Salt and Sanctuary (283640)

[ranplayer]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Salt and Sanctuary
• Steam AppID of the game: 283640

System Information

• GPU: RX 6700 XT
• Video driver version: Mesa 25.2.7
• Kernel version: 6.12.61
• Full system information: steam-sysinfo.tar.gz
• Proton version: 8.0-5, 9.0-4, 10.0-3 (4-RC), Experimental 2025-12-09

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

Proton Experimental logs: steam-283640.tar.gz

warn:  GetMonitorFormatBpp: Unknown format: 85
2705.080:0130:0134:err:steamclient:callback_len_utow Unix len 12 not found for callback 1112.
2705.080:0130:0134:err:steamclient:alloc_callback_wtou len 16 is too small for callback 1112, using default.
2705.121:0130:01b4:err:ole:marshal_object Failed to create an IRpcStubBuffer from IPSFactory for {e89f726e-c4f4-4c19-bb19-b647d7fa8478} with error 0x80004002
2705.360:0130:0250:err:dmo:create_placeholder_file Creating tag file placeholder-video-used.
2708.540:0130:0208:err:mscoree:expect_no_runtimes Process exited with a Mono runtime loaded.

Symptoms

• Game crashes on boot with Proton and displays an error dialog. Native (Vulkan) is working fine.

Reproduction

• Just start the game with Proton

[madewokherd]

This is unfortunately a common issue with games that use the MonoGame library (not actually XNA nor Wine Mono's FNA replacement but another implementation of the XNA API shipped by the game itself). For WMA files that have not yet been transcoded, Proton sends a generic video/audio stream to the application. As I understand it, it's not even possible to parse the file enough to determine that it's only audio, so Proton always sends video to the application. MonoGame rejects it for having a video stream.

And since MonoGame ships with the game, we can't change this behavior.

The only solution on Proton's end is to wait for the media to be transcoded on Valve's servers. But since this game defaults to native, that's unlikely to happen.

Game developers can fix this by providing the media in an unencumbered format.

[madewokherd]

After writing that, it occurred to me that we could work around it in Proton by having a separate mode that disables the video stream, so I pushed that to bleeding-edge experimental: cf5de03 bea1fa8

You'll likely be missing some audio, though.

[ranplayer]

@madewokherd just tried bleeding-edge and it fixed... there are just two intro logos that, to be honest, I don't recall having sound anyway in the native version... thank you