So this has been annoying for a while but got REALLY bothersome while I was debugging Armored Core 6 crashing on the first real boss fight (the answer is Proton 7.06, by the way).
It seems like it is a crapshoot as to whether steam borks itself while installing directx or any other redistributables. Resulting in some games working and others just hanging. And if it breaks, I need to clear the download cache and try again. And every time there is a new proton version it triggers a rebuild and now a different set of games work and don’t work.
From brief experimentation, it looks like not letting steam compile shaders in the background helps with this. But… I would rather restart steam every other day than wait 40 minutes to play Warframe.
So are there any tips to prevent Steam from being like a kitten tangled up in a ball of yarn? Ubuntu 22.04 with Steam installed via apt install steam if it makes a significant difference. I know people are really big on flatpaks right now but avoided that due to issues with like the two native linux games that still exist in Steam (mostly joking).
Weird. Each compatibility game should be running on their own proton prefix, each prefix is independent and changes to one game environment should never affect other games. Soldier configures it all automatically. I’ve never had to clear “downloads cache?” I wouldn’t even know where that is. How did you debug the issue, did you try protontricks? It makes directX and other common tinkering options simple.
Also, 40 minutes to compile shaders, even if it’s just once on first run, sounds sus. I’ve never had a game take longer that maybe 5. Maybe there’s something else in your system interfering? Do you happen to have Nvidia, by chance?
This ☝️. Every game has its own “container” of Proton and redistributables. My guess is that you have an odd install of Steam. I’d ditch what you have and migrate over to the Flatpak install.
Its a fairly common issue that crops up when you google the symptoms. Ended up doing a logging run and figured out it was hanging in (I forget the official term but the stage where steam installs dependencies into the prefix). And the way to reset that is to clear the download cache in Settings/Downloads.
And yeah, nvidia. But the Warframe shaders are apparently a pretty well known issue. No idea why, but I do know DE are a lot closer to old school iD these days in that a lot of people there enjoy doing fun graphics/engine stuff. Just amuses me that Warframe will take 40 minutes after an update/new proton version whereas Hitman is like 40 seconds.