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@rat now you’re talking!
If there is a way to download game content without launching Steam for Windows at all, this will change a lot of things for the installers for games such as Quake 1/2/3, Doom 3 or Shadow Warrior, none of which use wine at all once the content has been fetched.
Really looking forward to see your solution
Okay, I’ve been fiddling with this and I’m onto something.
Here’s my method:
– Find the Steam ID of the game you want to install, for this example we’ll choose Quake with id 2310
– Copy any appmanifest_{appid}.acf in the SteamApps directory and name it appmanifest_2310.acf
– Edit the file and change the appID line on top, and the “installdir” line, you can put anything as installdir but keep in mind that the game will be installed in a matching directory in SteamApps/common/
– I also chose to edit “name” and “GameID” in the UserConfig section, not sure that’s needed.
– Close Steam if it’s running
– Open Steam with the following command:steam [url=steam://preload/2310]steam://preload/2310[/url]
– The game should download and then become available in SteamApps/common/{whatever you put as installdir}
Now this is cool and all, but it would be even better if Steam didn’t need to be restarted. Of course, this is a pain in the ass to do manually, but the good thing is that it’s fully scriptable.
THIS IS ONLY TO DOWNLOAD THE WINDOW FILES. NOT TO LAUNCH THE GAME IN STEAM FOR LINUX.
1. Open Steam for Linux
2. Right Click on whatever the Windows game you want to install is and click “Create Desktop Shortcut”
3. Go to your Desktop or Desktop folder in home folder.
4. Open the icon you created for your game in a text editor. Nano, vim, leafpad, gedit etc.
5. You will see a line that says “steam [url=steam://rungameid/226320]steam://rungameid/226320[/url]”. You will need the ID part at the end. (This is Marvel Heroes Free to play on Windows)
6. Go to your home folder ex.. /home/yourusername/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps folder.
7. If you have at least one game installed in Steam you should have a file called appmanifest_SOMENUMBER.acf. If there is more then one, anyone of them should work.
8. Open this file in a text editor.
9. Change the number for “appID” and “GameID” to the ID part you found in step 5.
10. Change “installdir” and “name” to the name of the game you are installing.
11. Do Save As… on the file and save it under the new name of appmanifest_IDFROMSTEP5.acf. So in my case the new name of the file would be appmanifest_226320.acf. Save the file in the same location as the other appmanifest files.
12. Close Steam for Linux completely and reopen it. Go to the Downloads section and your Windows game will be downloading.Picture below of before and after of the appmanifest file using the ID and name above.
Before:
After:
I tried to be as detailed as I could in the instructions. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
@strider: Nice man, you and I both found the same solution. Haven’t had any luck getting it to load the game without restarting steam either. Will keep at it.
We should write a simple script to do this, process:
1. create and open shortcut for game
2. create a script to extract appID from the “Exec” and the game Name and load into variables $appid and $name
3. then access a Template of “appmanifest_xxxxxx.acf” and rename to appmanifest_$appid.acf
4. modify all the appropriate text i.e. “appid”, “installdir”, “name” and “appinstalldir” using $appid and $name in the .acf file.
5. Save and move to .local/share/Steam/SteamApps
6. Restart steam clientWhat ya think?
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