I would like to quickly add, as I felt my symptoms section was not very helpful, after finally combing through the Proton logs myself, it is evident that the game creates a WS_EX_TRANSPARENT WS_EX_LAYERED WS_EX_NOACTIVATE window that is click-through, cannot receive focus, and uses layered rendering, so this aspect of the "Desktop Adjutant" seems to work as intended. The logs also show a call to NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20088,RGB(00,00,00),255,2) , indicating the game is configuring a layered window with full opacity, followed by several calls to fixme:dwmapi:DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea (0000000000020088, 000000000010F170) stub. In addition, the logs contain needs_offscreen_rendering hwnd 0x20088, surface 0x55558fb66e80, surface->alpha_mask 0, which I assume means it is attempting to render onto an alpha mask, which it may not have? I believe DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea is part of the Windows Desktop Window Manager API used for transparent/glass effects, so the repeated stub messages suggest this functionality has not yet been fully implemented, at the very least on Proton Experimental and other Proton versions such as GE-Proton, unsure whether it's implemented in the the latest and greatest Wine versions. Ah well, at least this appears to be an unsupported feature rather than a broken one.
Have you tried Proton Experimental Bleeding Edge?
Have you tried Proton Experimental Bleeding Edge?
Yes I have, it's actually what I have set as my default runner on Steam, (it should be the Proton version used in the logs attached above as well) and unfortunately results in a black screen where there should be transparency, identical to the image above, so it doesn't seem to have any implementation yet.
proton experimentalx4 2026-07
Compatibility Report
System Information
I confirm:
Symptoms
Upon opening the game and enabling the "Desktop Adjutant" feature (creates an onscreen sprite that notifies you about in-game events), it causes the screen to go black, with your sprite of choice appearing in the bottom left quadrant of the screen, and it can no longer be interacted with. When attempting to click anywhere on the screen, it minimises(? It clicks through and goes back to the desktop, no minimising animation. You would need to alt-tab to focus back onto the game, only for the same to repeat.) At this point, the game must be restarted to to exit this mode and become playable again.
I presume this is due to how applications that attempt to run on the desktop layer (e.g. Wallpaper Engine) on Windows cannot do the same on Linux due to how the two operating systems handle desktop compositing. Therefore, unsure how much can be done/fixed on Linux to achieve a similar result to that on Windows. At the very least, it would be nice to have it in a state where you can interact with it and the transparency works again, even if it just acts like a fullscreen application at the front (not running on the desktop layer).
Reproduction
steam-3887700.tar.gz
Proton log (compressed) attached, image below depicting the issue