Steam Deck GWX SH3

[Cain77]

Hi all,
Recently got back into SH when I got a Steam Deck and realised you can play it pretty easily if you tinker with the controller config a bit (having the Steam magnify feature mapped to a button helps a lot!).
I wanted to share my experiences with the Steam Deck and the mods, so that it might help others as I couldn't find that much information myself.

SH3
I have the steam version which works fine as is (I use the force compatiblity to proton 8 on mine). As I said, with a bit of configuration of the various buttons and pads etc you can have a decent amount of control. You won't need the 1.4b patch that gets mentioned sometimes.

I've unsuccessfully tried a few of the supermods (but some of this might be because I'm learning the linux side of things as I go) however, I now have GWX working great. Here's what worked for me (through a lot of trial and error and note that it looks like a lot of faff but isn't actually too bad once you get into it!) -

1. Install SH3 from Steam (I put it on my SD card rather than the deck's internal HD). Check force compatiblty in Properties and select latest proton (i've tested it with 4.11 and 8 and they both seem fine). I also set the res to 1024 x 724 (I've not got into the HD res fixes or anything yet...). This assumes a clean install - you will have to find the SH3 folder and savegame folders to delete them if you've got a previous install.

2. Run SH3 once and start a sub school mission just to test (it also creates the save game folder which is in another weird linux file path)

3. Copy the GWX installer, Steam Fix & 4GB fix exes to the steam deck. I put the GWX exe in downloads folder and the other two patches went into the SH3 folder, which is, in my case, my external SD card (the path will be something like primary/steamapps/common/Silent Hunter 3/ you should be able to find it from the SH3 properties in steam or using the file browser in desktop mode) I don't know what those two patches really do but until I did this step I could never get the GWX career to start from 1st Flot/1939. It always CTD. It worked from other career start points though so maybe it was Kiel related or something? But I wanted to start a career in the little 11A so I was detirmined to fix it

4. Install Bottles and Flatseal from Discover in desktop mode. These are needed to run exes (specifically JSGME & the two patches).
5. Start Flatseal, select Bottles. Scroll down and select "All user files".
If you have a MicroSD, enter into the box right below "All user files": /run/media/mmcblk0p1.
6. Start Bottles, go to Preferences, scroll down to Integrations and select "Steam Proton Prefixes".
7. After restarting Bottles, your installed games should show up as Bottles on the "Your Bottles" page in a "Steam Proton" section.
8. Select Silent Hunter3, dismiss the "Missing runner" message, if you get that. Click the big blue button Run Executable..., navigate to Steam Fix.exe to run that file. Point it to the SH3 folder where the SH3 exe is.
9. Also in bottles, run the 4gb fix using the same procedure.

10. In Steam, add non-steam game, point it to the GWX.exe. Once added to the library, right click and force compatabilty mode to Proton 8 again.
11. Launch GWX.exe through Steam. Should run through the regular installation process, when it asks for the SH3 folder, you need to point it to your SH3 folder where the SH3.exe is.
12. Run bottles and run JSGME.exe (in that same SH3 folder you found earlier).
13. JSGME should run for the first time (you can add any of the optional GWX mods at this point should you want).
14. You are now good to run GWX, if you run SH3 from Steam it should work fine (you'll see the GWX loading screen if it all went well)

15. Using desktop mode you can copy mods to the MODS folder in the SH3 folder. Run bottles then JSGME to add or remove mods. I added bottles as a non-steam game so you can launch it from Game Mode as well as the regular desktop mode. I've been experimenting with mods and a lot of them seem to work fine. Some of the gfx ones didn't (MEP6 etc) but I've not tinkered with them much so it's not necessarily impossible to get them working.

That's as far as I've got. It's running fine and I'm loving it. One thing that I've not cracked yet is getting SH3 Commander working. I've copied it to the SH3 folder, ran it but it complains about not finding the .cfg file (which is I think because of the weird linux file path that is used for the saved games).
That's where I gave up (for now...).
If anyone knows how this obstacle can be overcome, please let us know

SH4
I've not played this quite as much but it's a bit simpler.
I've installed SH4 through steam (force compat to proton) and also ran TMO Overhauled which is working great. Other than chucking some extra music in the gramophone folder I've not done much else yet.

SH5
Not tried but watch this space....