Interesting. Firstly, thanks for letting me know how it works on a steam deck! I don't have access to one so I've not been able to test it (although I'd love to at some point). The local server thing should be fine without a network, at least it is on a regular Windows machine, so I can only assume it's a quirk of proton. There's a version of the game built with manjaro linux available to download (which valve recommend for steam deck development) - does that run at all? I'll definitely be making an effort in the future to make sure the game is fully steam deck compatible so I'll take your feedback into account. Thanks! 😁
Unfortunately not under the normal circumstances. Presumably, Valve's kang of Arch is missing one (or all) of the three dependencies (not sure how well the whole OS would fare without freetype though). I attempted to use the Steam Linux Runtime to no avail (it may require more work to run just any old Linux title).
The game provide the general "Failed to connect to local server" error. I may dig in with Protontricks and see what can be done to get around it in the meantime. I could also probably explore compiling the game in a Flatpak or AppImage, which Valve primarily recommends for running software in desktop mode
Shame. I'd be interested to know if steam deck supports installing packages from pacman (I *really* need to get my hands on one 😅) - although from what I hear it's generally easier to use use proton than it is to get native versions running... The game itself should dump some log files to your user directory if there's an error, although I have no idea where that would be under proton, presumably /home/user/.local/share/ but maybe not if proton handles this differently. If you have access to a keyboard you can also open an in-game console with F1 which ought to have some error messages printed to it. Thanks for all the feedback though, it's most appreciated! I've looked at flatpak in the past but my brain was unable to comprehend the packing process - if you can shed any light on that I (and all the linux users) would be eternally grateful!
Yeah, so to access most of the higher Arch features, you have to unlock the immutable filesystem Valve's put in place, then initialize and populate pacman-keys. Then you can pacman -Sy to get the repos updated. But you've heard right, running Windows software is only 2 steps more with Proton. You still can add the direct EXE to Steam (I have VGA Golf on my SD card), then you make sure you've enabled Steam Play for unsupported titles, and then you can choose a Proton version to run the game in.
With regards to running it in Proton, after enabling Hidden Files, the path of /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/########/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Trederia/ got me to the config files, no logs in sight.
I tried again with running the Linux build, in terminal, it states "./vga_golf: error while loading shared libraries: libBulletDynamics.so.3.24: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" which is in /libs/
Yeah, reading the Flatpak guide makes my head spin a little. Alongside the software (or a .sh file representing the script), you need a runtime which will act as the environment, and then your deps are "bundled" as needed, depending on what your software would demand. The guide for AppImage is a lot easier, it seems you can use CMake as normal, change a few options e.g., rename to AppDir, explicitly define CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr, and then use linuxdeploy to wrap it up into an AppImage. It may just work with the release you have. I'll power on my desktop and try it.
EDIT: My desktop runs Linux Mint and the highest version of libbullet right now in Ubuntu repos is 3.06, so I would have to compile 3.24 to even think of running VGA Golf. This is before even packaging it into an AppImage.
OK So I guess for now I'll stick with trying to get the windows version working with proton. It could be as simple as using 127.0.0.1 internally as the loopback address instead of 255.255.255.255, which is currently hard coded, so I'll try once I get set up. I'll have to see about installing proton on my desktop (although I'm by no means a linux expert, so adventures ahoy!) 😅 Thanks for digging out the user path, I had a feeling proton was going to do something like that when emulating the user dir of a windows system, so that's useful to know.
I did modify the rpath of the linux bin to point to the included lib folder, specifically because libraries like bullet are so varied between distros, but the fact that arch/ubuntu-debian are so different that it doesn't work doesn't surprise me all that much. It's a shame that linux distros are just so fragmented - it puts me off spending more time with the platform.
AppImage looks promising, especially if I can hook it up to the cmake script. I've still got a big chunk of work to do to get the next update to VGA Golf done, but after that I shall definitely be looking into this more. Oh, and you didn't hear it here, but there may be a chance of the game coming to steam in the future 😉 Potentially this could make things a little simpler when running on steam deck, if only because it'll be ported to Valve's networking libraries.
Thanks again for the help and feedback, it's really appreciated!