Steam Deck Discussion

This method works great!

Except one important thing with the OLED steam decks...because the steam deck starts up Aurora before it goes into the game (hence starting from the desktop), the game doesn't detect that the screen is an HDR screen so it doesn't let you use HDR, which is a real bummer.

I wonder if there's a way to get around this? Like being able to delay the start of the trainer by a few seconds (if that indeed is the issue). I did try running the game in borderless windowed and it didn't help anything. Is there a way aurora without launching another game, so it lingers in the background (and we can use the mobile app)?

I dont have an oled steam deck to test but on Steam tinker menu under custom command where you select Aurora executable you have an option "wait for custom command" where you can put a delay.

Have you tried changing that from 0 to 5 (seconds or when its milliseconds to 5000) ?

Unfortunately, it seems to delay the start of the game, rather than the start of aurora. Though a lot of the time it only started the trainer.

That did make it so Aurora was running but the game wasn’t, so I tried running another game so as to switch back and forth between aurora and the game (I.e. it stopped hogwarts legacy from loading, so I ran spider-man and window switched back to hogwarts…which successfully switched to aurora in desktop). This *did* let me run spider-man in HDR with aurora going (because it thought it was hogwarts the game), which means the steam deck is okay with switching in and out of HDR content. Sadly though, the trainer couldn’t see that spider-man was running and didn’t work.

It just seems to me that if steam deck starts a game it takes the parameters of the screen at the time the game client begins…and if the “game” starts from aurora in the ‘desktop’ it doesn’t sense the full capabilities of the display. It’s like in windows 11; if you have HDR turned off, start a game, and then turn HDR on, it won’t work in-game because the game client didn’t know your display could run HDR at the startup of the client because those weren’t the established limits of the display at the time…you have to turn on hdr in windows first before running the game. Same concept?

That sounds like a real bummer. I believe the creator of Steam Tinker Launch was on reddit, I'm going to look into it and if he is on there reach out and see if there is a way to delay the loading of the secondary app. But, I think of all the times I've launched STL Aurora always ran first because it's less memory consuming. Either way I'll look into it this week and see if I can find anything, unfortunately, I don't own an OLED SD so this will just be done on my OG.

I can easily add a way to delay the appearance of the window of Aurora. I just don't know if its enough or if that will work. Ideally Steamlinker would have a delay command which delays the start of the custom tool. In the meantime Steamtinker would continue launching the game.

I believe Aurora wouldn't be the first tool where this would be necessary. Imagine any kind of tool which injects stuff like overlays. These would require the game to run first.

Does anyone know if you can use these trainers with Ubisoft connect or know a way to use the trainers??

The FAQ Link has you covered, it's the last part. It mentions Epic games but works with any launcher. It's lazily written so if you need clarification on something let me know.

Edit: I realized I never updated my Epic games method. Make sure you do this one.
"Then there's another method that will let you run any game launcher(I would hope.) But it requires you to launch a chain of launchers... which could affect performance and cause more crashes. For example, to play a game like Breakpoint from Ubisoft you would launch Aurora.exe from steam then use Aurora to launch the ubisoft launcher then launch the game. And this whole process is necessary so Aurora can detect the game.

I don't have this written down so I will summarize the method and go off memory.

You will need to download nonsteamlauncher, which you can google the github. Use it to download and install whatever launcher you want. I would relaunch nonsteamlauncher to copy the path of the exe then exit. On steam, you will need to add Aurora.exe as a nonsteam game. Launch Aurora, go to a trainer like Breakpoint, paste the copied path of the launcher, you will need to add the correct letter assignment to the front of the path(e.g. f:/, c:/,z:/, etc). Launch the launcher get that all set up with the games. Then launch the game from there."

Also on page 61, I reply to someone regarding Epic games
"Ok gotcha, I'm new to linux just like you so dealing with flatpacks is a no for me. I can only give advice on what has worked for me. If you download that app on the github i posted it should get you the epic game store you need. it even tells you the path of where the folder is saved, you would then just follow the path find the launcher.exe then right click and hit copy location. paste that into "game path" add c:/, z:/, or whatever variable its located on. When Epic store opens you will see you have no games installed, go to where your game is installed and change the name of the folder, mine was Epic so I renamed it Epic2. Go back to your epic store and start an install and make a folder in the same location your game folder is and name it whatever it was called (eg. Epic), pause the download. delete your new created game folder, then rename your old folder (Epic2) back to Epic. I dont remember if you need to relaunch the epic store or not but you should be able to resume the download and it should tell you something about verifying your game files. Thats done and every game should be added once you try to install them."

[Edited by Jaz10, 11/22/2023 4:12:55 PM]

Use Bottles (Flatpak) for non-Steam launchers, and then install the "Wine Mono" dependency (Which includes the Windows dependencies for trainers to work).

Add the Aurora.exe to the Bottle and then make sure Bottles has permission to access the file path where Aurora is (I'd recommend Flatseal for that (Also a Flatpak)).

You should just be able to run Aurora and then a game (Or launcher) just like you do on Windows.



[Edited by Cogrock, 11/22/2023 4:06:49 PM]

[Edited by Cogrock, 11/22/2023 4:07:14 PM]