Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar (650670)

[robotjunkyard]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar
• Steam AppID of the game: 650670

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
• Video driver version: 535.154.05
• Kernel version: 6.2.0-37-generic
• Link to full system information report as Gist: N/A
• Proton version: 8.0-5 (for as long as Proton has been around, actually)

I confirm:

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

Proton Log:
steam-650670.log

Symptoms

This is a very old issue with running this game under Proton. It's happened with this game ever since Proton was first implemented in Steam many years ago, and even occurred in regular Wine before Steam even had Proton. I guess I should've reported this sooner.

What happens is that something very funky happens with the mouse cursor -- once you get to the main menu, move your mouse normally, and you will see the cursor reflect those movements in what seems like 0.01x time. Swipe the mouse left and right a couple times, and witness the lag on the mouse cursor which gets progressively worse, even to the point where you can swirl the mouse in a circular motion and, only over 30 seconds up to a minute (or more) later, see the cursor actually make that circular pattern (very, very slowly).

It renders the game completely unplayable in Proton.

Reproduction

Described already under Symptoms; just run the game and try to navigate the main menu with the mouse as you normally would in any game, and you'll experience it.

[robotjunkyard]

Tried this again. The mouse problem still happens with the newest "Proton Hotfix" as well as "Proton 10.0-3" (edit: and, yes, "Proton Experimental" too)

[robotjunkyard]

This MIGHT not be a mouse error but perhaps actually related to the music subsystem, for two reasons:

1. I booted into Windows to play it, and MIDI music plays during the main menu, a detail I'd forgotten about with this game. The music is not playing at all in that menu when running it in Proton

2. The attached steam-650670.log file has a bunch of spam for errors pertaining to music playback. Could the extreme mouse-pointer lag just be secondary visual feedback of this issue?

In the game's Discussion forum, some people have noticed this as far back as 2018 and seem to have fixed it in WINE (but for some reason the same fix didn't work in Proton), in this thread : https://steamcommunity.com/app/650670/discussions/0/1744480966997983204/

In that thread, user "Adoru" said:

How have you managed to run it?! I've installed directmusic, and now the game just freezes with static sounds.

After installing directmusic, dmsynth, and gmdls it works in WINE flawlessly, with sound and music. No mouselag either. However intalling these into SteamPlay prefix doesn't help.

[robotjunkyard]

Tried this per Arsonium's post in that aforementioned linked Steam Community thread:

WINEPREFIX="<insert path to steam>/steamapps/compatdata/650670/pfx" winetricks dmsynth gmdls directmusic

This unfortunately did not work. But... it DID work when I set up a custom Lutris launcher+prefix for Grimoire, and then ran that exact same command pointing to the Lutris-based Grimoire prefix. So in Lutris I am 100% able to now play Grimoire in Linux, without mouse lag, and the music also plays mostly fine (slightly choppy but nothing egregiously bad).

Is there a reason that winetricks command to install those missing system libraries would fix the problem with a Lutris-based WINE prefix, but not with a Steam/Proton-based WINE prefix?