Is there a steam-independent way of running multiple applications in the same proton prefix at once? If so, how do I do it?
For those interested in why I need that: I have the Tomb Raider trilogy (Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider) on Epic Games Store that I got for free a while back. And I played the 1st and 2nd one by installing them through EGS and adding them as non-steam games through steam. This allowed me to use steamtinkerlaunch with the “fork custom command” option to run a trainer together with the game with no issues.
However SotTR does not work that way. There is some DRM issue that results in the game launching and getting stuck at a black screen with the background sound effects playing and nothing else. After pressing alt+f4 there even appears a window asking if I really want to close the game, but other than that it’s just a black screen.
Now I did manage to get the game to run by using Heroic Games Launcher without Steam. However I can’t use steamtinkerlaunch with it and I couldn’t find an analogous option in there either. If I add the trainer as a separate game to the HGL, and start it together with the game, whichever was started 2nd doesn’t start until the 1st one exits, which is useless.
Hence the question, is there a way to do this without using steam+steamtinkerlaunch?
Protontricks does that at a lower level, but you should be able to get it working with steamtinkerlaunch, I feel so this situation is weird. You should be able to launch it doing the following with Protontricks:
protontricks-launch --appid <steam_appid> <location of exe file to launch>
However, I don’t think that gets to the heart of the issue. From what I know, the Epic versions of Tomb Raider are bugged and a pain to launch with Linux. The black screen apparently has to do with something regarding EOS and DX12? From threads like this or this online , you seem to need to do a bunch of things to actually get it to not use DX12 and use DX11 instead. Of course, I think that doesn’t allow ray-tracing but I am not sure if you are willing to make that tradeoff so I leave that decision to you.
Thank you for the response. I verified that while using Steam, what you suggested indeed works (both game and trainer can be launched at the same time, and the trainer recognizes the game process), however that doesn’t really help me, because as I already said, the game doesn’t work through steam. If I could use Steam, I would just continue using steamtinkerlaunch.
Also it’s definitely not a DX12 issue. When I’m launching through steam I get the black screen with both DX12 and DX11. So with Steam the issue is not DX12, it’s more likely the DRM as I said before. However with Heroic Games Launcher when I use DX12, the game crashes entirely, and the only configuration that works for me is HGL+DX11. And I’m now looking for a way to get a trainer working with that configuration. So anything that takes <steam_appid> doesn’t help.