Age of Empires 2 (2013) (221380)

[sandsmark]

same issue as when people earlier tried to run aoe2hd with wine.

if you replace Launcher.exe with «AoK HD.exe» the game seems to launch and work perfectly.

[KapiX]

Launcher.exe requires mfc140u.dll to run. Dropping it in game directory fixes the issue.

[dfduarte]

Confirmed the "partial" solution using the mfc140u.dll. However, the following problem happens:

1- When running without the dll file, the games freezes (then closes afterwards) with no message
2- After copying the dll to the Age 2 dir, the whole install process starts, but the install crashes right after installing the DirectX seven, closing the "load screen" again.
3- When putting the AoK HD.exe in place of Launcher, I get a error regarding a image failing to load in the textures folder. The game crashes after that

My machine is:

Computer Information:
    Manufacturer:  Unknown
    Model:  Unknown
    Form Factor: Desktop
    No Touch Input Detected

Processor Information:
    CPU Vendor:  AuthenticAMD
    CPU Brand:  AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 270 Processor
    CPU Family:  0x10
    CPU Model:  0x6
    CPU Stepping:  0x3
    CPU Type:  0x0
    Speed:  3400 Mhz
    2 logical processors
    2 physical processors
    HyperThreading:  Unsupported
    FCMOV:  Supported
    SSE2:  Supported
    SSE3:  Supported
    SSSE3:  Unsupported
    SSE4a:  Supported
    SSE41:  Unsupported
    SSE42:  Unsupported
    AES:  Unsupported
    AVX:  Unsupported
    CMPXCHG16B:  Supported
    LAHF/SAHF:  Supported
    PrefetchW:  Unsupported

Operating System Version:
    Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (64 bit)
    Kernel Name:  Linux
    Kernel Version:  4.15.0-32-generic
    X Server Vendor:  The X.Org Foundation
    X Server Release:  11906000
    X Window Manager:  Compiz
    Steam Runtime Version:  steam-runtime-beta-release_2018-06-14

Video Card:
    Driver:  NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GTX 750 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
    Driver Version:  4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.130
    OpenGL Version: 4.5
    Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
    Monitor Refresh Rate: 59 Hz
    VendorID:  0x10de
    DeviceID:  0x1380
    Revision Not Detected
    Number of Monitors:  1
    Number of Logical Video Cards:  1
    Primary Display Resolution:  1366 x 768
    Desktop Resolution: 1366 x 768
    Primary Display Size: 16.14" x 9.06" (18.50" diag)
                                            41.0cm x 23.0cm (47.0cm diag)
    Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
    Primary VRAM: 2048 MB
    Supported MSAA Modes:  2x 4x 8x 16x 

Sound card:
    Audio device: Realtek ALC887-VD

Memory:
    RAM:  7975 Mb

Miscellaneous:
    UI Language:  English
    LANG:  en_US.UTF-8
    Total Hard Disk Space Available:  250461 Mb
    Largest Free Hard Disk Block:  40602 Mb
    VR Headset: None detected

Recent Failure Reports:

[ryao]

env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/compatdata/221380/pfx/ WINEPATH=$HOME/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/Proton\ 3.7/dist/bin/wine winetricks vcrun2015

Running this winetricks command enabled things to work, although it seems hackish. The launcher buttons are also missing text.

[DrCox1911]

Works fine for me, only thing I did was renaming the "AoK HD.exe" to "Launcher.exe".

[felisucoibi]

This is a old knowm bug of aoe2 in wine (i was one of the bug trackers of this game in winehq.com) and yes just reanimg works.
Go to the folder of the game and rename Launcer.exe to Launcher2.exe and Aoe 2.exe to Launcher.exe

BUT

There is also a bug with hdmi screen in laptop if using nvidia output, it just works perfect with intel card enabled using nvidia config, but if you run it in a laptop via hdmi with nvidia enabled it stucks.

And also there is a font flickering and a black background in writing areas problem easy to fix too.

In total are 4 BUGS, but you can play this game with the workarrounds.

[legluondunet]

Another bug for this game: cinematics do not play, could be related to issue #1464.

[nwildner]

Don't know if this adds more info to this issue but i had to replace Launcher.exe with AoK HD.exe and add the NoStartup launch parameter for the game to launch.

Didn't tested online gameplay but as far as i could get Single player modes are running great. yay!
Edit: Ok, online game is working :)

Running on: Arch Linux(k4.18) + AMD FX9370 + Nvidia GTX 6050ti + Nvidia 396.54-2 driver version.

[hogar1977]

@felisucoibi I also played this game via Crossover before and it worked really well, but after trying out this steam version (after renaming AoK HD.exe into Launcher.exe) I have a problem with elo - it reports that elo is out of bounds and it resets to 1600 after every game (regardless of winning or losing). Did you experience the same problem?

Also what is the workaround for black text on black background in writing areas so they become effectively invisible?

[felisucoibi]

Yes, same problem here... the elo reset to 1600, i didnt say anything because i dont use it and i forgot to report....

There is not workarround for the black background when writing... never has been by now.

[hogar1977]

@felisucoibi

This is why I asked for workaround, I thought u were talking about that:

And also there is a font flickering and a black background in writing areas problem easy to fix too.

Cheers anyway, I hope someone will figure out the elo problem because now even my windows and Crossover installation is affected :-) Maybe I just have to reinstall everything there and it will go away, but I'm too lazy to do that...

[kisak-valve]

Age of Empires II: HD Edition - game works with issues

Issue transferred from #1285.
@hogar1977 posted on 2018-09-06T18:27:58:

Hi there,
the game works if 'AoK HD.exe' is renamed into 'Launcher.exe' and nostartup is added into launch options.
Issue 1: ELO system is not behaving properly - the game 'thinks' that elo is 0:0 and reports it as out of bounds at selecting multiplayer and after every played multiplayer game it tries to add/subtract elo points to/from 0:0 values which still makes them out of bounds and elo finally gets reset to 1600 every time. The game is completely playable except for the ELO bug in multiplayer.
I play this game regularly via Crossover and the elo bug is not present there - I presume because the Steam client itself is part of the wine 'bottle' and it is the windows version of Steam client that is also emulated. Since elo system is tightly interwoven with the Steam client, I guess that's where the problem lies...

Issue 2: In-game chat windows - text is black on black background, so during typing of a message it's not possible to see it. This particular bug is wine related I guess... It exists in my Crossover installation and now it's also present in the Steam for Linux via Proton variant. Haven't found any solution for it until now.

Other than this, the game runs smoothly with no crashes... For me it actually performs better than on my Windows 10 machine (there I experience at least one crash per session of gaming and is somehow slower...).

[KapiX]

I have also noticed that for some reason my achievements got reset. Only one awarded for finishing the tutorial is left, all I got in multiplayer are gone.

[kforney]

After swapping out Launcher.exe and replacing it with AoK HD.exe, the game runs perfectly on my system with the following issues:

• My ELO also resets itself to 1600:1600, claiming to be out of bounds at 0:0 each time I start the game.
• I receive the achievement "Dark Ages Rush or Early Adopter" each time I finish a game. This indicates that my achievement progress has been reset, and occurs every time I finish a game, making any progress difficult.

[ryad-eldajani]

Replacing Launcher.exe with AoK HD.exe works for me.

I've played the first few tutorial games and it works like charm.

However, I noticed a problem when tabbing out of the game and back, the game keeps scrolling in one direction. Could only reverse this by restarting the game. It doesn't matter, whether I've set the game to window or full screen mode.

Tested on: Arch x64, GTX 765M @ 396.51, Proton 3.7-6 Beta.

[hogar1977]

@kforney
I think the ELO problem comes from the fact that game is installed in wine environment and steam client is not. Therefore the game cannot access Steam API in a proper way - the elo cannot be read nor written properly after the multiplayer match is done (game tries to assign elo to 0:0 values and it ends up being out of bounds again and reset to 1600:1600). I think the achievements issue is the same thing...
I play this game over Crossover (commercial version of wine) and I never had this issue. But in Crossover, both the Steam client and the game are windows emulated versions and part of the same wine bottle, so I guess the game has no issues in accessing the Steam API properly.

@ryad-eldajani
Can you try to play a few online multiplayer matches, just to confirm the ELO 1600:1600 issue?
Also, regarding the tabbing issue... I had that happen to me from time to time when I played over Crossover, but rarely (as far as I know this happens in Windows too). Does it happen to you every time? Also I am not able to Alt TAB at all when playing via Steam for Linux + Proton, but I am using Gnome DE. What DE are you using on your Linux machine?

Other than these issues, the game is more stable for me in Linux then it is in Windows - almost never crashes, while in Windows 10 I experience game crash almost every time I play (1 time per session of gaming).

[ryad-eldajani]

@hogar1977 I noticed the tabbing issue appears, when scrolling the map using the arrow keys and afterwards tabbing out. If I scroll the map using the right click, cursor to window edge or click on mini map, it does not appear happen. I can confirm that I also have an ELO of 1600. I cannot say however whether this is correct or not since I've never played a ranked match before. I'm using Xfce 4.12.

[Flaburgan]

Hi everyone. Linux fan and AoE fan here. I play this game with Wine for years, first the original version, then the steam version installing steam with Wine. Everything works fine except for the black background of text.

So, I just installed AoE with Proton, I had to rename AoK to Launcher.exe (something I never did when installing the game AND steam under wine) and... BAM, all my achievements and my ELO score are lost :(
I played a multiplayer game, and the error (score is 0:0) is still there. Now, I accessed steam from the website and can see my achievements definitely are lost. It's not that bad honestly but I mainly play online and see my ELO score to 1600 is very sad knowing how many games I won :p

[Flaburgan]

(Also, I found the trick of renaming AoK to Launcher on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF1wPFRF_FI if someone with a Google Account can comment there to warn everyone about loosing all progress and ELO score in the game, that would be nice. I would definitely not have done that if I knew)

[hogar1977]

@Flaburgan
I hope more linux aoe2 fans will decide to comment here, maybe we actually get someone assigned to deal with the issue. Because, the Steam client behaves better and more stable in this way then when it's emulated with wine... I also played this game via Crossover for a relatively long time, but if it would work with Steam for Linux it would be perfect. Before installing I read only about losing achievements, not elo. I guess if I knew about ELO loss as a certainty I would not have installed the game like this either. Other than the achievement and ELO loss the game could essentially be whitelisted...

[hogar1977]

@kisak-valve
hi there, I noticed you moved my discussion into this thread... Do you have any relation to the valve proton dev team? Or just trying to moderate the Issues forum? This game has basically only one minor issue that needs resolving before it can be whitelisted... Any hope someone gets assigned to look into it?

[Flaburgan]

@hogar1977 well in the last 24h AoE is the 49th game the most played over thousands of steam games. So it definitely is popular. I don't know how we can point that to valve's devs though.

[hogar1977]

@Flaburgan as usual the devil lies in the details... It might be 49th most played game, but how many of those are Linux users :/ ? I'm afraid not that many :( I just hope someone sees my rant and decides to do something about it tho :)

[kisak-valve]

Hello @hogar1977,
hi there, I noticed you moved my discussion into this thread... Do you have any relation to the valve proton dev team?
No, I am not a Valve dev.

Or just trying to moderate the Issues forum?
Yes, I am a moderator for Valve's Github issue trackers.

This game has basically only one minor issue that needs resolving before it can be whitelisted... Any hope someone gets assigned to look into it?
The proton devs are actively listening to feedback and prioritizing what they consider most important, however, I will not single out any individual Proton dev or impose a priority system.

[kforney]

I went to collect a log file to try to see what was really happening, and noticed that my version of Proton was one too far back for the PROTON_LOG option to work. Updating Proton to the 3.7-6 Beta through Steam's options so I could get the log file had the side effect of resolving the issue. My achievements and ELO no longer reset every time I click "Multiplayer" in 3.7-6 Beta.

[hogar1977]

@kforney
@Flaburgan
@kisak-valve
@ryad-eldajani

I can confirm that using Proton beta version fixes the ELO and achievement issue!!!
Oh man I'm so happy with this.
Now, if someone only was able to figure out the black text on black background (and I believe this is strictly wine issue that exists since forever) that would be perfect :) But this thing alone makes this game able to be whitelisted in my opinion. I don't know their criteria, but this game is perfectly playable right now. Crossover wine AoE2 HD bottle bye bye...

[Flaburgan]

I can confirm after playing an online game that with proton 3.7.6beta the elo bug is gone. However, I still had to do the hack of renaming AoK to launcher

[purifyyourhome]

Thanks for the continued probing of this problem. Running Fedora 33 Workstation XFCE w/Intel iGPU. Setting "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" in the game Properties>Compatibility dialog as Proton 5.0-10 worked great for me. I couldn't get the ALT-TAB thing trick to work using any later version of Proton, nor did entering "PROTON_USE_WIND3D" in the game Properties > General tab > Launch Options box from @aeikum's suggestion but perhaps I put it in the wrong place.

[thaewrapt]

Still unplayable with Experimental-5.13-20210217 and in fact became unplayable in 5.13-6 as opposed to 5.13-5 (DXVK issue linked before by @aeikum). Haven't tried WineD3D but I guess it still works.

[Levitanus]

system information.txt

[kisak-valve]

Hello @Levitanus, the nVidia 390 driver series is older than the support cutoff for Proton. Additionally, your video card is part of nVidia's Fermi generation of video cards, and the 390 driver series is the last series that supported that generation, so you would be worse off trying a newer driver series. Proton uses DXVK to translate DirectX 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan and there is no video driver for that card that provides Vulkan support.

Unfortunately, this makes your hardware unsupported by Proton. That said, you could try adding PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% to the game's launch options to tell Proton to use wine's DirectX to OpenGL render path instead of DXVK, but this runtime option is expected to come with a significant performance penalty and is not considered supported.

[Levitanus]

@kisak-valve, thank You for complete answer! I'll try.
But for me it is still strange that I'm not able to launch the game released the same time with my graphics card)

[thaewrapt]

Still unplayable with Experimental-5.13-20210217 and in fact became unplayable in 5.13-6 as opposed to 5.13-5 (DXVK issue linked before by @aeikum). Haven't tried WineD3D but I guess it still works.

Playable at least for me (both video and menu are working) with a current Proton Experimental (experimental-6.3-20210402).

[h4kuna]

I confirm with experimental Proton 6.3 is playable. I updated few minutes ago.

[Endle]

I tried to run this game with Proton 6.3-3
The game quits silently a few seconds later
steam-221380.log
system_info.txt

I can play AoE2 with 5.13-6 and PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, as kisak-valve #72 (comment) suggested

[h4kuna]

For this moment after update, by experimental proton is not playable... :( I cannot play with 5.13-6 like previous post.

[thaewrapt]

Can confirm, again became unplayable with both 6.3-4 (intro videos play, then menu music is starting to play without redraw of the screen for a menu with the last played video frame freezing on screen) and current Experimental, 6.3-20210514 (black screen during video playback with intro's sound playing, then no menu sound and the same black screen upon either video completion or keypress to skip the rest of the intro).

[sulix]

For Proton Experimental at least, I don't get those issues if I set PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 (though I can reproduce them with DXVK). With WineD3D, the intro movies play correctly, and the menu (and game) display and are usable.

Otherwise, the only issue I've noticed (but not investigated properly) is that sometimes the game's custom mouse cursor isn't being used, which doesn't render the game unplayable.

[h4kuna]

I made video.
In first part is proton experimental, where you can see, the game start to black screen, processor working but nothing happen.
Second part is with proton 6, where freeze intro.
Third part is proton 6 with attribute PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 but nothing change.

Video

[sulix]

Hmm… I double checked with Proton 6.3, and had a similar issue with DXVK: the game doesn't render anything after the video. (Sound works, and you can navigate the menu based on the sound and changing mouse cursors, though it's not playable without graphics.) This seems to be the same as the issue with 5.13, which is to do with Vulkan not supporting multiple swapchains on the same window: doitsujin/dxvk#1726

It does work for me with WineD3D, though. I think from your video you might not be setting PROTON_USE_WINED3D correctly: it's an environment variable, so you'll need to append %command%, so the resulting Launch Options should look something like

PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%

(I also use the OLD_SCHOOL argument — after %command% — to get the classic fonts, but I don't think that's affecting this.)

The other option is to use the SKIPINTRO argument (again, after %command% if you mix it with environment variables, though it'll work by itself as well). This skips the intro entirely, and the game works fine with both DXVK and WineD3D, on both 6.3 and Experimental.

The mouse cursor issue only seems to exist with Experimental, and is a bit bizarre. The mouse stays as the system default arrow cursor on startup, when it should change to the AoE custom one. It will become the correct cursor after Alt+Tabbing away from and back to the game. It will, interestingly, revert to the system arrow cursor if you Alt+Tab away and back again, then press Alt+F4 to close the game (which brings up an in-game "are you sure" dialog box), and then move the mouse (possibly over that dialog, maybe up-and-to-the-left more generally, or maybe after some amount of movement.) I'm guessing this is something to do with the Experimental branch's work to avoid calling on wineserver for window-management-y things, maybe something like this: ValveSoftware/wine@ec72c4a

[h4kuna]

You have right. I used the argumet like PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% and game works. Thank you

But better solution was without arguments like before.

[NerosTie]

If there is an issue with DXVK, please report it.

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues

[aeikum]

@NerosTie It is already, doitsujin/dxvk#1726

[BNieuwenhuizen]

I had the additional issue (with wined3d since otherwise I run into the issue above) that when alt-tabbing and back while ingame the screen turns black as well after like half a second.

[felisucoibi]

100% WORKING wqith proton 6.3.8
INTRO VIDEO
MULTIPLAYER
EVERYTHING withoutmodifications, comgratulations!

[YellowOnion]

The stuck scrolling bug seems to be back.

[sulix]

Ah, this seems to be a bug in Proton Experimental's use of shared memory for the GetKeyboardState() call: if the fast path is used, the key values are no-longer masked off:
ValveSoftware/wine@d2cbafa

It should still work in Proton 6.3.

I haven't had a chance to test it yet (and the experimental_6.3 branch isn't even building for me due to a missing field in struct input_shared_memory, so it probably wouldn't work out-of-the-box anyway), but here's a patch which should fix it:

From 38ac7aa57a0314988a85dbb42b109f1c6b7f7b95 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: David Gow <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2022 15:00:01 +0800
Subject: [PATCH] user32: Mask off the unspecified bits in GetKeyboardState()

When using shared memory for the keyboard state (as added in "user32: Use input shared memory in GetKeyboardState." (d2cbafab08)), we no-longer mask off the unused bits, which causes the map to scroll uncontrollably in some situations in the Age of Empires series.

This is a regression of bug:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30814

An analysis of the bug can be found:
https://davidgow.net/hacks/aoescroll.html

Fixes: d2cbafab08 ("user32: Use input shared memory in GetKeyboardState.")
Signed-off-by: David Gow <[email protected]>
---
 dlls/user32/input.c | 6 +++++-
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/dlls/user32/input.c b/dlls/user32/input.c
index cabc7f23ff0..bb80dbdf7cf 100644
--- a/dlls/user32/input.c
+++ b/dlls/user32/input.c
@@ -567,7 +567,11 @@ BOOL WINAPI DECLSPEC_HOTPATCH GetKeyboardState( LPBYTE state )
     else SHARED_READ_BEGIN( &shared->seq )
     {
         if (!shared->created) skip = FALSE; /* server needs to create the queue */
-        else memcpy( state, (const void *)shared->keystate, 256 );
+        else
+        {
+            memcpy( state, (const void *)shared->keystate, 256 );
+            for (i = 0; i < 256; i++) state[i] &= 0x81;
+        }
     }
     SHARED_READ_END( &shared->seq );
 
-- 
2.32.0

In the meantime, I've written up a more detailed analysis of this bug on my website, which has instructions for patching the game executable to work around the issue, as well as links to other workarounds.

[rbernon]

Thanks @sulix, nice find.

[werdahias]

I have a 4k monitor. AoE2 runs fine with Proton. My issue is that due to the resolution the UI is too small (see here ). The fix is to set some windows compatibility settings like described in the link. How can I do this in proton? Is there any launch command I can apply?

[zaggynl]

On Steam Deck, in both Desktop and Game Mode, if I press the File Name field to save a game the on screen keyboard briefly appears then disappears.
If I start the OSK with Steam+X, then use tab to navigate to the File Name field, the keyboard also disappears.

[werdahias]

I have a 4k monitor. AoE2 runs fine with Proton. My issue is that due to the resolution the UI is too small (see here ). The fix is to set some windows compatibility settings like described in the link. How can I do this in proton? Is there any launch command I can apply?

Here a screenshot to illustrate my problem.The stats on the right are also cut off.

[werdahias]

[jr1991-g]

To fix the text bug toggle vsync off and on and it just works. You can do it ingame aswell. Tested with Proton 7.0-4 and latest GE.
Short video here
Combine this with the davidgow fix and you'll have a perfect time playing this. No more launch flags.

[bradgy]

Just reinstalled after the noclip documentary and found I wasn't able to play: Crashes after the okaying the Validating Subscription window, before the intro movie plays. Not sure if regression or issue with my setup.
Arch, i3 8100 RX580, Gnome Wayland, Proton Experimental
steam-221380.log

[sulix]

Still seems to work here with Proton Experimental (KDE/nVidia/Wayland).

That being said, it may be worth trying out an older Proton version, the SKIPINTRO command-line argument, and/or the PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% option. All of those have helped with various issues in the past, and the intro movie in particular is a constant source of problems.

[bradgy]

Thanks David, tried both of those already and no luck with either unfortunately. Going to chalk it up to some weirdness on my setup's end that will probably resolve itself at some point. Will update here if I manage to sort it out in the meantime.

edit: user error, of course. I had the nointro command entered incorrectly. These are the exact launch options that get it working for me with proton experimental at the moment:
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% SKIPINTRO