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[–] 106 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Yesterday I tried to mod persona 4 golden on Linux. After a couple hours of headaches and some help from the developer, I finally managed to fix the problem and launch persona aaaaand denuvo shut it down.

Denuvo literally shut down my legal version of P4G because I used one too many versions of proton. This is why I support fitgirl

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago

    Yeah, Denuvo registers every version of Proton as a different computer. So when you cycle through a bunch of different versions, Denuvo sees you booting it on a bunch of different computers back-to-back. IIRC Denuvo’s ToS allows for 5 different computers to boot a game within 24 hours. So it locks you out for 24h, as an anti-account-sharing measure. It has hit the spotlight a few times recently, because of the Steam Deck users needing to cycle through Proton versions.

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  • [–] 79 points 11 months ago (21 children)

    it's consistent, quick, and dependable. There's no reason to use anything else. I get the original purpose was for people in countries with slow internet connections but now everyone just uses it.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (19 children)

    It's harder to use on Linux, and lower-performance devices. I would prefer prefer having dumps of the pre-installed game folder to use on a steam deck, for example.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    I use it all the time on linux, what problems did you have?

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    What's your process for running the unpacker executable? Maybe it depends on the game, but I set up a wineprefix through Lutris and always seem to run into issues getting it to complete properly without any unpacking errors.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    For the setup:

    Final Edit: The wine prefix is the same for the games and the installer, just a windows subsystem that has all the dependencies.

    First I install the wine-cachyos package, create a WINEPREFIX variable for the folder i want to put the prefix in, then i run winecfg to start the prefix, then I install the dotnet packages and vcredist packages through (before, when the repos existed) these links for the vcredist and dotnet (maybe archive.org or somewhere else still have the executables), or using winetricks too, but these are nicer to use as they install everything in one go.

    Then I install the dxvk and vkd3d (you can install through lutris, so this is kinda useless hahaha).

    Then I run the fitgirl repack through lutris and click to install the vcredist or .net when asked.

    Then I just run the game with a runner or wine-cachyos.

    I'll update this with valid links when I find them.

    Edit: last time I used this and this, installing just the .net runtimes, not directx, java, silverlight, etc.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    winetricks should be able to install all of those dependencies, including versions of .net and vcredist. But it's a terminal script, so requires the environment variables that Wine uses for the paths and stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Yeah, remembered that wrong, thanks for the correction! Corrected it in my comment.

    winecfg can add drives too, I always put an U: to /home/username , that makes it easier to pick a better location to install the game files (in my case, to ~/Games). A lot of things can be tweaked with winetricks and winecfg hahaha.

    I think WINEPREFIX is all those tools need. Lutris can use that too (if i remember correctly).

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    I mainly had trouble on the steam deck, in the early days. Most people recommended unpacking on a windows PC and transferring the files back then. It might be easier now, but it is more trouble than a game dump.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    As someone trying to move to Linux this year, what issues are there? I've heard this before, but I never see an explanation on what makes it difficult.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

    Proton can handle the game files but not the installer. So you have to install in wine and it's a hassle. I install the games on my windows pc, zip them and then transfer them to my deck.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Since Fitgirl's installer just unpacks stuff, I just use the same prefix for all installers. Protontricks/wine lets you specify a path in the Z:/ drive as well (the linux base system), so no need to move stuff.

    I even made a dummy exe file that does nothing and added that as a non steam game that works as a catch-all prefix for whatever I need to run without adding it as a non steam game first.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Huh? I add the installer to steam, use proton and install. No problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I also have problems on Linux. I’ve tried a few different methods, but ultimately, they always end up seeming to freeze and make no further progress after a certain point.

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  • [–] 73 points 11 months ago (18 children)

    Folks here are like "everyone uses it. Eventually all gamers realize it's better"

    Me, having never even heard of this in my 30 years of gaming: 🫣

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    I mean, do you pirate games? If you've never gone to a torrent site in your life it's not surprising, but FitGirl's repacks are so numerous that it's hard not to notice them if you do pirate.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I used to torrent frequently, but rarely software.
    Since I graduated and started making adult money I haven't really at all. When I want to vote with my wallet, I just don't play it at all (usually these are live service games anyways).

    Although I'm going to start torrenting music and video again on principle.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (9 children)
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Huh, the site isn't opening for me at all, DNS_PROBE_ERROR or ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED on my browsers. I wonder if it's a country-wide block in Brazil? I saw some news yesterday on the police raiding pirate servers

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    the IP address is 103.224.182.241 if you want to try adding it to your hosts file to circumvent what appears to be a solely DNS-based block. or just change your DNS lookup server I guess.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Yaaarggh! Fuck you auto mod, I'm trying to be helpful. >:(

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Just FYI: Links to such sites are a liability for the instance operators.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Come sail the seas at dbzero where we dont give a fuck

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    Wouldn't they at most have to comply with a DMCA takedown request within a reasonable amount of time? At least that seems to be what major platforms do. Not actually sure what happens for smaller platforms and many lemmy instances are hosted and owned outside the US too.

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    [–] 32 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I used fit girl for a game I didn't know if my first pc build would run a game I wanted to buy. It didn't work, I upgraded my pc and tried it again and then it worked.

    I'm glad they are around now that I'm trying to learn about pc gaming.

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  • [+] 183 points 11 months ago* (45 children)
  • [–] 88 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    It's more likely that the devs are not being given the time or resources to do this kind of thing properly. Their bosses are too concerned with what will save money and generate shareholder value.

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  • [–] 71 points 11 months ago (14 children)

    I wouldn't really say that. The kind of extreme compression Fitgirl does comes with the tradeoff of really long decompression times. Depending on which games, nearly 45 minutes (with a 7800x3D)

    Some games lack compression but I would not want those long install times by default, if you have a speedy internet connection they usually take longer to install than to download. Don't get me wrong, for people with really slow internet those repacks are a godsend but they are not "better" on every aspect.

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  • [–] 41 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

    Steam gets around this problem by doing the decompressing on the fly as you download. Go check out your CPU usage next time you install a game.

    Edit: I think this is also why it defaults to not downloading while you game. Steam doesn't want you to have a bad experience from the decompression.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    More like check your hdd. Steam goes like this for me download, download, download, pause downloading to extract and smash my hdd, download, download, downloand.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah I think it ends up waiting for slower storage if your cpu or HDD are too slow. I experience that with slower sdcards on the Deck.

    But on a decent NVMe with a balanced CPU the download and disk are full bore and the CPU usage goes really high.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Ahh yeah this could be. My system isn't by any means crazy but it is modern. A tuned 5600x (draws about 115W at full load) and an nvme 3.0 ssd. I'm being bottlenecked by internet bandwidth at the moment.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Is this why steam is so insanely slow to download games.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    It will also use ALL your bandwidth by default. I can't even watch a yt video or anything while doing a steam download unless I limit the bandwidth in settings.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    What kind of router do you have? If it has any kind of "smart queue" or "smart qos" you could try enabling that and it will de-prioritize steam's packets (as needed) so that web browsing and voip still work.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Awesome thank you for the tip. I'm not too well versed in networking so I never really dig around in my router settings. I'm just using the Modem/router supplied by the ISP right now and it doesn't look like it has anything like that from a quick look through the config page.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    Ahh yeah the provided router might not have some of the more advanced features. But suffice to say this isn't so much a steam problem as it is a "how computer networks work" problem. The way routers work by default tends to penalize "bursty" traffic like loading websites/gaming/voice and prioritize sustained traffic like your download, so it's nice that valve provide the option to limit the bandwidth. I'm on satellite internet right now waiting for verizon to finish their fiber install and I can't even use that reliably because my bandwidth changes constantly D=

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  • [–] 26 points 11 months ago* (6 children)

    The thing about compression is you have to process it to decompress it. It may be benificial to people with limited bandwidth, or for peer-to-peer sharing, but it's probably better for most users for someone like Valve to share the uncompressed version. Bandwidth isn't the issue it used to be.

    It also makes progressive updates harder. The best you can do is compress each update individually, not the whole package.

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  • [+] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I don't know any that take a long time to unpack from developers. They do have to pre-compile shaders, but that's different. Maybe I just don't pay enough attention, or maybe it's just because I don't play many big budget games.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

    • to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
    • to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

    The download size difference of 7 GiB only costs me another 60-80s to download as long as the Steam servers are serving well. So funny enough the first option would be better for me.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    No it's making a choice. Faster decompress times. Considering a lot of their customers have fast speeds it doesn't really matter.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    The EA/Ubisoft/Rockstar servers are so shit and their games so large that it's actually near impossible to download their games on a slow internet connection, because they would just timeout after 3~4 hours.

    Downloading a cracked, compressed FitGirl repack over P2P and just ignoring the crack was unironically the only viable way to legally enjoy the games I had purchased back when I had slow internet.

    The repacks are windows .exes, yet even work flawlessly via wine. FitGirl truly GOATed.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of devs stopped giving a flying fuck to disk space and performance a long time ago. "32GB of RAM and 500GB of disk space? Don't mind if I do!" - for a pixel art 2D platformer

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    do an extremely bad job at basic tasks like compression

    I've installed one game from FitGirl so far. It took three hours to unpack while hammering all the cpu cores, failed, and required another three-hour go to install properly.

    So you're saying that all games should install like this?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 children)

    You're meant to check the CRCs before you extract to verify that you actually fully downloaded the file. Otherwise yes, people like myself will mock you online for this trivial anecdote

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Oh really? How come it installed fine the second time from the same file?

    It's well-known that installation of FitGirl's repacks can fail, and the recommendation is exactly that one don't touch the computer while it's going on, and retry again if it fails. Mock yourself for not knowing this, as this very thread contains more ‘anecdotes’ about the same.

    It's some kinda super wonky compression that gives extreme space savings but is so fragile that the result isn't guaranteed, which is precisely why it isn't widely used.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    it's well-known that ...

    alright

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Great rejoinder there. "I didn't research how stuff works, but I have an irrelevant rebuttal, and when people point out that it's not how stuff works, I will reply 'alright', that will really put them in their place."

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    (Sorry, I just wanted to come back and say my response wasn't very friendly or constructive but I think took issue with your (perceived) tone mostly.)

    I have had your issue once before in the past, but I genuinely don't think it is such a pain point that it's a frequent issue to prevent further use.

    I can imagine from a consumer point of view that there will always be faster way to pack data so that people can start playing instantly and leave the problem of storage to online game libraries. But from an archivist point of view I genuinely believe that the format she has chosen for those of us who want to replay a game every now and then and can suffer the hour long unpack is efficient for the storage/playing tradeoff

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago*

    don't think it is such a pain point that it's a frequent issue to prevent further use

    I don't have statistics, but:

    • I myself didn't do any research specifically on this matter, and only learned of these problems through osmosis by randomly reading various threads on Reddit's r/all

    • I installed one single game from a repack by FitGirl

    • my experience right away exactly mirrored that of which I've read previously

    I don't have problems with FitGirl using this compression, in fact I find it fascinating that such an algorithm exists. However, it obviously doesn't meet standards to which a commercial publisher or storefront are held.

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  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Piracy is the response when companies refuse to serve market needs.

    I mean, there will always be people trying to get something for free when they normally have no problem affording it or obtaining it personally. It’s why the Parasite Class continue to drive down wages while raising prices for that sweet labour-free profit margin, even though they already have obscene amounts of wealth. Their boundless greed demands they squeeze even more out of the Working Class whose labour is the source of all wealth.

    So yeah, there we’ll always be some people who will pirate purely for the fish.

    But in the end, any significant piracy is 100% the fault of those very companies that complain about it.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    I am in the process of moving to pc from ps. I wont buy the same games again, it doesnt make sense to me. Where it is cheap and easy I have done but I feel I bought the right to buy them and also I hate some of the features with logins and always on connections.

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago

    God bless Fitgirl

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Back in my day, we had RELOADED, Razor1911, DEViANCE! Haven't pirated games in forever though, I mostly buy "indies" today and steam + gog facilitate that nicely.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    I only pirate games that I wouldn't mind playing but also hate the publisher, or the publisher makes the games annoying to play despite steams easy UI and setup.

    Games from EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc I will pirate with no remorse and then place the launcher link in my steam library.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Wait fitgirl is actually a female? Been using those repacks for a very long time. A legend among the scene.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Yep, she was super happy when another girl came upon the scene, Empress. They collabed on a big release one time and I remember her saying "Girl power!", then not long after Empress had a big ego trip and falling out with the repackers.

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