Non-steam game on Bottles crashes when I uninstalled steam?

Hi all,

I have a really weird issue. I’ve been playing “Horizon Zero Dawn” on Bottles with wine-GE. It was working fine. At one point, it stopped working and started crashing after initial loading screen, without any detail in the pop up message. I tried to reset everything but the problem kept occurring.

I reinstalled steam and then the game immediately starts working again, even though it uses Bottles, not steam. Then I remembered that I uninstalled steam shortly before the game stopped working.

Why would this be happening? Anyway to make it work without having steam installed?

I use gentoo Linux with bspwm. I also have Hyprland installed but don’t use it for gaming. I have an nvidia 3060 Ti and the nvidia drivers installed. I have bottles installed through flatpak.

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

Is your Steam installed via Flatpak? If your Steam is Flatpak’d then it might be pulling in some extra Flatpak dependencies (e.g. Nvidia drivers) that Bottles could be using. If it’s not installed by Flatpak then I’m puzzled, because Bottles shouldn’t be using the base system for anything.

At the very least I would try uninstalling and reinstalling Steam to confirm that it is indeed what is causing it to stop/start working, and also to check if any other dependencies are coming and going alongside Steam.

cyclohexane,

It works even if steam is installed through my system package manager rather than flatpak, which I find even more puzzling.

I suppose steam is installing something alongside it that bottles is using. Can’t figure out what it is.

luthis,

Recreate the crash and check the logs. Bottles should be writing logs, as well as the OS.

My guess is that Steam installs some extra dependencies which are also used by Bottles.

I’m not a Gentoo expert in the slightest, so I can’t really comment on how to find out what extras your package manager installs.

cyclohexane,

I checked the logs by running bottles from terminal (is that what you meant?)

I didn’t see anything out or the ordinary.

I mentioned gentoo but I think it shouldn’t matter as I installed bottles using flatpak, so I assume it should have everything it needs. But gentoo does install a very minimal base OS.

luthis,

Hmm… have a read, there might be something to help you here:

docs.usebottles.com/utilities/logs-and-debugger

rotopenguin,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

Most games sold on steam do a “does your account really own this” check. There is a “goldberg emulator” that I’ve heard deals with that, haven’t tried it myself.

cyclohexane,

I don’t think this should have to do with it, as I run the game outside of steam in bottles. I am running a GOG copy.

rotopenguin,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

Quite a few drm-free game builds still come with “steamapi.dll”. It’s supposed to be neutered, but maybe it still saw dregs of your steam install and tried talking to steam anyways? It might just need a “steam_appid.txt” file (with just the appid # inside) to nicely ask it to back off. Or the game might go merrily along with removing the steam dlls.

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