LunNova / nix-gaming

Gaming on Nix

nix-gaming

Gaming related stuff for Nix and NixOS.

What's in here?

Package	Description
osu-lazer-bin	osu! lazer, extracted from the official AppImage
osu-stable	osu! stable version
rocket-league	Rocket League from Epic Games
technic-launcher	Technic Launcher
wine-discord-ipc-bridge	Wine-Discord RPC Bridge
wine-ge	Wine version of Proton-GE
wine-osu	Wine optimized for low latency
wine-tkg	Wine optimized for games
winestreamproxy	Wine-Discord RPC (broken)

• legendaryBuilder is a function that installs games with legendary-gl. You are expected to log in before using it, with legendary auth. The function takes an attrset containing at least the attrset games which includes the games you want installed. Optionally, you can set an opts attrset that will set the options you set inside for all games listed.

You can find a usage example in example.nix.

• osu-lazer-bin is an osu!lazer build that is extracted from official binary AppImage releases in order to preserve multiplayer functions.

• 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.

• 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-discord-ipc-bridge provides bridging between games under Wine and Discord running on Linux.

• wine-ge is the wine equivalent of the famous Proton-GE. It is based on wine-tkg, and is expected to work better than it.

• wine-osu is wine-staging, with patches applied to make it low-latency. The patches can be found here.

• wine-tkg is a special wine version, tailored for the best gaming experience. It consists of a wine tree generated with the tkg patches.

• winestreamproxy provides bridging between games under Wine and Discord running on Linux. (currently broken, help with building would be appreciated)

Install & Run

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

# configuration.nix
{
  nix.settings = {
    substituters = [ "https://nix-gaming.cachix.org" ];
    trusted-public-keys = [ "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;
}

Also, add inputs or nix-gaming to specialArgs when building your system config, or to extraSpecialArgs when building your Home Manager configuration.

Then, add the package(s):

{ pkgs, config, inputs, ... }:

{
  environment.systemPackages = [ # or home.packages
    inputs.nix-gaming.packages.${pkgs.system}.<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>

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
  
  preCommands  ? "" # run commands before the game is started
  postCommands ? "" # run commands after the game is closed
}

osu-stable wine-discord-ipc-bridge wine overriding

Sometimes you want to override wine for various reasons. Here's how to do it:

{
  environment.systemPackages = [ # or home.packages
    inputs.nix-gaming.packages.${pkgs.system}.osu-stable.override rec {
      wine = <your-wine>;
      wine-discord-ipc-bridge = wine-discord-ipc-bridge.override {inherit wine;}; # or override this one as well
    };
  ];
}

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. It also provides a better desktop experience due to its PREEMPTive nature and tickless scheduler.
• 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.

Credits & Resources

Thank you

• boppyt
• gonX
• InfinityGhost
• LavaDesu
• openglfreak
• yusdacra