protonscr

Velvet Assassin

protonopen appid 16720Game compatibility - Unofficial
ValveSoftware/Proton#5624 · opened 2022-02-26 by Mephistople · updated 2022-03-12 · 2 comments · github · game page · search this game
MMephistople 2022-02-26 github

Compatibility Report

  • Name of the game with compatibility issues: Velvet Assassin
  • Steam AppID of the game: 16720

System Information

  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Rev. A
  • Driver/LLVM version: 510.54
  • Kernel version: 5.16.7-1-MANJARO
  • System info
  • Proton version: Proton Experimental

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.
    steam-16720.log

Symptoms

Start the game, first thing that pops up is a launcher to configure settings.
When you hit play in the launcher, the game will try to start but will give an
critical error.
If you try to continue or ignore it, the game still wont start and the window stays inactive.

Critical Error

Reproduction

  1. Install game
  2. Launch game
  3. Configure settings in the launcher.
  4. Click on the play button in the launcher.
  5. The game will try to start, but will fail with an critical error.
MMephistople 2022-02-26 github

Okay, after some digging I found a fix.
Kudos to the some of the commenters over at ProtonDB, who found this method to fix it.

Since the game is from 2009, the game uses an older version of Nvidia PhysX. This version is not compatible with the one included in "Steamworks Shared/_CommonRedist".

To fix it, I had to reinstall the game.
Then I'd make sure that before I launched the game, I renamed the "PhysX" folder located in
this location "/home/username/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Steamworks Shared/_CommonRedist"

Then when I started the game, steam would use the Nvidia PhysX provided by the game, instead of the one included with steam.

Edit: Unfortunately this fix is more of a ban-aid, since it will only work as long as the folder is renamed.
As soon as you change the name back to "PhysX" the game will give the same critical error.
Not sure how feasible this is to fix, unless we specify some older games to use certain legacy version of PhysX under install.

Velvet Assassin gameplay

Mmsmafra 2022-03-12 github

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/5624#issuecomment-1052152414

Amazing! I check it out. I could never play this game even when I used to dual boot Windows for that purpose It never worked on Windows for me, nor on Proton.

Proton versions