Migrate/import existing Eve wine prefix to Lutris

EVE Technology and Research Center Linux
1

First off, the question: Is there a way to import an existing Eve Wine prefix (’.eve’ folder with separate ‘evelauncher’ folder), created with the system Wine version (5.0), into Lutris?

Disclaimer: I know this is a bold question. I probably could find an answer with enough research. My attempts so far have failed though and I don’t even expect to find answers to the more specific additional questions I have. I am exhausted. :worried:
I could probably reinstall eve through lutris and wipe the other eve installation, and it may prove to be the best option, but maybe there is an even more straightforward route. I don’t expect a tutorial but perhaps someone can point me in the right direction where I can find some information on this. I have found a guide over in the lutris forums for installing a game by hand but I could extract little useful information for importing an already installed game.

Currently I cannot play eve at all (ever since I updated the mesa drivers I suffer from this issue, which should be resolved by installing DXVK). However, someone mentioned that Wine 5.0 apparently does not support dxvk, so I’d first have to update Wine anyway. For reasons of flexibility in the future I would thus like to switch to Lutris right away, so I can make changes to the .eve prefix more easily and let Lutris handle the headache.

Why I’m asking this: I would still consider myself a linux rookie (switched with the end-of-service for Win7), although I know my way around the console enough to be dangerous (which is exactly the point. I don’t want to murder my system by messing around with things I only half understand). Also I’m not entirely clear how the concept of wine prefixes works and how versioning comes into this (i.e. what it takes to ‘upgrade’ a wine prefix from 5.0 to another version). Looking at how steam’s proton handles things, it looks like the prefix isn’t necessarily altered (much) when paired with a different version, but I don’t want to toy around with the eve prefix to test things out.
Assuming one can somehow integrate an existing prefix into wine, there are thus still a number of points I am unsure about. Most prominently:

  1. can the prefix be integrated and executed with a different wine version cleanly (i.e. does WIne/Lutris duplicate any significant file structures when executing a game with a different version, or is it more or less plug and play for ‘prefix’ + ‘wine’)? Is there any ‘maintenance’ or ‘cleanup’ to be considered, either in the file structure or my system packages?
  2. how would I integrate the ‘evelauncher’ folder in Lutris. I’d assume under ‘working directory’ but am very unsure about this
  3. what executable would I give Lutris. The evelauncher.sh is obviously needed to update the game but the actual eve.exe is in the wine prefix

I thank everyone who has read this far. Any assistance is much appreciated.

Best regards,
Laxyr

2

I’ll keep it short.

This is most likely your best option. Note that you can copy your shared cache (game files) over.

3

instead, I advise to set it to a shared directory, typically $HOME/.cache/eve . To do that you need to winecfg and ensure the directory is accessible (eg set V: to it) and a good idea is to enable hidden directory.

Also if you want to share the configurations, then you can make a symbolic link from the wineprefix to a folder in your .settings for example

export EVEPREFIX=$HOME/wineprefix/eve
mv $EVEPREFIX/drive_c/users/$USER/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data $HOME/.settings/eve/Application\ Data
ln -s $HOME/.settings/eve/Application\ Data $EVEPREFIX/drive_c/users/$USER/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data

just copy the second line for a different prefix and both your installation will share the same settings, eg

export EVEPREFIX=$HOME/Games/eve-online
ln -s $HOME/.settings/eve/Application\ Data $EVEPREFIX/drive_c/users/$USER/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data

(it will complain the directory already exist, bu rather safe then sorry ; once it complained and you’re ok, add the --force at the end)

4

Thank you both very much for your advice. I reinstalled using Lutris - making sure not to update to the latest launcher version. However, it will probably be a while until I roam around the stars again…

It does not start with dxvk, giving me the following error:

“Required Vulkan extension VK_KHR_surface not supported
terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘dxvk::DxvkError’
Monitored process exited.”

I’m only adding this in case someone here has come across a similar error. Several hours of googling so far have yielded nothing that seems applicable to my case. The hardware does support vulkan. I have 32bit and 64bit loader libraries installed but something is clearly not working/misconfigured/missing

Launching Eve without dxvk works as well as it did before, i.e. with black screen.

I’ll continue searching and will post here if I find anything.

EDIT: after long studying and reading some guides I concluded that my issue is probably caused by me not having the 32 bit vulkan drivers installed. Hence I did:

*apt-get install mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 *

to get them and now it launches. I still have to migrate settings and such but eve launches. I’m on a debian based linux with an AMD GPU so this will not be the right package for everybody but the idea could be the same.

5

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.