itch.io

All right, thanks for the info and have a nice day!

I see. I didn’t know that OpenH264 couldn’t be bundled, although I guess in hindsight it makes sense so that Cisco can keep track of how much they need to pay in royalties.

By the way, is the Discord server the right place to report bugs/issues with the game? I have experienced the game crashing/closing unexpectedly when not in focus, but it’s very infrequent and seemingly completely random, so I haven’t encountered it on the few times that I’ve had the game running in the terminal as opposed to the itch.io client. If the server is the right place to go regarding this, I’ll join once I have at least some idea as to what’s going on.

Hi, and thanks for the info! I knew that AV1 was heavier on the CPU, but I wasn’t aware that VP9 was too, not to mention not being able to easily include videos in multiple codecs :/

So, this is probably gonna sound a bit silly, but video playback just started working flawlessly with full hardware acceleration once I switched from Wine’s built-in DirectX(/Direct3D?) 11 implementation to DXVK — it’s even using functionality called VideoEnhance in intel_gpu_top, which I’ve only ever seen one other application do and which I still don’t fully understand — so this ended up being a bit of a wild goose chase in the end. Between that and the only seemingly relevant information that I could find online being H.264-encoded videos not working in Steam games due to Steam likely not wanting to risk stepping on any patent owners’ toes, that is not enabling H.264 on Linux by default and instead opting for a mixture of reencoding videos on their servers and whitelisting specific games (and Media Foundation apparently not being supported/implemented in past versions of Wine), I apologise for the confusion 😅

By the way, I’ve only played through the first fifteen chapters thus far — yes, I skipped over a few video scenes without even realising that they were video scenes and thought that Wine or the game was acting up — but this has been the most beautiful and immersive visual novel I’ve played on itch thus far, so, to you and the rest of the team, thank you so much for creating this amazing game and I wish you all the best!

Edit: So, I just had a thought: Instead of the built-in DirectX 11 implementation being faulty, it could be that it just defaulted to my NVIDIA dGPU instead of my Intel iGPU, which would nicely explain why video playback returned nothing when it was decoding the video on the iGPU. Now, generally, OpenGL applications default to the iGPU on my laptop — yes, it did seem to fall back to OpenGL rendering according to the terminal output, and no, I didn’t check which GPU was in use — but, seeing as Vulkan applications manage to always default to the dGPU unless I force the iGPU, I could imagine Wine’s DirectX 11 implementation following suit in spite of using OpenGL in the end.

Before somebody asks: “Why didn’t you install DXVK right away‽”, well… I did, but MinGW64 being kinda fragile and me being kinda liberal with compiler flags on my installation of Gentoo led to any and all games crashing immediately upon trying to open any sort of window because of faulty stack smashing protection getting tripped. You can see the DXVK issue ticket here, but, in short, removing -fstack-protector-strong from my global CFLAGS (which I actually did a while ago but just didn’t rebuild MinGW64 in the meantime), adding -fno-stack-protector and removing -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 for MinGW64 specifically for good measure, and rebuilding DXVK fixed the issue for me.

Proton works as well and is probably the more practical approach. I don’t know about other distros, but it’s available as app-emulation/wine-proton in the main Gentoo repository at the very least.

Edit: Err, actually video playback doesn’t work (which I only noticed now); the last image shown/loaded just remains on screen until all videos have been skipped and the next bit of dialogue with its corresponding image is reached, at which point gameplay resumes normally. Looks like either switching to Proton-GE! or cloning Media Framework DLLs from a Windows installation might fix this, but I have yet to try either.

If the developers ever see this comment, it would be nice if the videos could be reencoded as VP8, VP9, or AV1: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ve0kjw/a_developer_is_asking_what_codecs_are_supported/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/videoplayer-videos-do-not-play-on-steamdeck.1387941/

Edit two: So, when running OoT.exe from the terminal, the Wine standard output seems to indicate that this isn’t an issue with the Media Foundation, but with DirectX Media Object libraries being missing, specifically msdmo.dll. Winetricks does have a dsdmo verb, but it seems to only install the 32-bit version of the libraries: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/issues/660

Edit three: So… After experimenting with a clean Wine prefix, it appears to me that at least some of the information regarding Wine and Media Foundation is outdated and that a lot more Windows libraries have been implemented in Wine since the default prefix was first initialised on my laptop, as both mfplat.dll and msdmo.dll are present now with Wine (Proton) 9 — there is output from mfplat itself in the terminal now and there are no errors regarding msdmo.dll — and the Intel VA-API driver is being called by GStreamer, which means not only is video playback working, but it’s working with hardware acceleration! Well, it would at least if it weren’t for the following GStreamer error right after initialising the VA-API driver:

0:00:01.483014858 834788 0x7a83fc0010b0 ERROR             audio-info audio-info.c:302:gst_audio_info_from_caps: no rate property given

Now, either the video’s audio is being screwy in some way or my GStreamer installation is being screwy, but at least the video codec can be ruled out as causing any issues, at least outside of Steam (and there sadly isn’t much information out there about Proton when used outside of the Steam client specifically).

(Hopefully) final edit: Read my response to Nikolay’s response. Tl;dr: Everything works just fine after switching to DXVK in spite of that GStreamer error (and one more error about a surface being detached or something).

Same. I’m on Linux in case that matters.

Edit

When I click on the “Download Now” button on the game page from within the launcher and then click on “Download” for the Linux ZIP, I get the following error:

While queuing download: TypeError: Cannot read property 'build' of undefined

The description says that the game crashes on Firefox, but it didn’t crash once when playing on Firefox Nightly (116.0a1 (2023-06-22) as of the time of writing) on Gentoo Linux; I’ve successfully played through all of the stages and unlocked the entire gallery just now. The only thing that did happen was everything but the animated background disappearing from the iframe once, possibly related to me having scrolled down the page a fair bit, but a simple page refresh did the trick.

Awesome work and I wish the devs a great day!

Heads up: On Linux, the game fails to launch if the sandbox is enabled in the itch app settings.

In case this is an issue on the game’s end, here’s the relevant snippet of the event log:

Exit code 0x1 (1) for (PaperLilyDemo.x86_64)
Had error:
→ Standard error ================
 Error mkdir: util.c:836 create_empty_dir_as_root: Permission denied
====================================
→ Standard output: empty
Relaying launch failure

Edit

Also, trying to load the save state from the end of Project Kat, the one with Lacie that mentions chapter one, seems to just soft-lock the game; the loading screen never goes away, even with no disk activity in sight. I’ll probably send an email later if this comment isn’t noticed in the next couple of days or so.