MentalEdge

Bottles has a wine manager that allows you to install various wine versions, and switch between them. You can also use the system installed version or even more versions installed by protonup-qt.

Winetricks is included.

No, actually.

Your game files do not need to be inside a prefix, and I generally do not set things up that way.

Same as on windows you can have your c drive, but then install games to a different drive. You can mount any file location as an additional drive in wine. There is usually already a "z" drive mounted, which gives the prefix access to the filesystem outside the prefix.

This means there's not actually any need to place things inside the prefix, except for save files which need to be in specific locations like appdata or documents.

So to move things over and run them, you'd just copy the game files anywhere you like. To run a game, instead of a location on the c drive, you'd use the corresponding z drive path to the exe.

With bottles, this is super easy. Set up a bottle, and copy any save files into the prefix. Easily done with "browse files" from the config page of a bottle, which will open the fake c drive in a file browser.

With a configured bottle, simply navigate to the game .exe. Right click it, and select run with bottles. Bottles will ask which bottle to run it with, and that's that. Alternatively, use the "Run executable" button found on the config page of the bottle. For ease of use, add the exe to the bottle as a shortcut.

Shortcuts can then also be added as start menu items, or even added to steam.

No need to fiddle with putting all the game files inside the fake c drive.

Setting things up this way means you have your prefix, with save files and such, separate from the game files. You can easily delete or add games, without touching the save-file-containing prefix, and move games around to wherever you need and still have them work.

You can re-use the same bottle for many games, and keep the save files for those games in one prefix.

If a given game needs a bit more massaging to work, bottles makes it very easy set up and manage additional bottles for any such games.

Well, Endeavour is just arch. If you want, you can achieve the same install that has only the things you need, by removing things instead of just adding.

IMO it starts off closer to the config most people want, so it's less work to take it the rest of the way.

PBR isn't shit, and it doesn't necessarily mean targeting photorealism.

It's just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.

You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it's easier to "style" your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.

Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won't be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.

If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur...

You get the idea.

Not even close, if you actually install barebones arch, then barebones arch is exactly that, barebones. You wont even have a DE.

Endeavour is what you want. It's just straight up arch, but with all the stuff you'd want to set up anyway done for you.

And if you want an "app-store" style app to browse packages with, and not fiddle with the command line to manage packages, install pamac. It can be expanded with AUR and flatpak support.

I adore Fires of Rubicon. They know how to design games, and how to pull off an aesthetic. That side of the studio has serious world-class talent.

But fromsoft has some big issues on the graphics tech expertise side of things.

I don't think I've seen any subsurface scattering in their games, or proper multi-texture materials. I don't think they are on a PBR workflow (physically based rendering) though they couldn't achieve their "style" if they were. And the way they still rely on shell texturing in places they really, really shouldn't, actually hurts.

My problem isn't with their style. It's that they don't seem to know all the industry standard solutions and techniques that exist and have been developed, and shoot themselves in the foot both in terms of performance and fidelity, by achieving things in ways that an expert could immediately tell is a bad idea.

I know.

But only games running dx12/Vulkan must compile shaders.

The "normalcy" of sutters on linux is because dx7-11 games are running through vulkan, and those games were never coded to account for the way Vulkan works. Hence the shaders are compiled (by VKD3D/DXVK, not the game) during gameplay when first needed.

Like I said, if games must compile shaders during gameplay, they should do so asynchronously in order to not impact frametimes. This only applies to titles actually coded with the intention of being run under dx12/vulkan. Elden Ring in particular straight up violates the dx12 spec.

Compiling the shaders in advance also doesn't take 30 minutes, and doesn't require doing so for the entire game. Many games will only compile the shaders for the immediate area that a player is in. (Apex Legends in dx12 mode for example processes only the current map in rotation and lets you play when it's done)

Games that precompile shaders when running using Vulkan/dx12 have never made me wait longer than a few minutes at most, and only at first launch.

There is no excuse.

Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.

Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.

Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is "common in new games". It's amateurish and completely avoidable.

With AUR it's as easy as installing any other package, actually.

You just install the git version from AUR.

No clue. Haven't used it in years. I was done when I went looking for a fix for the compositor thing and found a years-old open bug report.

I do want to add that new games can also require new packages, the way Alan Wake II did at launch. Even on Arch you had to compile the development version of Mesa for it to run.

Cinnamons compositor doesn't turn off for games (it's supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.

Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.