SKSE and Linux...

[mkienenb]

mkienenb, don't you consider moving to SE? I believe that it is more robust, with a lot of bugfixes. Compatibility with the latest mod versions is another its advantage.

I'm considering it, but I'm not willing to pay full price for it since SE linux compatibility is supposed to be worse for SE than for oldrim. So if I can't get oldrim (which I own) working well, I'm not excited about spending a lot of money to get something else that probably will work worse. I have put SE on my watch list, though.

 

 

I just tried reinstalling everything after making a backup of common/Skyrim, but the uninstaller didn't ask me to keep my saved games, and SURPRISE!, the saved games weren't in my backups; And the reinstall didn't fix the issue.

My saves are located in ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/Saves, and yours?

 

Yes, my saves would have been in a similar location, but the saves were deleted due to the following Steam/proton bug. It's frustrating that it's a known issue but there's no warning where a user might see it.

 

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/231#issuecomment-415407874

 

It might be important to note that uninstalling a game launched via

proton that uses personal folders like My Documents to store saves

leads to those saves getting wiped as the prefix is deleted

completely. This might be an unexpected behavior for some people as

saves are usually preserved when a game is uninstalled in steam.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/428

 

I now have my saves directory symbolically linked to a different location so I won't lose them this time.

 

As an update, I did finally get oldrim installed and working with SkyUI again last night. I had to reinstall it and SKSE several dozen times -- hours wasted.

I hit all kinds of odd issues, such as the WASD movement keys not working with SkyUI installed until after you get past the starting tutorial sections.

 

I also finally determined that part of my dual-wielding mouse button issues are that when both left and right buttons on my Logitech Trackball are clicked, they are converted into a single middle button click, either by the trackball itself, (which would be unlikely) or by the evdev kernel driver. The driver does have random settings for this, but I've yet to find one that works. I did find another mouse that doesn't emulate a middle button.

 

xorg.conf.d Option "Emulate3Buttons"
xinput property "Middle Button Emulation"
xinput property "Evdev Middle Button Emulation"
xinput property "libinput Middle Button Emulation"
xinput property "libinput Middle Emulation"
xinput property "libinput Middle Emulation Enabled"

[mkienenb]

I'll also note that after all this time, I've still been unable to get Steam SKSE working out of the box with Steam Oldrim on Steam/Linux/proton. I still have to manually replace TESV.exe with the SKSE loader exe, and set up a skse.ini file, and launch Skyrim instead of SKSE to make it work.

 

In frustration to losing my saves, I took a few days detour to get Morrowind working on linux. It wasn't as easy as I had hoped using Lutris. None of the installers worked (and I have every possible game source - Morrowind Cd, Morrowind GOTY cd, GOG Morrowind GOTY, Steam Morrowind). I eventually had to manually unpack the the GOG version using innoextract, then manually create an lutris entry. I wasn't able to get MO2 or Vortex to work as a mod manager (I kinda got MO2 working, but not reliably). I eventually moved on to the command-line portmod, and that turned out to be way better as it can install hundreds of mods at once. And I got to help find and sometimes fix a half-dozen new bugs there :) Fortunately the maintainer is great about working through issues and accepting/providing fixes. Unfortunately, I accidently nuked my Morrowind setup trying to install Skyrim mod management, so I'll have to redo that one as well, but at least that time was my own fault.

[zixi]

I'm not sure how much you know about gaming on Linux but in case you don't know this... here it is. There are games like Morrowind and Oldrim and Skyrim and Baldur's Gate and 7K and then there's the really, really fascinating, time-consuming game called Getting Games to Work and Modded!

 

Re mod managers - I work with whatever decides to work at the time. I'm using Vortex at the moment. This time round it works better than it did last time round. First time round we had to make symbolic links to all the games. This time round it spotted them for itself. But I did have several months of MO2. I really liked that. Its interface isn't beautiful but it 'enjoyed' being a mod organizer. I always think Vortex would like to be something else... If you know what I mean...

 

Anyway, I'm in awe with what you've done! It *will* get easier!!!!

[mkienenb]

zixi

 

I'm very familiar with playing Getting Games to Work and Modded. For me, I first played it back when it was a Windows-95-only game, only then it was called Getting Games To Work including Sound, Graphics, and Networking. :laugh: We always spent more time playing this than all other games combined. I used to joke that my housemate spent all of his time installing games and never actually played anything other than the intro video before moving on to the next game.

 

I'm also the author of Might and Magic 6/7/8 mm8leveleditor[1] modding tool, so "GGtW And Modded" is definitely easier today that back then :) I've also been using linux almost exclusively for two decades, and was running linux games, such as they have been, (actually SunOS/NeXTSTEP more often than linux) as far back as three decades ago.

 

So, yeah, I should know better than to expect things to just work, but seeing all these new ways to get games working (Steam/Proton, lutris) got my hopes up :) And you don't have to worry about me being scared away by the difficulty of the challenge :) Did I mention that I spent all weekend getting portmod working for Morrowind -- I only played Morrowind about five minutes afterward -- I got through the intro with hundreds of mods loaded and admired the new loading screens! -- and then I went back to Getting Games to Work and Modded - Oldrim Edition again.

 

And I can still use all the help I can get, so please treat me as a newbie and assume I don't entirely know what I'm doing -- that's definitely true for Skyrim at present even though I'm starting to figure some things out.

 

[1] http://mm8leveleditor.sourceforge.net/

 

P.S. Morrowind multiplayer[2] looks interesting. Anyone given that a try yet under linux? A couple of my kids have expressed interest, and I might let them try Morrowind with me using that.

 

[2] https://tes3mp.com/

[zixi]

I remember Might & Magic - pretty certain I had one of the games but I can't remember which. The first games I played were on the ZX81... it took all evening to get them to load by which time is was too late to play... If someone switched on a light somewhere you'd get murderous because the thing was so unstable. It's come a long way since then. I don't think I ever used Sun OS but I did use NextStep a very very long time ago. What happened to Next??? I still think fondly of CPM... and The Pawn!!!

 

I'm definitely a newbie Linux-wise. I terrify my husband who is the Linux guru here because I work on the principle that unless you play around with something you'll never understand it. I know 100 ways to really mess things up! But as all I do is game on a PC now, I really don't care. And actually Linux is very stable and supportive in a strange kind of way.

 

No, I never play multiplayer games or online. Also the connection here is effectively dial-up. Sammy the Snail can walk faster than it is!

 

Bug reports!!! Yes, that's something you get used to in Linux as well. I find them absolutely fascinating. I love the way that the software engineers argue over them and then parcel out the tasks sometimes to one of them who isn't 'there' just then as in: Oh... Jo can do that when s/he does XYZ... The enthusiasm and the knowledge is wonderful.

 

But to return to the sheep, Oldrim is running on this very machine using SKSE. I haven't tried putting in SkyUI because I don't like it. shumkar uses SkyUI though. I know people moved away from Oldrim but I kind of agree with HeyYou there's a lot to be said for it. When I fired it up I was amazed by just how good the graphics were. I thought they'd be awful... I'd forgotten. Linux handles audio better in Oldrim and its more stable. The only downside for me was that Live Another Life was no longer available via Steam Workshop except in Russian... and Oldrim is the one game that Vortex doesn't recognise because I installed it after Vortex... so it's either a manual install (sigh) or symbolic links (sigh)... And at the moment things are a smidgen complex here so I don't really feel like doing either...

 

[mkienenb]

I was fortunate enough to just miss having to use cassette drives. My first computer was an Apple II+ with a disk drive.

 

Publicly, NeXT was bought out by Apple never to be seen again, but practically, the Mac operating system was replaced by NeXTStep. The first release of OS X was pretty much NeXTStep with an Macintosh theme. At the time, NeXT employees had t-shirts made of the next logo eating the apple logo. I got to work at NeXT writing dev docs for about 3 months.

 

I only play multiplayer with my kids on LAN. Even when I was younger, it was only LAN parties if I did anything multiplayer.

 

For my next round of GGtWaM, I'll take a look at Vortex installed after Skyrim as a mod manager. I wasn't able to find the kinds of mods I was looking for in Steam Workshop (other than SkyUI). I was looking for major bug fixers like better-dialog, better-messagebox, the unofficial patches (had to give up on that one as they cannot be found any longer for non-DLC oldrim), and something to fix the flora respawning. Most of the stuff in the workshop seems to be graphic updates. So I ended up manually installing the three or four mods I wanted.

 

Did you use Lutris to install Vortex or another method? My Lutris Vortex issue is that if it cannot find something installed (which it was never able to do), then the app doesn't even launch to the point that you can configure it -- it just gave some kind of "missing game" warning and quit.

 

I'd feel more secure if my mods were managed by something rather than manually installed with fingers crossed.

[zixi]

The cassettes were dire! I wish I'd missed them too!

 

Rockerbacon has a version of Vortex which runs from Lutris. I installed via Lutris but it fetches all the stuff you need from Rockerbacon's Github. I seem to remember that it needed some messing around to get it to install properly. It might have been down to something about the version of Wine and it needed some tweaking which I'm pretty sure was documented on Lutris. The only problem I really have with Vortex is that I can't launch it. It doesn't turn up on Lutris (it's just disappeared). The only way I can get it to launch is by downloading a file from Nexus! Hence, I'm trying out a mod a day! My husband helpfully suggests it's a config file somewhere... great! I've thought about reinstalling it but that way lies madness... I know what will happen - the whole caboodle will likely fall apart so I'm waiting until April when I'll move to Ubuntu 21.04 and I'll deal with the fallout (if there is some). I've recently rebuilt the OS putting Home on the main drive and the OS on the smaller drive. I wanted to avoid having to reinstall everything every time I did something drastic to the OS... It's worked very well. But it took a while putting everything back on because the download speeds here are appalling...

 

Rockerbacon also has a version of MO2 which again can install from Lutris or via Github. I really can't get that to install now. It fails and I've forgotten why. But as I say, I just use whatever works and I accept that as versions of Wine change so there will be issues. As you know, Wine changes as Windows changes - it's not under the control of the Linux community.

 

I don't like manually installing mods either. I've done a lot of it because once that was all there was. But it was never fun and you need to have your wits about you even now. I don't mind playing about with the ini file as Skyrim will simply reproduce one if it all goes pear-shaped but I agree, there are better things to do with your time than manual install of mods... In any case, there are other more urgent ways to make oneself miserable - the dentist for example...

[shumkar]

since SE linux compatibility is supposed to be worse for SE than for oldrim.

 

Well, I can't compare them, because I don't have Oldrim, but SE's compatibility suits me perfectly. It "just works", including SKSE and SkyUI.

 

It might be important to note that uninstalling a game launched via

proton that uses personal folders like My Documents to store saves

leads to those saves getting wiped as the prefix is deleted

completely. This might be an unexpected behavior for some people as

saves are usually preserved when a game is uninstalled in steam.

 

Thanks for the heads-up! Useful to know, even if I'd made the saves folder a symbolic link initially...

 

I still have to manually replace TESV.exe with the SKSE loader exe, and set up a skse.ini file, and launch Skyrim instead of SKSE to make it work.

 

It's what I call "manual installing", I consider it normal :smile:

 

I'm also the author of Might and Magic 6/7/8 mm8leveleditor[1] modding tool

 

Interesting! Though, I haven't played Might and Magic. But I played (for a very long time) Heroes of Might and Magic 3 :smile:

 

And I can still use all the help I can get, so please treat me as a newbie and assume I don't entirely know what I'm doing

 

"The more we learn, the less we know"? I like that principle :smile:

 

I only play multiplayer with my kids on LAN.

 

And I've been playing in WoW for 2 years, and than in TESO for 1 year...

Edited January 21, 2021 by shumkar

[shumkar]

@zixi: Getting Games to Work and Modded!

@mkienenb: I used to joke that my housemate spent all of his time installing games and never actually played anything other than the intro video before moving on to the next game.

 

Doing so is OK!! The main thing is the process, not the result! :laugh:

[shumkar]

Did you use Lutris to install Vortex or another method? My Lutris Vortex issue is that if it cannot find something installed (which it was never able to do), then the app doesn't even launch to the point that you can configure it -- it just gave some kind of "missing game" warning and quit.

 

I have Vortex too, and it works well for SE and all of its mods. I installed it after SE and before all the mods, not using Lutris, not using Proton, but using a "standard" Wine, in a separate prefix. At the first launch I pointed to Vortex where my SE is located, and Vortex recognized it. When I was downloading Vortex, I chose the option "custom install location"; for make it work correctly I had to install corefonts and dotnet 4.6, in the same prefix, using winetricks.

 

Edited January 21, 2021 by shumkar