besides wine, what do you need to run non-steam games?

From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.

dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might've just been stupid though)

for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2's Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

 

Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn't (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).

And what's great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you're good or you'll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.

 

One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you're using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDES.3DDLL_Overrides

for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" wine speed.exe

another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review

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Now here's a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it's mainly about tab completion).

If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.

Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.

 

Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won't work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe

 

Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren't supposed to include the amp; parts