I’ve just started using Lutris recently, I’ve been using Playonlinux for years now, and the UI is fine for supported software but I can’t figure out how to install anything unsupported. Is there a tutorial for this somewhere? Or… maybe someone could point me to some menu item that I missed?
All I see is the “Add Game…” option, but that’s clearly intended for adding games to Lutris which are already installed. Except that’s also what the “Import Games…” option is for, so I just don’t know.
I thought I might download an install script for a different game and just modify it a little, but I don’t see any way to import or run a script. Menu options are really very limited.
I can’t test it right now, but what I always did was: I installed a game with wine (if you have wine installed, just right click on the installer and launch it with wine) and then you can actually add the game with the “manually add game” button. You should see something called “path”. Here you have to set the path to the exe file that starts your game. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any videos that might help you.
Hm. Well, if I have to set up the prefix myself and try to get the installer to run that way then I guess I can still use Playonlinux to take care of that for me. That’s assuming that I can get the installer to run… I’m really doing this because Lutris offers some compatibility options that Playonlinux doesn’t, so if I can’t get it to work in Playonlinux then I try it in Lutris.
To answer your question: most recently I was trying to install 1Quest (the DRM-free itch.io version), but there have been others.
I don’t know about 1Quest, but most installers worked for me without having to setup anything in wine. I only installed wine, installed the game or program and tada. Good luck btw!
Q4Wine is rather helpful for managing Wine prefixes for manually installed games (as well as games/apps within them), and most Wine compatibility options/DLLs can be set up using Winetricks (although I found that for sake of compatibility it’s better to run it with the desired wineprefix exported in WINEPREFIX… I do it with a custom run script, usually). Most popular dependencies seem to be mfc*/vcrun*, with runner-ups being d3dx*, dotnet*, xna*, quartz and physx. And there was a few games which only seemed to work when I enabled ddr=gdi (default is ddr=opengl).
Another thing is, if you’re able to figure out how Lutris install scripts work, you can add the game on your own and write the Lutris install script for it here (you can use it by disabling draft filter, or within the editor after it was saved). Others won’t see it until a moderator approves, but I’ve heard the option to add draft install scripts is available immediately to the game page creator.
I’ve done it a few times for a few games that didn’t have an install script for the platform on which I owned them, and found them approved by a moderator a few days later (even though I didn’t send them for moderation), so you probably only need to care about the installer working out for you.
Well Q4Wine is pretty decent, thanks for that suggestion.
I’m a little disappointed that it would require such a hack to use your own install script or to install a game which Lutris doesn’t support, but at least it can be done.
Not sure what you mean by that… I don’t think that adding an already installed game into Lutris can be considered a hack, and creating install scripts of your own is how new games/installers are added to the site. Regardless of the way it’s done, someone has to figure out what settings/libraries are needed to make the game work with Wine before others can use an install script that automates this setup.
If you’re talking about installer script then I see no reason why it wouldn’t (so long as it’s valid). If you’re talking about the game installer itself… Well, if you can’t get it to run and have no clue how to deal with it, I suppose you’ll have to wait until someone else figures it out.