The Sims Legacy Collection (3314060)

[Blayer98]

Compatibility Report

• Steam AppID of the game: 3314060

System Information

• Proton version: 9.0.4
• Device: Steam Deck 256GB LED

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-3314060.log

Symptoms

There appears to be a rare bug where switching to another application or the Nested Desktop while in Gaming Mode causes a crash with this popup below. I have not yet encountered this issue on Desktop Mode. There's also another bug where the EA logo video does not play as it is encoded with the AVI format. hence you see the second screenshot below. After this, the game appears to start in Desktop Mode minimized.

Reproduction

Regarding the game crash, Simply launch another application or launch the Nested Desktop application from Gaming Mode.

[Bitwolfies]

Installing WMP11 does resolve the FIXME, but the videos still do not play (even with additional codecs installed ) and the game wont proceed till you alt tab in and out.

[ninja-]

I managed to solve it - first by a heavy bruteforce of installing everything, then it took even longer to try to get a smallest working wineprefix.
I installed klite, then wmp11 and then - the most important part - changed system to Windows XP which directly fixes the blackscreen/alt+tab issue.

Don't start with changing the system as then klite/wmp11 won't install.
It's possible klite isn't needed, maybe I'll try from scratch later.

This knowledge should be used to add a new script to protonfixes repo.

It takes about ~4 seconds and then the EA logo movie appears.
Playing with gamescope recommended (on desktop) for stability, cursor works perfectly with my 4k 200% screen
(I am saying that because about 50% of games hit cursor speed or cursor size gamescope bugs at hidpi ;) where it works fine on Xwayland otherwise

[ninja-]

I double checked, without KLITE it will go back to blackscreen.

There are some log entries about built-in quartz, so maybe it can be improved at Wine level.
I tried external quartz.dll - latest quartz.dll = crash, quartz.dll 2010 - skips the movie and goes straight to loading screen.

So at the moment there's no known way to create a smaller working setup than klite+wmp11

proton.log

edit: installing "full" directshow which includes quartz.dll bypasses quartz problem, it seems. but then it errors out from gstreamer:

winegstreamer error: h264parse0: No valid frames found before end of stream
winegstreamer error: h264parse0: ../src-gstreamer/libs/gst/base/gstbaseparse.c(1423): gst_base_parse_sink_event_default (): /GstBin:bin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstH264Parse:h264parse0

I also tried using lavfilters. then gstreamer is not used, but only sound is playing and the video is black

Interestingly, the same crash is reproduced using gst-launch

LANG=C gst-launch-1.0 -v playbin uri=file://`pwd`/Sims2/TheSims1/Music/eag_br.avi

ERROR: from element /GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstH264Parse:h264parse0: No valid frames found before end of stream
/GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstMultiQueue:multiqueue0: max-size-bytes = 8388608
/GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstMultiQueue:multiqueue0: max-size-buffers = 5
Additional debug info:
../libs/gst/base/gstbaseparse.c(1423): gst_base_parse_sink_event_default (): /GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstH264Parse:h264parse0
ERROR: pipeline doesn't want to preroll.
/GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstMultiQueue:multiqueue0: max-size-time = 0
Setting pipeline to NULL ...
Freeing pipeline ...

I reencoded these files so gstreamer does not crash, but then the app does crash anyway with memory violation. It's hard to debug that deeper.