My FNV is through Steam… but… i think Limo does support GOG… I… would think you would, yes, have to set up your own filepaths, point it properly to where the game dir is, and it… should work?

You can launch a game from Limo, like, I do test runs of that in desktop mode on my Deck…

But the way the deployer system works is that you click deploy… and the even if you launch the game from some other way, like via Steam, in game mode on the deck, or… presumably via Heroic… it just now is the modded game. To revert, undeploy in Limo, and then either play vanilla, or swap to another modset profile and deploy that.

For NVSE, I just literally did the old school method of go into the real game dir, rename the main exe to .exe.old, and then rename the NVSE exe to the proper FONV game exe’s name.

That and manually install the dlls and other files that come with NVSE into the real dir.

This isn’t much of a problem with older games, but with newer games, that method would potentially be undone by ongoing update patches.

This is the kind of ‘some mods you just have to manually install’ thing… but in fairness… most of the time those mods are the same way on Windoes as well, unless some kind of mod manager goes far out of their way to specifically support that exact mod.

… why would you go out of your way to install a mod and then fight against what the mod does?

Like, sure, it’d be fairly nuts to make a variant of the game exe such that it basically uses a variant of the native save file format that is such an extensive rework that it builds some kind of literal self corruption mechanic into the save file itself…

… but it would not be that hard to tell the exe (provided, of course, you have succesfully decompiled it, or the relevant parts of it such that you launch mod.exe which sufficiently acts as a wrapper that then launches the actual game.exe within it, or can manipulate the vanilla game.exe/directory in realtime) to check the last update/file creation timestamp of the ironman save file itself, and check if it matches up with some kind of hash based off of that, where the decoding method/table for the hash is built into the exe itself… and then the exe deletes any save file that has been pasted into the directory manually when you run the exe, to start the game.

Kenshi doesn’t have a particularly complex DRM or AC service you’d need to actively fight against… you would just need a legit copy of the game with a valid key. It is a single player game that doesn’t even use online verification, its an old school cd key method.

I pointed to NVSE as an example because… it is similarly an exe that entirely replaces the vanilla game exe of Fallout New Vegas.

You could make a New Vegas mod that does this iron man thing trivially with NVSE, they already did the hard work of decompiling and reverse engineering the game exe, and then expanded its capabilities.

…

Imaging your entire drive would wipe out everything and reinstall the os from scratch, probably a new partition table too.

Restoring from a backup is again, fighting against a mod you have chosen to install becauae you wanted to use the mod.

Finally, the user, especially in Windows, absolutely does not have full control over the OS, unless you are literally hacking into it to defeat parts of it that it normally won’t let you remove.

Go ahead and try to entirely remove Windows ability to verify its own liscense, or hell, even fully remove advertisements from your Start menu, and then tell me how the user has full control.

Kernel level anticheats have more access to your system than you as a user do.

… Oof.

Yes, yes Kenshi fairly brutally depicts limbs being utterly crippled, as well as even amputated (look up adventures of torso on youtube)…

But I wouldn’t say fairly realistic depiction of certain kinds of disabilities… are anywhere close to the same thing as… making a game more easily playable by a real world person with varying kinds of disabilities.

If the game exe itself can… write and delete save files… and it is fairly common for extensive mods to just… literally replace the game exe… I don’t really see why a custom exe could not just … say, delete any saves you’e introduced back into the save directory manually, other than the last one it has remembered save/exiting with.

I can think of other methods of doing something that would achieve basicslly the same result (an enforced iron man mode) via other methods as well.

… I can think of even more ways to do this by making basically an open source (so that anyone can look at the code and verify it isn’t malicious malware) shell script/utility type thing that runs on linux, and would mod a windows game running on linux via proton, but then the problem is that windows users would not be able to use that mod.

You could probably do the same with windows bash scripts, but i am just more familiar with linux.

Like… by your logic, it is impossible to crack a game such that it runs without DRM.

This is obviously false.

… Or, am I misunderstanding you, and you are just saying the concept of an ironman mode is … just stupid in concept, and no game would ever support this natively?

Because again, that is obviously false, there are many games, of many different genres, that at least support an Ironman mode without any mods at all, and even a few that actually do enforce it all the time, though yes, admittedly, the games that enforce it all the time are usually more niche.

Like uh, HOI4 and Stellaris and No Mans Sky, just off the top of my head, all have built in, vanilla ironman modes. Oh and Xenonauts!

There are many, many games that do not support an ironman mode, even with mods… but have significant chunks of their communities dedicated to self imposing their own rule sets, either to make casual play more fun, or as conditions for a class of competetive speed run.

Nuzlocke rules for Pokemon games is basically an Ironman mode for Pokemon, tons of players will just do that even for casual play, to make the game more challenging.

Every game every with a ‘No Deaths’ rule as part of a speed run ruleset.

Some even go further into… literally you are not even allowed to ever even take any damage, as well, a ‘no hit’ rule or what not.

To add in about game modding on Linux:

https://github.com/limo-app/limo

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo

Limo is a universal mod manager that is linux native.

And I do mean universal. It’ll work with literally any game, you just have to take a bit of extra time to configure things for games that do not yet have a supported preset configuration out of the box… but at this point, that includes most games that are generally reliant on some kind of mod manager type program on Windows, to keep track of 10s or 100s of simultaneous mods.

It works very much along the same lines as something like Mod Organizer 2, though there are some differences, read the wiki.

It sets up a virtual file system that allows mods to be set up outside of the main game directory itself, and will override them such that the mods actually load, but they can be ‘undeployed’ to revert back to vanilla, you can set up different profiles of different mod configurations and deploy/undeploy what you like.

It can also manage load orders, supports formats such as fomod and similar for games like Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, you can set up tags and category groupings, and it also shows you conflicts between mods down to the specific files, showing you a chain of overwrites to the final file from the final loaded mod.

It doesn’t support things like LOOT, which purport to autogenerate correct load orders… but frankly, thats fine, because shit like that doesn’t even work properly in situations you’d use it in on Windows 90% of the time.

EDIT: Wow, apparently it does support LOOT now, it did not a few updates ago.

…

I have successfully gotten FONV working using Limo to set up uh… there’s a variant of the Viva New Vegas mod setup guide aimed at Steam Deck users, but it tells you to set up Mod Organizer 2 on the Deck… which you can do, but its rather input laggy and there are other inconveniences…

Here it is, Mirelurked Viva New Vegas:

https://ashtonqlb.github.io/mirelurked-vnv/intro.html

I had to alter a few steps from this to get it working with Limo, but they were basically just… set up Limo instead of MO2, and you have to handle NVSE a bit differently, because it literally replaces/overrides the entire main game exe.

…

I have also used Limo to mod Cyberpunk 2077, works with more in depth frameworks like CET, RedExt, etc, as well as using the Decky Framegen plugin to insert FSR 3.1 Upscaling and Framegen into CP77, which gives better quality and fps than the official FSR 2 and 3 implementations that come with the vanilla game and are vanilla supported on a Deck.

You basically just have to launch the vanilla game via the normal launcher first, check the ‘enable mods’ switch, fully load the game…

Then you can set up the Framegen mod, which adds a custom command in steam to the launch parameters… and then you can also setup the ‘skip intro’ mod, which is reliant on both the mod being present, as well as additional command line parameters…

There are a bunch of reddit posts complaining that the FrameGen mod doesn’t allow other additional launch arguments, but they are wrong.

All you have to do is append those additional launch args … at the end of the FrameGen mod’s launch arg. This just doesn’t seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, by anyone… I may have been the first person to figure this out?

Anyway, after that bit of silliness, setting up other mods for CP 77 using Limo is fairly straightforward.

…

… I am doing all this on Bazzite on a Deck, but you could do it on… presumably any linux distro that supports flatpaks and proton (the translation layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux).

There will always be a few ‘weird’ mods that are just totally reliant on a whole bunch of Windows specific things to work, or just cannot be made to work without actually overwriting some core game files in the main, real directory itself…

And, some of these mods will require a windows component dependency, like vc_2017 or vc_2022, you set those up with something like ProtonTricks or SteamTinkerLaunch to modify the proton config per game, instead of trying to install the exe system wide as 99% of the windows oriented mods will tell you to do…

But so far, I have found either my own solutions for these cases, or someone else already has, or someone has just made basically a linux compatible equivalent for such a windows reliant mod.

… You can also just choose to run MO2 on Linux, it will work, its just… buggy, and overlycomplicated, imo, you’ve got to set up a custom wineprefix for the MO2 UI to not do dumbshit, give it thr dependencies it needs, and then you’ve got to do this for each different game you want to mod with MO2.

I found that Limo is sufficiently capable and much less hassle to use once you take the time to understand its differences from MO2.

EDIT:

Also, for anti virus, ClamAV exists. I… think it is literally the only AV for linux?

… there’s gotta be some way to make a save file self destruct or corrupt itself if moved out of the directory it was created in.

… might have to be a more extensive mod, something like NVSE, that actually replaces/hijacks the main game exe, uses its own dlls, lol.

… I kind of find it hilarious that say… Kenshi, which allows saving and loading anytime, would have this count as an accesibility feature.

BrB, making ironman mode mod for Kenshi, save=game exits, mod allows only a single save file at a time, deletes any others, rofl.

I… would also have thought this as well.

Just have a player host their own instance, everyone connects to them, and have some kind of fallback system in place in case the host disconnects.

Then, next step, make it so that once that basic framework is setup, maybe also have a basic host migration thing within an established group of players, basically ping everyone to everyone and pick the person who has the lowest average ping to everyone else as the host.

I do not undertand at all why this game … needs a central server at all.

It is described as an ‘online only’ game.

I have not played it, but it seems like the levels are small, the default player count is 6, but a lot of the game is based on physics interactions…

Closest comparison I can think of is fucking about on GMod with 6 people, which you could probably pull off with your own self hosted instance, but a higher player count (which is apparently the main thrust of these mods that they say are anihilating their bandwidth) would need an actual dedicated server to avoid desync and lagging into oblivion.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/after-repo-kinda-blew-up-its-developer-asks-the-community-for-advice-on-how-to-make-matchmaking-lobbies/

They are apparently a small dev team and … this is their first multiplayer game, ever.

So cutting them some slack is I think warranted.

They say they are considering making matchmaking lobbies as a feature… by which they presumably mean some kind of private servers?

I really don’t know, ‘matchmaking lobby’ is an extremely broad term that could mean basically anything from self hosted servers… to rentable/configurable dedicated servers… ???

Apparently right now it is all centrally piped into their own servers, and is reliant on Steam invites to actually get people together into a session.

They say they are worries that if they add ‘matchmaking lobbies’, that introduces the problem of hackers… and to solve hackers, they would need an anticheat, which would break mods.

I… do not understand how that makes sense, there have been many multiplayer games with both mods and anticheat.

You could go with a less intrusive AC like VAC… it does work on many non source engine games, though I don’t know what the liscensing costs would be… and then just integrate mods into the steam workshop?

Or some other AC solution, and have some other method of basically submitting mods for some kind of review and standardization with the AC… and then just also have an option for AC-off servers, so you could test your wip mods?

I guess we really have gotten to the point where modern devs just actually cannot fathom how mods and AC could work together.