Steam Deck: Non-Steam Game Launcher Script - A Useful But Flawed Tool

hi everyone Shane R Monroe here if you use the non-steam launcher script you probably already know that it's very very cool to be able to install multiple digital lockers simply and easily without a lot of work the problem is this script has a lot of issues it leaves behind a lot of stuff and you're not learning anything by using it which means if something goes wrong you're sort of out of luck in this video I'm going to show you how to use the tool but I'm also going to teach you about The Good The Bad and The Ugly stick around [Music] hi everybody Shane R Monroe here and today we're going to talk about non-steam launchers a script that's gaining a lot in popularity because it takes away a lot of the effort for installing non-steam digital lockers but there are some caveats if you go looking for this thing you might find this one first that's not the one we're looking for we're looking for the one from moreroy this is the correct non-steam launchers that we're looking for so let's go ahead and grab that from GitHub nice big download button you can't miss it and when you download it make sure you save it to the desktop as a DOT desktop file if you don't it's not going to work so save it to the desktop dot desktop some browsers will mangle the extension just make sure that you got it down correctly now I've already downloaded it no need to download it again let's go ahead and run the application pretty Bare Bones but a lot of stuff going on here as you can see from the list a lot of the popular lockers God Galaxy Ubisoft connect Battlenet EA app all of those things are here along with a whole bunch of what look like websites these are to make shortcuts to popular things like Netflix Hulu Game Pass all that stuff but it requires Chrome I do not have Chrome I'm not going to use Chrome so we're not going to show you how any of that stuff works we are instead going to be looking at the lockers Now by default all of the lockers will get shoved into one proton prefix that's good and that's bad we'll talk more about it later there is an option here though to separate the app IDs so that each of the lockers installs in their own prefix there are advantages to that we're going to talk about that later but let's go ahead for now and do the single prefix non-steam launcher install so we're going to grab a handful of the popular ones got Galaxy you play which by the way is Ubisoft connect not you play big difference battling net EA app um Rockstar launcher that's probably enough to get us started here and then you're going to click ok reminder these are all going to go into the same prefix this asks you if you want to put any other custom websites in here don't hit cancel if you don't want anything hit okay I've already let the author know we spent a lot of time together me and the author talking about this app so anyway some of these installs as they go are going to be mostly unattended like this God Galaxy web launcher this is there's there's a front end to see as it's installing but you're not going to actually have to do anything all of this varies drastically by launching you're going to see more of that if we go to the compat data folder we do indeed that there's a compaton data item or a proton prefix that says non-steam launchers and it was made just now so that's where all of the launches are going to be installed inside a single proton prefix again a lot of people like that they only want one because it saves space on the other hand it removes a lot of Versatility to be able to augment each one of those launchers or lockers with something special if they were being stored separately I'm a big separation guy I don't want everything stuffed into the same place I want some uh fluidity and I want some I want some option with the tools that I'm using you can see now that it's installing Ubisoft connect and you don't really see anything it's just kind of going so you have to watch that install window to make sure there's actually something going on that's good I mean I like the idea that most of this stuff is silent now Battlenet on the other hand no way to get around that there are going to be some visual indicators of the installation so as you can see it looks a lot like you downloaded it installed it yourself as an on Steam game that's it's doing the whole bit but again you'll notice that there's only one compat data folder and right now we have no Shader cache folder so there's some interesting stuff that we're going to show off later on with this um that you'll understand why there's some there's some defects in the script and the author knows all about it like I said he and I have spent a lot of time together this last week prior to this video trying to get some of the Kinks out and I've been helping him test and submitting bug reports but this is where the state of the tool is today all right so Battlenet takes his own sweet time installing but again I want you guys to see what this looks like I realized I could cut this down or trim some of these things out but I want you guys to see how long it takes and what it looks like at least once when we do this on a single Locker or a one Locker per prefix we will not be spending all this time here we'll speed it up but I want you to see the length of time and what you expect to see now when these lockers are installing you'll have an opportunity to log in you can do so you'll notice for now I am not doing so just to get through the video I could log into each one individually as these things come up now Rockstar like you have to go through the whole thing so something to note it's not uh fully unattended right so you are if you would like the script to continue you will have to um get involved here there are a lot of things running in the background but you'll notice Rockstar is just kind of sitting here so we do have to go through all of the standard installation type things so not 100 unattended okay so now it's going to close Steam down because it can't add anything to steam with steam running and it's going to inject all of those digital lockers into steam for you very handy now what it won't do is it won't take them back out of steam for you this is a known issue the author knows about this so while it will helpfully insert them it will not take them out and we're going to show you how to take them out safely and cleanly later but as you can see they're all here sometimes though the Rockstar launcher gets tucked away under the games or under some other category so you actually have to go search for it um anyway but it's there you can see that it's here um actually if I can click on it we'd be in good shape all right so they're all here they all got inserted but do they run well obviously the script wouldn't be all that popular if they didn't run but again we're going to go back to compat data now look here compat data now this English version of non-steam launchers is a Sim link that actually goes to a properly named non-steam folder ID if you were to drill in here and drill in here this is the exact same folder this is a human readable version right it points to that folder and there's the folder so if you were to uninstall any of these launchers or lockers from Steam it will not uninstall properly so we'll show more about that later but I wanted you to see that there's two folders now created by the end of the process one of them is human readable the other one is necessary to keep Steam on the up and up why would we care we want to go into proton tricks a lot of times you need to install something with proton tricks none of them are here none of the digital lockers we installed are here that means you can't inject stuff easily now the author understands that this is a thing and it will repair once you have run one of these digital lockers for the first time so let's test that out I know I could have run Rockstar Games but battle that's very popular right now because in Diablo 4 so we're going to run that one so when we run it you'll notice another folder is created a zero items folder which is basically a faked out proton prefix folder that's something else that won't disappear later on you're gonna have to clean it by yourself so here's Battlenet it's running now the question is did proton tricks does proton tricks now show this Locker uh yeah yeah we only know that uh we know that Battlenet dies from time to time but there's nothing in there it's it's sort of a placeholder shell thing and it will not clean up on its own and this can be confusing there's a lot of things that if you understand how the back end of this stuff works yeah you'll uh you'll be confused as to why some of these choices were made but you can see here that they all do go to the non-steam apps compact data non-steam launcher folder right you can see that it's all launching from there but that number that fake folder has to be there if you ever want to see proton tricks work now we run proton tricks well that's not bad on it that's God Galaxy well God Galaxy was the first item on the list that we chose so that's what it creates that is the shared digital Locker folder so it says God Galaxy but it's all of them right you installed them all in the same place so EA app is in there everything's in there so we can prove this out again we run EA app it creates Another Empty fake folder which is fine there's nothing in it it's not taking up space just adding to the confusion and muck of proton in general and uh we're not again we're not going to sign in or anything we're just going to kind of wait for it to come up and then I'm going to close it and we're going to see if we get another entry in proton tricks you you probably figured out we're not going to but it's worth covering just so you guys understand we do get that extra folder there's nothing in it right prove it all out and uh yeah so they work right I mean I think that's the game plan for most people they work but proton tricks is a huge thing now you'll see here that again we still only have one that's the shared proton prefix for all of them if you inject something into that all of them have access to it which could be a positive thing but at the same time it doesn't keep things very tidy if for some reason in the future you would like to have separate uh installs mods all sorts listen there's a whole bunch of reasons why shoving these all into a single prefix is not the best thing to do it's convenient it saves space which I know a lot of people are cognizant of but I'm telling you this this gets very confusing it gets very confusing but again they all work another trip to proton tricks and again we just have the single same one which again expected but if you're looking for God Galaxy up there that's the only one you're going to see if you're looking for uh you play or uh Ubisoft connect rather or whatever you're never going to see it inside a proton Trace because it's all one shared deal for your sanity's sake I would recommend not using a single folder to store all of these but we're going to run through these so you can actually see that they do work yeah thing Ubisoft connect works now this does not gain any advantage or utility right this tool does not make these work offline this tool does not um offer any sort of extras in terms of what you're seeing it's the same as if you installed it yourself but if you install it yourself you would know what's going on a lot of people who use this script don't know what's going on and by nature of the things that are amiss with this script they're going to be confused they can make mistakes which could cost them data later all right so there is an uninstall so let's say that you just wanted to uninstall one of these from that shared prefix you can't the thing is is you can't honest it won't work from Steam so you have to return to the script you have to return to the script and select the ones you want to remove now there's something down here called Fresh Start and Fresh Start aims to put your system back the way it was prior to clicking the install here's the thing anything that's inside that proton prefix any games you've installed settings saves anything gone you click that it's all over you lost them all but all of those folders that were created the zero item fake proton prefixes are still here it didn't clean them up at all so those are left behind on your system for you to be confused about what the hell's in there or what it was for to begin with um it also doesn't take them out of steam and I think that's one of the more confusing things so I did a fresh start which means that all of my stuff is gone all of the tools that actually do the work are gone but all of the entries are still stuck inside of steam and I have to go in and clean each one of those out by myself now we can go ahead these zero item folders are not real proton prefixes they're fakes right we can actually go ahead and delete these completely safely so we'll go ahead and delete these guys I always forget how multiple select works in the dolphin file manager I I am not a dolphin file manager fan I'm going to be straight with you um I'm not a huge fan and again we have to delete all these ourselves right we have to go in and clean these up they're gone if I were to hit play on one of those right now they're dead along with everything that was installed and configured within there right Fresh Start sounds great use with caution all right let's get rid of these three zero item folders make it go bye-bye and uh there there's nothing in there so they're safe but they can just lend us some confusion now one by one take off everything out of Battlenet uh here EA app remove all of this stuff from Steam yourself because it doesn't work anyway and if you were to try to delete one of these it wouldn't delete anything all it would do is re if you were to delete these before the fresh start or uninstalling them with the script all you would do is lose connectivity from Steam to that particular Locker all of the files and everything else for that Locker remain inside that folder so again order of operations means something here and understanding what's going on is very very important and again I know non-steam launchers designed to make sure you don't have to know anything but you need to know stuff to make this work all right so I'm going to go ahead and we're going to do the same set of installs again this time we're going to use separate app IDs so we're going to hit OK and it's going to go ahead and install all of these in their own app IDs again don't hit cancel hit okay no no cancel there you go all right now you're going to see something slightly different as each one of these install you will see a brand new English friendly folder created the items put into it it gets renamed into a proper proton prefix number and then Sim linked that's what it's supposed to do and you'll see in a minute that it does it for some but it doesn't do it for all which again adds even more crazy confusion to people who understand how this back-end stuff's supposed to work but we're going to clip a lot of this stuff out because we've already done these installs we'll only stop when it's interesting okay so everything is completed and it is uh injecting everything into steam now all of a sudden you'll see that you play launcher or the Ubisoft connect becomes a Sim link and it links to a folder all on its own which is sort of what we expected that's what we saw using non-steam launcher as a single proton prefix but that's not how it worked for everything else this can be confusing and can cause some interesting uh interesting issues later on all right so if we go into our steam Library we can confirm that each one of these is indeed installed and I assure you they all work as usual the monkey business that's going on behind the scenes is sort of the problem let's take a look at proton tricks shall we as expected none of them are accessible with proton tricks so what we're hoping for is when we launch each one that it will make that available now looky here though you play launcher has its own Sim link and its own folder right we just ran Battlenet and Battlenet does not is no longer Sim linked or it never got simlink to begin with so actually Battlenet in the Battlenet launcher is actually inside the Battlenet launcher folder not inside the weird proton prefix folder that originally should have been created so this is a glitch right got Galaxy launcher got one you play launcher got one Battlenet didn't get one so what gives now it doesn't affect the way that it works so a lot of people like I don't care but you would care if you had to use proton tricks to get in there you'll see that EA app created it's fake proton prefix number but Battlenet did not there's a glitch in there there's a glitch in the code the the author knows all about it um and again it doesn't stop it from working but what it does stop you from doing is if you don't get one of those fake numbers proton tricks will not allow you to mess with it Oh see now we've got one for Battlenet what happened where did that come from it's not sim linked but it made it anyway okay so the can you can see where the confusion can get crazy here right so Battlenet did get one made for it but it never made the Sim link hmm interesting confusing but interesting so it looks like we will be able to inject into Battlenet God Galaxy and Ubisoft connect through proton tricks so that does appear to be working okay but the inconsistency of how these folders are made can be very very confusing especially if you're trying to keep your ship nice and tidy and you're concerned about free space everybody knows that compat data and Shader caches where all your other none more secret free space uh turns up getting sucked down from so not having a coherent methodology of referencing all of these could be problematic for those in again in the know so once again we got our fake proton prefix for Rockstar but we didn't we didn't get a sim link for it we just have yet a folder that actually has the stuff in it but not sim link to the actual proton prefix folder that was created it's very it's very confusing here folks uh the way that this is done the author believes that there is some Python Programming issues involved here he's looking at it and you may even see hot fixes before this video is even released but it is important to note that um well it looks great from the front what's going on in the back side is sometimes anybody's guess again more important to most people is that they work and that they can get proton tricks to inject things into them I will tell you that I believe that this tool was made more for a single proton prefix than to use individual proton prefixes or he probably would have tested it more so um as a single proton prefix you lose some functionality in terms of being able to segregate everything and keep everything clean but you do gain some space so as you can see here we went through each one of these we're checking it out some of them are making the fake folder some of them are not in Shader caches we are getting Shader caches with the fake proton prefix number which is good the question is will they clean up as part of the process I can tell you right now that the non-steam launchers tool will not clean up the Shader caches hopefully the Shader caches will get cleaned up when you uninstall them from Steam we're gonna find out for sure how that works shortly and in some cases some of these prefixes didn't get a shaders cache folder that's a problem I don't know how that's going to react right so we have this but there's no corresponding folder for it so is are there is there not going to be a Shader cache for that one if not what's that going to do to gain performance if there's no place to write the Shader caches then a large Ubisoft game some big open world game may not be able to build shaders that could be bad so let's talk about removing these things right so if I remove these launchers or these lockers myself right I'm going to delete them all you'll see that um it appears to be removing the Shader cache folders this is kind of what we were looking to prove out one way or the other so we're going to remove them all and we'll see what happens here now remember we're not actually deleting any of these all we're doing is removing the steam link to them they're all still there all those folders all those empty folders the actual lockers themselves are all still there we have to go and clean those up with the script all right so you can see after the uninstall from Steam everything's still here you if you think that this new change of steam where if you remove a non-steam game it takes everything away that's true unless you're using this script and then if you're using this script taking stuff away or it doesn't happen because of the nature of the way the script works you have to use the script to get rid of everything so we'll do the Fresh Start thing again and you'll notice that it does clean up well mostly there's still folders in here those some of those zero item folders are still here those are those fake proton prefix folders set up to trick proton tricks into working these things are all gone you know we'll take this last one and get rid of it okay and there you go I mean once again we have these items here and it doesn't clean them up listen I hope this helped you out please like subscribe hit the Bell you guys know what to do now you have a tool which does amazing things and you know what it doesn't do that's so amazing and how to clean up and make things work properly uh it's a great tool if you know what you're doing I'm Shane R Monroe thanks so much for watching and take care

Channel: MonroeWorld

Views: 6,708

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Id: myGFyHY4GQU

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023