look at a howto guide, e.g. https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Wine-on-Linux


If you got the game from Steam then search the Steam SH3 community https://steamcommunity.com/app/15210/discussions/ , there used to be some step by step instructions for Linux/Wine there.



In brief:



Wine uses an area of the user's home directory for each wine installation. This is referred to by a system variable called a WINEPREFIX. The default location is the hidden directory .wine. There's a subdirectory drive_c in there which is all your windows files in the usual windows directory structure.

To set it all up type the following from the terminal:
winecfg

This also allows you to tailor the system behaviour for each installed application.
I don't know what proton does with its files, to use an existing Proton installation you might have to do something like
WINEPREFIX=~/.proton winecfg

You have to install your applications just like windows, so use commands like
wine 'install.exe'
There's a utility called winetricks which lets you add more dlls in your virtual C drive to get stuff to work. For example the Vulkan implementation of directx would be installed with

winetricks dxvk
Which might get you back to your white smoke bug! BEWARE - it's hard to go back!



To get widescreen working in SH3 you need to run winecfg, select the libraries tab and override d3d9, msvcp71 and msvcr71. This makes wine try to use local versions of these dll's in the SH3 directory which have been messed with to get widescreen working.


It's not so hard once you get used to it.... Honest...

Hooston,

My Linux SH3 Guru… I am attempting to get widescreen to work using this method of DLL override through protontricks but can’t get it to work. Do I need to do the 4gb patch first?

[Hooston]

The 4Gb patch is not necessary for widescreen. However I would say either the 4Gb patch or the H.Sie/Stiebler hard coded fixes are a must have for modding as all of the megamods use so much memory, mainly due to textures for 3d models I think. in fact they are now pushing over 4Gb and modders are having to cut nice things out.
The main consideration is to pick a widescreen mod that wants a resolution and refresh rate that your display and graphics card can support. This can be difficult on Linux, especially as my distro has switched to the Wayland windowing system which is not properly supported by old Nvidia video drivers. Proton on the steam deck pretends to support 1920x1080 by scaling the display but it looks like the directX wrappers used by widescreen mods are ignoring this and treating the display as its native 1280x800. It should be possible to hack a widescreen mod to look ok at this resolution but you would have to go into the cfg files to reposition and scale all the elements in the UI. A lot of work for just a small increase in the available screen area.

[millnate]

The 4Gb patch is not necessary for widescreen. However I would say either the 4Gb patch or the H.Sie/Stiebler hard coded fixes are a must have for modding as all of the megamods use so much memory, mainly due to textures for 3d models I think. in fact they are now pushing over 4Gb and modders are having to cut nice things out.
The main consideration is to pick a widescreen mod that wants a resolution and refresh rate that your display and graphics card can support. This can be difficult on Linux, especially as my distro has switched to the Wayland windowing system which is not properly supported by old Nvidia video drivers. Proton on the steam deck pretends to support 1920x1080 by scaling the display but it looks like the directX wrappers used by widescreen mods are ignoring this and treating the display as its native 1280x800. It should be possible to hack a widescreen mod to look ok at this resolution but you would have to go into the cfg files to reposition and scale all the elements in the UI. A lot of work for just a small increase in the available screen area.

Bummer. I hear ya about modifying all those file and “small gains” but… sure would be nice on the small steam deck screen to find a widescreen GUI cause all them small numbers are hard to read!

Any chance you’ve gotten SH5 WOS steal working on Linux?! 😂😭