It looks like some nice features have been added to Heroic Game Launcher for those Linux users that are interested :

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/11/heroic-games-launcher-v250-is-out-with-downloads-manager-app-sideloading/

I've been messing around with it, and it's awesome. It was already very convenient for GOG games and especially Epic games, with a lot of room for tinkering, and looked great - now it's even better. Game library looking very sweet, which is a first for me in Linux. Lutris is OK, but custom exes for imported games had icons missing or they were stretched or whatever. Just didn't look puurrrrtyyy.

And the ability to sideload anything in a gaming-optimised prefix? That's cool too. I got EA App to work (which is a small miracle) and through it, Dragon Age 2 as I am replaying the whole trilogy. I installed DAO with Lutris, but that's a bit clumsy due to the offline installers. I also couldn't get MangoHUD or vkBasalt working in Lutris.

Heroic Games Launcher might be the Lutris killer. And Bottles killer. Kill kill kill.

While I'm an edge case, and I've tinkered with Gamehub and Heroic, the one thing I like about Lutris is that it doesn't try to make a new wineprefix for every single game, because that's just not the kind of redundancy I'm into.

Separate prefixes seems safest in case one game were to override the libs of another as part of its install. It also makes uninstalling as easy as removing the prefix directory. But in many cases a prefix could be reused.

The thing I like about this version is that it seems you can just point it to executables. So you could setup a prefix, "manually" install as many games into it as you want, and then in HGL just point to the executable to run each game.

Sadly, Trying to set-up EA app in this just nukes my password for "suspicious account activity"

But Origin still works fine.

Very nice.
I would also highlight the data fetching from HowLongToBeat. Some won't care about this, but I think it's a really useful feature, it's very convenient to get an approximation of how much time you'll need to spend on a game. Now, it would be better to expand this and, for instance, add to the sorting options the possibility to sort by time.

Yeah, I find myself looking up times on that site pretty often.

Like I said, I'm an edge case. Most of my games are installed elsewhere and I point to them.

Another thing I noticed Heroic can't do: Dosbox.

Can it handle Wizardry 8? (Lutris fails to run this particular game, at least for me.)

Also, if you've already downloaded the installer from GOG, can you use it to install the game and have it be treated as a GOG game?

That might be true, not sure. But if Dosbox is not native, then can't you run the windows exe inside a Heroic wineprefix anyways? I feel like I'm missing something here :)

I don't know, but unlike Heroic, Lutris includes custom fixes and tweaks (mostly which DLLs to override and which components to install, based on community experimentation) so if it didn't work out-of-the-box with Lutris, it most likely will not work in Heroic given the same wine and dxvk version. Yet with either one, it is easy to configure everything to your liking, and with some troubleshooting you might get lucky. It's certainly easier than starting from scratch with a fresh wine prefix.

I'm not sure I understand your use-case here, but you could run the installer in your previously made Heroic wineprefix, and install the game wherever, then import that game into the Heroic game library and point it to your desired wine prefix (could be the same one, doesn't have to be).

How does this differ from using your system-wide wine to install from the offline installers, and then importing the game in Heroic? Probably not at all. Though, come to think of it, some redistributables might get nicely installed as a dependency with the first method, otherwise they would go into your default wine prefix and be wasted. Hm. Good point.

I find the good things about Heroic are

1. Nice looking game library
2. Extensive wine prefix configuration settings
3. Fast and easy installation of GOG and Epic games

Heroic bypasses the offline installers, which makes it fast and convenient for most users, but then again, you don't get the offline installers if that's what you want. To be fair, if you want those then lgogdownloader is superior to any method that gets singular games in wine prefix managers or linux game launchers.

Otherwise, it's pretty similar to Lutris or Bottles. Maybe even inferior.

My use-cases are

1. Using Heroic to conveniently download and run GOG and Epic games
2. Collect my installed games in a pretty gaming library.
3. Browse all of the pretty gaming library to decide what next to play

Lutris is thus the competitor for GOG Linux gaming with Heroic as it does these things too. But with Lutris you have the option to keep the offline installers. And there are fixes to get games working out-of-the-box. Tough choice.

Thing is:
* Wizardry 8 is functional (but not exactly performant) if I just install it manually and just run it from WINE.
* I can improve performance by changing the graphics settings (to use DirectX IIRC), though changing them does require using winetricks to add a DLL. (The DLL is only needed for the configuration program, not the game itself.)
* My understanding is that DXVK is used for modern or semi-modern DirectX versions, which Wizardry 8 does not use because of its age.

I don't have the game so I can't test this, but you should be able to get it running by

1. Using dgvoodoo2
2. Using winetricks to install
mfc40 vcrun6 d3dx9_36
3. Using wine-GE-xx (34 is the latest)

So dgvoodoo2 for any games older than DX9 (Wiz8 is DX7), which then get translated to DX11, after which DXVK does the heavy lifting to Vulkan. Lutris makes this super easy - you just flick the slider to ON for both dgvoodoo2 and DXVK in the wine prefix settings.

The DLLs come from the Lutris script, so use that (especially made for GOG version) or put it in to standalone Wine prefix. It seems the 3D Configuration tool might work with this, like you said - if not you will have to manually edit it.

Glorious-Eggrolls custom wine version should enable the videos to play, according to reports on ProtonDB. Use proton-up-qt to automate the download and installation process of them to Lutris, might as well grab the new DXVK 2.0 whilst you're at it.

If you just used Wine without DXVK, then that will definitely be much slower as it would use WINED3D that is still a work-in-progress and will probably never be as good as DXVK in performance (though it's at least compatible with other DX versions).

If not, then error logs should guide you to the culprit. There are plenty of succesful Wizardy 8 gamers over on ProtonDB, but that's STeam and PRoton and their own hacks and fixes built-in, and as you've made perfectly clear on several occassions, we hate Steam so we need to replicate that success outside of Proton.

Thing is, I *have* gotten the game to run without Lutris or any other launcher; it's when I throw Lutris into the mix that the game fails.

Also, why are you taking about Vuklan when the game was made before you even had programmable shaders in common use?

Dosbox is native, there's just no way to indicate the executable is going to be run via Dosbox.