• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds Saga
• Steam AppID of the game: 356500

System Information

• GPU: GTX 750 Ti
• Driver/LLVM version: nvidia 396.54
• Kernel version: 4.15
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/FederalRecall/cd98b62cde3ae0ebdb11fbc8909a1559
• Proton version: 3.7-6-Beta

I confirm:

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

Symptoms

I clicked on Play on steam it only states Running and then blinks and then dumps back to the desktop with no game window opening and nothing happens.

Reproduction

Activate the following on Steam Play:

• Enable Steam Play for All Titles
• Use this tool instead of Game-specific selections from steam
• Change selection from Compatibility Tool to Proton Beta
• Download the game and then click Play and let it install necessary files like DirectX etc. then actual crash happens after finishing final setup.

I remembered that this game has a launcher in which you can select which of the games to launch. This launcher crashes immediately. I think this might be similar to Age of Empires 2 HD where it is also unable to launch the launcher.

In the game folder there is an folder named /game/ which contains the executables. 'player.exe' for the launcher, 'Battlegrounds.exe' for the original game and 'battlegrounds_x1.exe' for the Clone Campaigns.

Renaming one of those 2 to player.exe will result in a hanging black screen. I tried deleting the intro movies as I thought that might be an issue, but it keeps hanging.

This 2018-APR howto says that the WineCfg 'Emulate a virtual desktop' setting is needed to start the game in Wine:

I am unsure how that setting can be replicated in Proton (which is a close Wine fork, I believe), just thought I would mention it, maybe helps solving it under proton.

Look a bit around and the 'Emulate a virtual desktop' can be enabled on Proton using the following terminal command:

WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx/ winecfg

For the resolution, I've kept the defaults.

This still won't boot the game. As mentioned earlier, rename 'player.exe' to something else and rename 'Battlegrounds.exe' (or 'battlegrounds_x1.exe' for the expansion) to 'player.exe'.

Doing that will boot the game. The menu has some graphical issues and for some reason I couldn't scroll upwards (had to use the arrow keys).

I played through the first mission of OOM-9's campaign and it seems to work okay.

[edit]
Basically the top part of the emulated desktop is unusable, and it does depend on the selected resolution both in-game and for the emulated desktop to how much is usable.

Have anyone testing earlier had working intro video? With 4.2-3 launcher seems to be 'working' (at least partially).

Anyway, decided to test it using 4.2-3 and game closed immediately - log contained an error about 'vidc IV50' codec missing. I installed iv5setup.exe from here (during installation unselect everything not related to 5.0 codec - especially browser plugins) and game the started, but intro was rendered in a tiny window. Then I ran protontricks 356500 winecfg and enabled virtual desktop. After that game starts (in window - weird); window needs to be moved to the left side of the screen, otherwise menu options won't be reachable with cursor.