Elite Dangerous

1.0 2.0 4.0

Visiting Hong Kong cavaliers
Visiting Hong Kong cavaliers

Primary Buffer Panel

All works.

There are a bunch of videos showcasing Elite Dangerous with my Primary Buffer Panel on my YouTube and PeerTube accounts.

Launch parameters

Like most games does this one also not detect a screen layout but only the primary display on a Linux PC so it won’t offer the maximum resolution possible e.g. with a triple head setup đŸ–Ĩī¸đŸ–Ĩī¸đŸ–Ĩī¸. This can be worked around in multiple ways, e.g. with configuring a virtual desktop in the WINEPREFIX, by adding a virtual monitor to the system or simply by making use of gamescope, the SteamOS session compositing window manager.

Here is an example how games may be started from Steam by adding the following commands to the start parameters (That’s basically the same for e.g. Lutris btw).

gamescope -h 1200 -w 5760 -H 1200 -W 5760 -b -e – %command%

This is not needed if only one monitor is used for gaming.

I love to play many games with my XR glasses in Side-By-Side mode where each eye is fed with a slightly different camera position resulting in 3D depth perception.

This is similar to VR but does not offer e.g. a backchannel for head tracking. Some games, like Elite Dangerous, support this natively. Other games can be forced into a SBS like mode with ReShade and a plugin like SuperDepth3D or Rendepth Reshade. In theory are Reshade shaders compatible with vkBasalt but the depth stuff is apparently exempt from this rule so that is not an option. The approach works nicely with Proton though.

The reshade-linux repo is very useful to get you started but the required steps can be done manually too, of course.

You will need gamescope on top though, because the output has usually to be rescaled or the display ratio is completely off. This also depends on the glasses. Mine do FULL SBS so a resolution of 3840x1080 is excepted in the end.

For Elite Dangerous the correct settings would e.g. be:

gamescope -h 2160 -w 3840 -H 1080 -W 3840 –scaler stretch -e – %command%

Other games may require slightly different settings here. This is an example for Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown with Reshade and the SuperDepth3D shader:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=“d3dcompiler_47=n;dxgi=n,b;” gamescope -h 1080 -w 1920 -H 1080 -W 3840 –scaler stretch -b -r 60 -e – %command%

YMMV but the general idea should work with almost any game.

I launch Elite Dangerous from Steam and for most people it’ll be just click Play. Elite had this atrocious overloaded and slow launcher though so I switched to MinEdLauncher instead, which would also kindly chainload further 3rd party apps for me.

The new launcher Elite Dangerous got a few weeks ago is a lot faster and also very minimalistic. Good thing we have choices though. Here are a bunch of ways I launch Elite depending on what I’m going to do:

Launch within gamescope for proper screen size, show MangoHud overlay, use MinEdLauncher and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Odyssey:

gamescope -h 1200 -w 5760 -H 1200 -W 5760 -b -e – mangohud ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDO

Start MinEdLauncher from a gnome-terminal and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Horizons:

gnome-terminal – ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH

Start MinEdLauncher from a gnome-terminal and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Odyssey while allowing access to the Vulkan rendering for recording in OBS Studio

obs-gamecapture gnome-terminal – mangohud ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDO

Demo

Watch this video on YouTube PeerTube

Ignore the Primary Flight Display. This version of my app has currently a bug where it’s stuck when it should not display at all. It should only display near a planetary.

Music “Running and Burning (Single)” by “Desert Eagles” is released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License