A small update for those interested in keeping up with the news surrounding Steam Play and Proton development.
In September, we spoke to Linux game porter Ethan Lee where he went on to mention how he would like to officially work on Steam Play’s Proton. Not long after our article went up, he ended up speaking to Valve so things started moving pretty quickly. All was quiet, then, at the start of this month he wrote a post on Google+ to mention that he was working out some sort of contract to officially begin working on it.
Teasing on Twitter only a few days ago, Lee showed off RAGE running with FAudio and then last night he said this on Twitter:
Oh, by the way, for those wondering about my _official_ work, starting tomorrow I’m working on Proton in an official capacity, in partnership with CodeWeavers. Task #1 is FAudio integration!
What exactly is FAudio? In Ethan Lee’s own words:
FAudio is a new, accuracy-focused reimplementation of XAudio2 and its relative libraries (such as X3DAudio, XACT, and XAPO). Part of this work includes a COM wrapper that mimics the Windows XAudio2 DLLs, allowing Windows games to use FAudio for audio support instead.
At the moment Wine is reimplementing XAudio2 with OpenAL Soft, and the other libraries (including X3DAudio) are currently stubbed. In addition to the feature gaps, there are also various accuracy issues that come from wrapping a low-level audio API around a high-level API (as we found ourselves while making FNA, hence the creation of FAudio).
The idea is that FAudio would both fill in large gaps left by the current Wine implementation as well as make the existing implementation much more accurate, and in a perfect world, remove the need for the DX redist for audio support.
This should allow many more games to work properly in Steam Play, which is why it’s such an exciting project.