Linux compatibility improvements @Devs

Hello all,

Recently I have been working on getting the game run trough "Steam Proton" and Wine + Lutris for Linux users, The state of the project is that the game is fully working on Linux trough Proton and Lutris+Wine, the installation is quite simple. Toetje585/Age-of-Empires-Online-Lutris: Adds Age of Empires Online on Lutris Game Platform and so enabling the game to work under Linux! (github.com).

Proton (a Wine fork) enables us to download the game trough Steam client on Linux, patch it using .NET Core "Gamescanner" by "martinmine" and use Protontricks to automatically change "AOEOnline.exe" to "Spartan.exe". Valve is doing a great effort improving compatibility on Linux allow more people to enjoy games on the Linux platform. My first indication is that this game will be fully playable on the Steamdeck devices regardless of how un-practical this might sound. The Steam runtime is quite powerful on mapping mouse/keyboard buttons and emulating mouse movements on touch and or joystick tumbles. And of-course in "Docked-mode" you can use a keyboard/mouse regardless. However putting the steam-deck aside I would like to suggest some changes that I cannot implement myself sadly due the "lack" of skills writing code in any of the cross-platform programming languages.

Currently users cannot create a game account on Linux due the heavy .NET Framework requirements of the launcher, while .NET Framework 3.5 runs great under Wine anything above this is a bit a hit and miss. In order to workaround this issue a new cross-platform launcher would be needed or perhaps allow game account creations trough the website. Sadly as much I would love to write this by my own I sadly can't as I don't have any programming skills outside simple bash scripts.

Currently the Linux version has the following downside:

- No account creation is possible
- Ports 1000-1005 are restricted to the root user only.

As you can see, those two are making the game unplayable unless you created a account before on Windows, and for the restricted ports you can use a tool "setcap" to connect to the servers regardless. However as for now this means new Linux users are not able to play the game, while my personal believes are we might actually get a few new players if we make the approach playing more simple and straightforward. So I would love to get some help or at-least some feedback on this part, perhaps some of you have idea's to work around this and or perhaps some of the developers can give some kind of feedback on my idea, and perhaps then once the steam-deck releases we can have AOEO playable and be the first community driven game available on this new device, but please keep in mind this would allow the game to be playable for new users across all Linux distributions.

Best Regards,

Discord: TerrorToetje#2457