Gentoo esteam script to install game deps w/o Steam runtime

[Chewi]

Hello! My name is Chewi. You may remember me from such threads as Minecraft (ebuild to build deps from source!).

I now have a better excuse for not having worked on the Minecraft stuff lately. I've been working on a new script to complement or potentially even replace the steam-games-meta ebuild found in steam-overlay. This script is much more dynamic as it doesn't require support to be added for each and every game. This greatly increases the chances of things working without the Ubuntu-based Steam runtime installed. If you're a typical Gentoo user like me then you probably don't like the idea of relying on prebuilt binaries from other distros!

The pull request has not been merged yet as I'd like to get some feedback from users first so please give it a try here. Please ensure you have the Steam packages installed with the steamruntime USE flag explicitly disabled.

[Holysword]

I wonder why no replies.

Are you still working on this?

Will this work if I install it with steamruntime flag enabled, but call "STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam"?

My main problem now is the lack of support for GCC5+ from STEAM_RUNTIME (or maybe I'm just missing something).

[Chewi]

I still consider it active though I haven't been able to spend as much time on it as I'd like. For most of the time since I released it, I have been frustrated by the VAC situation. Portal 2 and GRID Autosport were just two examples of popular games that are VAC-enabled but wouldn't work properly without unbundling. I sought advice from Valve but as expected, they never replied. I even tried to go through Michael Larabel of Phoronix as he has connections and was quite annoyed when he didn't reply. I think they've since stopped bundling libstdc++.so.6 with Portal 2 now but no doubt there are plenty of other games that are affected. I could risk it and try unbundling anyway but VAC bans are permanent and although I don't play online much, I do have a large library. VAC bans can also take affect a very long time afterwards and it is constantly evolving so I would never know for sure that it is safe.

And yes, you can run it with the steamruntime flag enabled.

[Holysword]

I still consider it active though I haven't been able to spend as much time on it as I'd like. For most of the time since I released it, I have been frustrated by the VAC situation. Portal 2 and GRID Autosport were just two examples of popular games that are VAC-enabled but wouldn't work properly without unbundling. I sought advice from Valve but as expected, they never replied. I even tried to go through Michael Larabel of Phoronix as he has connections and was quite annoyed when he didn't reply. I think they've since stopped bundling libstdc++.so.6 with Portal 2 now but no doubt there are plenty of other games that are affected. I could risk it and try unbundling anyway but VAC bans are permanent and although I don't play online much, I do have a large library. VAC bans can also take affect a very long time afterwards and it is constantly evolving so I would never know for sure that it is safe.

And yes, you can run it with the steamruntime flag enabled.

To be fair, I wasn't aware of the problem with VAC-protected.

I find the whole lack of interest for Linux gaming quite disappointing. I thought that Steam was going to help out, but apparently they also lost a large deal of their interest. SteamOS seem to be dead too?

They are still shipping libstdc++.so in their ubuntu12_32 binaries, is there any particular reason why it should be bundled together with Portal 2?

[Chewi]

To be fair, I wasn't aware of the problem with VAC-protected.

To be clear, it may not even be a real problem, the issue is the uncertainty.

I find the whole lack of interest for Linux gaming quite disappointing. I thought that Steam was going to help out, but apparently they also lost a large deal of their interest. SteamOS seem to be dead too?

I've not been following SteamOS. Things do seem to have lost momentum a bit but games are still being ported and work continues in certain areas, particularly VR.

They are still shipping libstdc++.so in their ubuntu12_32 binaries, is there any particular reason why it should be bundled together with Portal 2?

It's not known why they did that and evidently they didn't need to as they've now removed it. It was affecting many people, not just Gentoo users.

[zlg]

Just dropping by to say "thanks". games-util/esteam has made Steam bearable on Gentoo! I've been using it ever since you (or someone else) told me about it.

Unfortunately a few of my games don't work correctly (Torchlight 2, Risk of Rain, Borderlands: The PreSequel), but those are known to have issues on Linux. Without esteam I would've depcleaned Steam a while ago.

[azp]

Thank you for creating esteam! I've been using it since it came out. Recently I have an issue with Mad Max though, I get Sigsev 11 when starting the game. Something I did not get a year ago, and I'm not sure when the problem started, since my computer has been unused since April last year. After starting up the computer and running an emerge -uDvatN world and change to the 17.1 profile, the issue was there.

[Chewi]

You're welcome.

I don't have Mad Max. It's similar to Tomb Raider 2013 but I've finished and uninstalled that. What I did find with Shadow of the Tomb Raider is that trying to unbundle libcurl.so.4 causes it to crash on startup. Maybe the same is happening here? Unfortunately I wasn't able to find out why and you may need other dependent libraries that Gentoo doesn't have. Please let me know if this helps.

In future, please file issues on the steam-overlay GitHub project as they're better tracked there.