Megadimension Neptunia VII (460120)

[mat8913]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Megadimension Neptunia VII
• Steam AppID of the game: 460120

System Information

• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 560X
• Driver/LLVM version: Mesa 18.2.3
• Kernel version: 4.18.16
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/mat8913/203796073021a28373383b4282f101d6
• Proton version: 3.7-8

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-460120.log

Symptoms

None of the videos play and instead you get a black screen.

Reproduction

Open the game. Instead of the intro videos, you'll get a black screen.

Workarounds

• You can keep clicking on the black screen to skip the videos (thanks ProtonDB for that info). Then you can at least access the rest of the game.

• You can create a 32-bit wineprefix for the game, and run winetricks quartz devenum wmp10 in it (thanks WineHQ for that info). Then the videos will play, but might[1] be super laggy.

[1] On my laptop, the videos are laggy when running on battery, but play just fine when plugged in.

[mat8913]

It turns out you can use https://github.com/MysteryDash/Dash.FileFormats to extract the game's cutscenes. Doing so, you end up with a bunch of .usm files which play in mpv. Here's their info:

matthew@thorium:/media/matthew/SanDisk/MOVIE00000/en$ file game_ev_001.usm
game_ev_001.usm: Microsoft ASF

matthew@thorium:/media/matthew/SanDisk/MOVIE00000/en$ ffmpeg -i game_ev_001.usm
Guessed Channel Layout for Input Stream #0.1 : stereo
Input #0, asf, from 'game_ev_001.usm':
  Metadata:
    date            : 2015-12-16T14:42:47+09:00
    encoder         : Lavf55.33.100
  Duration: 00:01:10.36, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 10430 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: wmv2 (WMV2 / 0x32564D57), yuv420p, 1280x720, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0:1: Audio: wmav2 (a[1][0][0] / 0x0161), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s

[krauser87]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Megadimension Neptunia VII
• Steam AppID of the game: 460120

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
• Driver/LLVM version: 450.66
• Kernel version: 5.7.0-0.bpo.2-amd64
• Link to full system information report as Gist
• Proton version: 5.0-9

Log File

steam-460120.log - Default

Symptoms

The game by default, does not run any video. At one point, clicking doesn't work anymore(it works in the first black screens only), you get to the Menu and not much further, you can't even start the story

Using LAV Filters, I got the videos to play but they are pretty much running at 2-3 fps(or even less), unwatchable. Going into previous reports, presented here https://www.protondb.com/app/207350, I tried the most recent one, Lutris has a script to do everything it shows in older comments. But when I run the script and then try to play the game, it won't even launch.

[krauser87]

Update

Alright, the problem was the wine/winetricks version. The newest one doesn't install windows media player. I used the native one from Debian Stable buster repo and now the game works just fine, running the script here https://lutris.net/games/megadimension-neptunia-vii/

[Snaggly]

Reading user reports and looking at that Lutris script suggests that running a 32-Bit prefix under Steam Proton had been working before. This seems to not be the case anymore, regardless of what I try. The only way to yet make the game work is under Wine Steam in Lutris, having the Windows build of Steam encapsulated in a 32Bit Wine environment.

Symptoms wise, from Proton 5.13 and upwards the entire application now freezes when it tries to play a video. The same happens in Proton-GE and TKG builds.

Is there something I missed, or did Steam really lock down their Proton on a 64-Bit prefix only? #449

[E100Beta]

Tried this game on Steam Deck and Archlinux with Proton Experimental, the game actually works out of the box, but it spawns videos in separate window, while requiring game's window to be focused to play them, which results in not seeing videos on Steam Deck.
Here's a demonstration of what I'm talking about on desktop: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nNpIygs93KI
Here's a log saved right after the video: steam-460120.log

[Snaggly]

@E100Beta install "quartz" using Protrontricks:
protrontricks 460120 quartz

But then in game cinematics will only display that testpattern. Using GE-Proton will make them play but then you won't get audio on the cutscenes.

[E100Beta]

@Snaggly thank you, current Proton Experimental actually works after installing quartz with audio, at least with intro cutscenes so far! Can confirm that GE-Proton does has no sound.
Edit: can confirm that it also works on Steam Deck
Edit2: I retract my claim, it seems that while some cutscenes work, others do not. I can skip cutscenes, so the game can be played technically, but it seems I will need to go through the setup for proton 5.0-10 described on protonDB

[Snaggly]

@E100Beta on Proton 8.0-1d or current Experimental game now runs with cutscenes and audio after applying following protrontricks:
protontricks 460120 quartz_feb2010 wmp11 qasf

I tested this on current GE-Proton7-55 as well and it seems to have worked too.

[E100Beta]

@Snaggly thanks, I tested it on my laptop and Steam Deck and it seems to work much better than previous workaround. No audio issues (pops and skips) present in Proton 5, all cutscenes and chapter menus work, and the game itself runs noticeably better thanks to newer Proton version. I'll run it a bit more in the coming days and update this post if I notice anything else.
Edit: Seems audio stutters are still present, although maybe less severe.

[unit73e]

I got the game working without protontricks on a fully updated Arch Linux.

The standard proton doesn't work, it has to be proton-ge because it has the necessary codecs. I'm using proton-ge-8-25. With standard proton the game crashes and you can see in the logs that WMVCore.dll is not found.

If you ran the game with standard proton you need to delete the prefix first and then run with Proton-GE.

rm -r $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/460120

For some reason this game also needs gamescope or it will freeze right at the beginning. This is my configuration to tell the game run at 1080p, full-screen, but then in reality run at 1440p with FSR, because that's what I have.

gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -W 2560 -H 1440 -F fsr -- %command%

There's no need for MegaresolutionNeptunia if you use gamescope, so win-win.

With that the game should run, with video and audio, 60fps (that's the max) if you use an AMD RX 6600.

One last problem, the game doesn't always exit correctly and in that case you either need to restart to play it again, or you need to kill the NeptuniaVII.exe and wine processes.

[E100Beta]

@unit73e new versions of ProtonGE actually execute the protontricks command that Snaggly provided under the hood, so that's the trick to why it works more easily nowadays.

[unit73e]

@unit73e new versions of ProtonGE actually execute the protontricks command that Snaggly provided under the hood, so that's the trick to why it works more easily nowadays.

Thanks, confirmed. If anyone wants to test:

$ protontricks 460120 list-installed
quartz_feb2010
wsh57
gdiplus
wmp11
qasf

Even so gamescope somehow is needed. I don't get why but it freezes the game otherwise.