nix-gaming

Gaming related stuff for Nix and NixOS.

What's in here?

Package	Description
`osu-stable`	osu! stable version
`rocket-league`	Rocket League from Epic Games
`technic-launcher`	Technic Launcher
`winestreamproxy`	Wine-Discord RPC
`wine-tkg`	Wine optimized for games

osu-stable provides a script that installs/runs osu! automatically, in addition to a desktop entry. Installation will take a bit of time. It will download and install about 400MB of files. In any case, do not stop the command! If anything goes wrong and for some reason osu! won't start, delete the ~/.osu directory and re-run osu-stable.
rocket-league relies on legendary-gl, which expects you to log in. It's best to do that before running RL, by adding legendary-gl in a nix shell and running legendary auth.
technic-launcher will guide you through the install process, just like it normally would. Some modpacks will complain about libraries, and that is expected. In such cases you may want to enable the withSteamRun = true; override flag. This will run technic-launcher with steam-run and prevent those errors.
wine-tkg is a special wine version, tailored for the best gaming experience. In addition to the tkg patches, I have added openglfreak's patches and gonX's patches which make everything buttery smooth. NOTE: I was not aware of this until now, but it's very likely that the built wine isn't actually tkg. Because of the way nixpkgs handles patches currently, I will have to find a better way to patch everything in.
winestreamproxy provides bridging between games under Wine and Discord running on Linux.

Install & Run

It's recommended to set up Cachix so you don't have to build packages.

# configuration.nix
{
  nix = {
    binaryCaches = [ "https://nix-gaming.cachix.org" ];
    binaryCachePublicKeys = [ "nix-gaming.cachix.org-1:nbjlureqMbRAxR1gJ/f3hxemL9svXaZF/Ees8vCUUs4=" ];
  };
}

Now, rebuild your configuration and continue reading for install instructions.

If you're not using flakes, skip to here.

Flakes

Add these packages to your home.packages or environment.systemPackages by adding nix-gaming as an input:

# flake.nix
{
  inputs.nix-gaming.url = github:fufexan/nix-gaming;
}

Then, add the package(s):

#
{
  environment.systemPackages = [ # or home.packages
    inputs.nix-gaming.packages.x86_64-linux.<package> # installs a package
  ];
}

If you want to install packages to your profile instead, do it like this

  nix profile install github:fufexan/nix-gaming#<package>

NOTE: the above snippet won't work if you use Home-Manager. You can use the old nix-env syntax.

Everything is available as an overlay if you prefer that, though your results may greatly differ from the packages.

Nix Stable

The following instructions assume you have this repo cloned somewhere.

Packages

To install packages with nix-env, run

cd directory/of/nix-gaming
nix-env -if . -A packages.x86_64-linux.<package>

To install packages to environment.systemPackages, add this in configuration.nix:

let
  nix-gaming = import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/fufexan/nix-gaming/archive/master.tar.gz");
in
{
  # import the low latency module
  imports = [
    ...
    "nix-gaming/modules/pipewireLowLatency.nix"
  ];
  
  # install packages
  environment.systemPackages = [ # home.packages
    nix-gaming.packages.x86_64-linux.<package>
  ];
  
  # enable module (see below)
  services.pipewire = ...;
}

PipeWire low latency

PipeWire is a new audio backend that replaces ALSA, PulseAudio and Jack. It achieves lower latency than possible previously with Pulse, for lower CPU overhead.

This module extends the PipeWire module from nixpkgs and makes it easy to enable the low latency settings from a single line (or more).

Add it as a module to your configuration and enable it along with PipeWire:

{
  services.pipewire = {
    enable = true;
    # alsa is optional
    alsa.enable = true;
    alsa.support32Bit = true;
    # needed for osu
    pulse.enable = true;

    # the star of the show
    lowLatency.enable = true;

    # defaults (no need to be set unless modified)
    lowLatency = {
      quantum = 64;
      rate = 48000;
    };
  };
  
  # make pipewire realtime-capable
  security.rtkit.enable = true;
}

If you get no sound, you may want to increase quantum, usually to an even number or the prefix of the rate (48/48000 is exactly 1ms).

Game overrides

The game derivations were written with versatility in mind. There are args that can be modified in order to get the result one wants.

{
  wine      ? wine-tkg         # controls the wine package used to run wine games
  wineFlags ? null             # which flags to run wine with
  pname     ? "game-name"      # name of the script and package
  location  ? "$HOME/${pname}" # where to install the game/wine prefix
  tricks    ? null             # which wine tricks to install
}

Tips

In order to get the most performance out of your machine, you could use the following tweaks:

custom/gaming kernel: linux_xanmod is the recommended one for games, since it provides many patches that aid wine and other games. NOTE: Xanmod is not preferred on laptops and other power-constrained devices, as the tick scheduler draws a lot of power (at least 3W alone).
gamemode: lets you achieve lower nice values and higher realtime privileges at game start. It can either detect games or be told to start with gamemode-run.
pw-jack: can force games such as osu-lazer to a lower quant value which provides lower latencies than using the pulse backend.

Credits & Resources

Thank you

LavaDesu / nix-gaming