protonscr

Distant Worlds: Universe

protonopen appid 261470Game compatibility - Unofficial.NET
ValveSoftware/Proton#3152 · opened 2019-10-15 by heregoesmarcel · updated 2026-04-29 · 4 comments · github · game page · search this game
Hheregoesmarcel 2019-10-15 github

Compatibility Report

  • Name of the game with compatibility issues: Distant Worlds: Universe
  • Steam AppID of the game: 261470

System Information

  • GPU: GTX 970
  • Driver/LLVM version: nvidia 430.40-6
  • Kernel version: 5.2
  • Link to full system information report as Gist:
  • Proton version: 4.11-7

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.

Symptoms

Initial launcher window won't start the game when clicking on the play button.

Game also won't run if the DistantWorlds.exe is renamed into autorun.exe.

Reproduction

  1. Start the Game
  2. Click on the launch button

steam-261470.log

Mmadewokherd 2019-10-16 github

Looks like a Mono bug: [00000045:] EXCEPTION handling: System.Runtime.InteropServices.MarshalDirectiveException: [MarshalAs] attribute required to marshal arrays to managed code.

Hheregoesmarcel 2019-12-04 github

In addition to the issues mentioned above, this game also lists Internet Explorer and the Windows Media Player as dependencies and is therefore another reason for #449.

BBananasGoMoo 2025-10-03 github

is there any update to this? still doesnt work on my end.

MMagelon-png 2026-04-29 github

This should work with Proton 11 assuming Steam does the following when installing the game:

  • Install the following winetricks software dotnet35sp1 dotnet40 gdiplus wmp9 ie8
  • Install the Direct X executable provided in the Common redistribuable from the game
  • Include and install the Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable

This should allow the game to at least run. However there are still two issues with the game:

  1. The game requires wmp11 to play music but the wine implementation is likely not complete as the game will become impossible to launch due to a unhandled exception when the game calls the wmp dlls
  2. There is an issue where the game randomly crashes with an oom error. There isn't really any pattern with it so it's hard to say what causes it.

Nothing extracted yet.