Getting started with Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition
Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition was on sale since last weekend, and today I fell for it.
Before purchasing the game, I checked all recent Proton reports for Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition, because one does not simply run Windows games on Linux. At least, not always without a little tinkering.
Launch flags
Among all the recent recommendations, this one worked for me:
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 RADV_TEX_ANISO=16 PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 gamemoderun %command%
Adding __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 caused the game to get
stuck in the splash screen, so I had to remove that.
Update (2025-01-05)
At this point more recent Proton reports suggest that it i best to stick with Proton 7.0-6. This does seem to help, although at this point the difference is only that the game crashes right after character selection rather than not starting.
The same crash happens also with Proton version 6 and GE 8.16. With the latter the crash also left the mouse cursor of the game active and no other application reacted to (or received) click events, at least for several seconds. After the crash it is still necessary to ask Steam to stop the game, or even exit Steam.
Proton Experimental, Hotfix and verion 9 had the same crash.
Install physx
Although I'm not sure it helped, I did try installing NVidia's Physx library:
The installation seems to have been made only for the default
WINEPREFIX in $HOME while the game uses the one in
$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx so
the correct command would be
Update (2025-01-05)
This worked out of the box in Ubuntu Studio 22.04, but later in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 it failed with this error:
$ WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx winetricks physx
Executing cd /usr/bin
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warning: Unknown file arch of /usr/bin/wine.
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Searching around for that error did not lead anywhere useful,
but poking around did: /usr/bin/wine essentially symlinks to
/usr/bin/wine-stable which is just a shell script to decide
whether to launch /usr/lib/wine/wine or /usr/lib/wine/wine64
but only the latter is installed so this can be bypassed with
the WINE variable pointing directly to the binary:
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx winetricks physx
$ WINE=/usr/lib/wine/wine64 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx winetricks physx
Executing cd /usr/bin
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warning: You are using a 64-bit WINEPREFIX. Note that many verbs only install 32-bit versions of packages. If you encounter problems, please retest in a clean 32-bit WINEPREFIX before reporting a bug.
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warning: You apppear to be using Wine's new wow64 mode. Note that this is EXPERIMENTAL and not yet fully supported. If reporting an issue, be sure to mention this.
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Using winetricks 20240105 - sha256sum: 17da748ce874adb2ee9fed79d2550c0c58e57d5969cc779a8779301350625c55 with wine-9.0 (Ubuntu 9.0~repack-4build3) and WINEARCH=win64
Executing w_do_call physx
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warning: You are using a 64-bit WINEPREFIX. Note that many verbs only install 32-bit versions of packages. If you encounter problems, please retest in a clean 32-bit WINEPREFIX before reporting a bug.
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warning: You apppear to be using Wine's new wow64 mode. Note that this is EXPERIMENTAL and not yet fully supported. If reporting an issue, be sure to mention this.
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Executing load_physx
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warning: /home/ponder/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx/dosdevices/c:/Program Files (x86)/NVIDIA Corporation/PhysX/Engine/86C5F4F22ECD/APEX_Particles_x64.dll is not a regular file, not checking sha256sum
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Executing cd /home/ponder/.cache/winetricks/physx
Downloading https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/9.21.0713/PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe to /home/ponder/.cache/winetricks/physx
--2025-01-05 23:25:47-- https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/9.21.0713/PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe
Resolving us.download.nvidia.com (us.download.nvidia.com)... 192.229.221.58, 2606:2800:233:ef6:15dd:1ece:1d50:1e1
Connecting to us.download.nvidia.com (us.download.nvidia.com)|192.229.221.58|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 27152680 (26M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe’
PhysX_9.21.0713_Sys 100%[=================>] 25.89M 55.4MB/s in 0.5s
2025-01-05 23:25:48 (55.4 MB/s) - ‘PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe’ saved [27152680/27152680]
Executing cd /home/ponder
Executing cd /home/ponder/.cache/winetricks/physx
Executing /usr/lib/wine/wine64 PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe
0238:err:environ:init_peb starting L"Y:\\physx\\PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe" in experimental wow64 mode
wine: failed to load L"\\??\\C:\\windows\\syswow64\\ntdll.dll" error c0000135
Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specif
ied file.
ShellExecuteEx failed: Internal error.
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warning: Note: command /usr/lib/wine/wine64 PhysX_9.21.0713_SystemSoftware.exe returned status 1. Aborting.
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Avoid broken launcher
Also, as reported by thehoagie,
The game tries to use a launcher. Bypass it because it doesn't work. Change the line in this xml file:
$ vi "${HOME}/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Dragon Age Ultimate Edition/data/DAOriginsLauncher.xml"
and change line 247 from
to
With that, the game finally launches. There is a pop-up dialog about DLCs needing to be activated, which is one of those things that EA has broken by not maintaining things working.
Years ago there was an option in Steam to obtain the "CD keys", but it appears that option is no longer feasible and there is no clear workaround that will work in 2023, except getting the games from GOG:
- What does the "Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition DLC CD Key" do?
- How to get all the DLC
- Downloadable content (Origins)
Update (2025-01-11)
In the off-chance that this game might have worked better with the Steam from snap, tried installing it again and tried all the above on it.
To install physx the snap version of the plx directory was
$HOME/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/47810/pfx
and the game was installed under
$HOME/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Dragon Age Ultimate Edition.
Despite all the tweaks above and trying all versions of Proton 7.0-6 and newer, the game would not even show the launcher at all, so that's even worse than the recent update with non-snap Steam.