Ubuntu – Skyrim Special Edition voices not working, steam play, wine and xact, what is GOING ON

gamessoundsteamwine

So I am a total noob when it comes to Linux. I finally made the switch from Windows yesterday to the latest version of Ubuntu, and I'm really happy with it aside from the gaming problems, but there are just some things I don't understand.

I'm using steam play, which is called Proton I believe? I'm using it to play Skyrim Special Edition, but none of the voice audio is coming through. All the other audio is fine and the game runs totally fine too. I went through and did all the graphics drivers and stuff, took a long time for me to figure out how to get it all to work. Still trying to figure out how to get Steam to recognize my HTC Vive VR headset, but my first benchmark for a new computer is Skyrim, so getting that to work is what I'm focused on for now.

I tried doing some research into this, but I keep seeing stuff about Wine and xact 64-bit, and forcing stuff, and how Wine and Proton don't get along but you have to run them at the same time? I am really just not understanding what the heck is going on lmao. I don't even know if Wine came installed with Ubuntu or not, but I guess it must have if I'm able to play Skyrim at all? Maybe?

Assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Okay, i am so excited, because i searched for a long time and finally fixed this myself. Just a heads up, this might be incomplete.

To make this work, the proton "layer" requires access to some specific xaudio dll's, most notable the xaudio2_7 dll.

In here i'll condense my answer down to "what works" and try not to go to deep in to "why". First off because i would not call myself an "expert" in this topic and secondly because it is really messy and complicated. If someone want's to got in the deepend of this, feel free :)

How can you get this?

There are multiple layers to "what works" and you might find yourself satisfied earlier or later.

1

The most common fix appears to be, to install xact through winetricks (as for example discussed here, here and in many, many more parts all over the internet.

For that, you can run the following command:

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winetricks --force xact

This will (in the loostest terms possible) install the required xaudio dlls (and more) into the wine-layer used by proton.

Alternatively, you can also manually add the xaudio2_7 dll to you game, because where some crashes reported, which appears to be caused by installing the whole xact. For that run

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winecfg

and navigate to the "libraries" tab, enter "xaudio2_7", click add and you are done.

2

That didn't work? Okay, try to adjust the access level of the proton-layer. You can specify which parts the proton-layer should use, by doing the following:

run this command:

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winecfg

In the freshly opened window, navigate to the tab "libraries"

Select either *xaudio2_7 and/or xaudio2_7 and play with their access level from "Native" to "Native then Builtin". There have been multiple different positive results reported for all possible configurations.

Some even reported success with adjusting xaudio2_6 with that.

3

According to some other sources (like this issue on the proton github site itself), this does not always fix the issue.

I also found myself in this scenario. In this case, it appears that steam might override the wine access settings, which we set in 2.

This is a bit more tedious to "fix" but also can be done easily, by doing this:

Rightclick your game in the steam library.
Click on "Properties"
Add this to the "Lauchoptions" field WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" %command%

This explicitly overrides the access level of the xaudio2_7 to "Native then Builtin).

By the way: With this fix there can also finally be sound for Fallout 4 :)

Last straw

If everything else fails, try to do this (as reported here), though it should not be needed.

Download the latest FAudio build from https://github.com/Kron4ek/FAudio-Builds/releases, and untar. Then cd into the untared folder and run

WINEPREFIX=~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx bash wine_setup_faudio.sh

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have 2 new games to attend to, i previously could not play because there was no dialog/sound and hopefully you will soon too :)

Have a great day everyone!

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Error on executing Steam Play game via command-line (Proton)

Here's an experiment that may help you get the answer. For convenience, I'll refer to your default Steam library location as $STEAM (the default is ~/.local/share/Steam/). Proton is installed by default to $STEAM/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7, I'll call this $PROTON.

So, when I tried running The Witcher, Steam ran this command:

"$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader" "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine" "Z:\$STEAM\steamapps\common\The Witcher Enhanced Edition\System\witcher.exe"

Where $STEAM has backslashes instead of slashes, as it's a Windows path. In addition, it set something like 70 environment variables (related to Wine, Steam, various hardware/drivers, libraries, etc.). A single variable, WINESERVERSOCKET referred to the wine server started for this instance. If I omitted this variable and used all the rest, I could start the game from the command line.

Steps:

Replace $PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader with a wrapper script that saves the environment somewhere:

PROTON="$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.7" # adjust to your settings
mv "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader" "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader-orig"
printf "%s\n" '#! /bin/sh' 'env --null | grep -vz WINESERVERSOCKET > ~/env' > "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader"
printf 'exec %q "$@"\n' "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader-orig" >> "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader"
chmod +x "$PROTON/dist/bin/wine-preloader"

The script is essentially this:

#! /bin/sh
env --null | grep -vz WINESERVERSOCKET= > ~/env
printf "%s\0" "$0"-orig "$@" > ~/cmd
exec /home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 3.7/dist/bin/wine-preloader-orig "$@"

It saves the environment, except for WINESERVERSOCKET, in ~/env, the command to run and arguments in ~/cmd and runs the actual file with the arguments provided. It uses ASCII null characters to separate everything, since the actual environment variables may contain newlines.

Note that I save the command with -orig added for convenience.

Run the game from the Steam GUI. The wrapper script will create these files.
You can load the environment and run the command from these files. In bash
```
mapfile -d '' -t env < ~/env
mapfile -d '' -t cmd < ~/cmd
env "${env[@]}" "${cmd[@]}"
```
-d '' here tells bash the files use the ASCII null character as delimiter.

This much was sufficient for The Witcher to run for me. All of those environment variables probably won't be necessary. I leave it to you to test which aren't.

Of course, all of these might be completely unnecessary. Looking at Steam's command-line options, we have:

-applaunch <appID> [launch parameters]  Launches an Game or Application through Steam.

And when I ran:

steam -applaunch 20900 foo bar

the Wine command was:

"$PROTON/dist/bin/wine" "Z:\$STEAM\steamapps\common\The Witcher Enhanced Edition\System\witcher.exe" foo bar

So Steam did pass on foo and bar as arguments to the game. This might be all you need.

Best Answer

How can you get this?

1

2

3

Last straw

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Error on executing Steam Play game via command-line (Proton)

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