Populous: The Beginning
Additional notes and symptoms:
Main Menu/Coming Soon
Clicking "Coming Soon" shows a fullscreen copyright notice about Bullfrog/Dungeon Keeper/EA/PlayStation/etc. Then, one of two things randomly happens: 1) It shows a black screen but you hear music and stuff from other games, presumably it's audio from a promotional video. OR, 2) It simply stalls at a black screen and the game must be killed from Steam via the Stop button.
Between-screen freezes
Playing this more, sometimes instead of the game minimizing when it switches from one game mode/screen to another -- or from playing a full-motion video (which only randomly shows up properly, maybe 10% of the time, the 90% it just shows black screen while its audio plays) -- it will simply freeze at a black screen.
Examples of texture atlas bleeding on UI graphics and billboarded sprites
Particularly interesting is the appearance of popup windows.
You can see the graphics artifacts clearly in this screenshot.
However, SOMETIMES this window doesn't have any apparent texture glitches at all.
Just keep opening and closing it and you'll see how the artifacts are slightly different each time..
I gave this a try for the first time today, vanilla Proton 10.0-4. For a rather old Windows 9x based game (not even NT-based), it seems to work okay with Proton. I didn't observe any of the issues reported above. The main graphical issue I saw is some ghosting at the horizon between the world and the sky - annoying but didn't really interfere with game-play.
The biggest issue I noticed is the apparent inability to save any progress. The Steam synchronisation directory appears to be steamapps/common/Populous 3/save/, but the files therein don't get updated when saving in the game. I also made a thorough check of the contents of steamapps/compatdata/2616430/pfx/drive_c/ but couldn't find anything resembling save files there either.
Looking at the reports in https://www.protondb.com/app/2616430, it seems the most positive results might be with Proton 8? I didn't try for myself, though.
@Wedge009 the horizon glitching also happens to me on windows. As for save files, they appear to be working normally with proton 11 on my end.
I think it's related to display size. Initially, when I tried it on Win7 (via Win98 compatibility mode), it allowed me to go to 1600x1200. The graphical glitches occurred then too. But subsequently - not sure why - it only allows me to go to 800x600. At that size, the horizon displays okay.
I could get save file writing working in Proton 8 but not reading - and that's even after messing around with symbolic links to the compatdata directory. If it works in the Proton 11 beta, that's encouraging. So far I have only got working save file writing and reading on Windows.
Confirming file saving and reloading is working across sessions in Proton 11... but I'm still not sure where those files are going - it doesn't appear related to steamapps/common/Populous 3/save/.
Proton versions
proton 10.0-4x1 2026-05
Compatibility Report
System Information
I confirm:
Symptoms
Multiple symptoms encountered:
At the very beginning title menu screen, the full screen is mostly black, and then the game itself is drawn unscaled, thus only in the upper-left corner of the black screen.
When transitioning between certain screens, the game itself sometimes gets minimized to the taskbar, and the player must click on its taskbar button again on the desktop to bring the game back.
Once going past the first couple of screens and getting into the game, gameplay itself seems to be presented in fully-scaled fullscreen just fine (the planet selection screen is when the game starts to be fully drawn to the entire screen as expected). However, textures (edit: by this I mean UI textures and all billboarded sprites) are very grainy. Particularly, in many cases, icons and letters/numbers that are presumably drawn from texture atlases, show smears of pixels of their neighbors in the respective texture atlas. Changing between Bilinear filtering vs Nearest filtering in the DirectX options menu does not change this behavior.
I will continue playing this game some more and update this issue if there are any further mid-gameplay problems I encounter.
Addendum: there's also a "Populous: The Beginning - Undiscovered Worlds" launch option. This exhibits similar behavior with what is described in point number 1 and 2, but after passing the intro video, it never shows the main menu screen at all, so this, which I presume is an expansion pack or bonus mission for this game, is completely unplayable.
Reproduction
You will encounter everything mentioned above by just playing the game as intended.
Attached files
Proton debug log:
steam-2616430-populous_the_beginning_proton9.zip