SulfurNitride/Fluorine-Manager v0.4.1

Fluorine Manager 0.4.1 VFS Improvements OpenMW Modlist Support

on GitHub

Fluorine Manager 0.4.1 adds a faster FUSE VFS, Steam shader cache sharing, OpenMW installation tools, and a round of Steam DRM, Proton prefix and launch fixes.

Faster FUSE VFS

• Answer Wine's case-folding query on directories so missing-file lookups are no longer scanned for case variants. This is on by default and measured about 4x faster on missing-file probes against a 1283-mod list. Lookup now folds Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian letters, so the VFS catalog schema moved to version 6 and existing catalogs are rebuilt.
• Skip FUSE flush for read-only opens and size the request worker pool by hardware threads (minimum 4) instead of a fixed 16.
• Optional io_uring transport (needs fuse.enable_uring=Y; Settings offers to enable it). It falls back to the normal transport if libfuse rejects it.
• Optional kernel passthrough for large read-only files (4 MiB and up), about 3.3x faster when streaming BA2/BSA archives in a benchmark. It uses a small helper that Settings installs once through pkexec.
• Existing mod files are now written in place, like MO2, so edits to mod and profile files no longer create copies in Overwrite. Base-game files stay copy-on-write. The unfinished tracked-writes feature was removed.

Steam shader cache

• Steam games launched from Fluorine now reuse the shaders Steam has already compiled or downloaded for them (NVIDIA, Mesa, AMD and DXVK caches).
• Optionally record the shaders a game creates, including modded ones, so Steam can pre-compile them for the next launch. This needs Steam's Shader Pre-Caching turned on.
• Both options are in the Proton settings tab and default to on. Games from other stores are not affected.
• This is still a WIP

OpenMW

• New OpenMW tab in the installer window to browse modding-openmw.com lists and preview the install plan.
• MOMW install dialog, Nexus web authentication, and OpenMW cfg updates.
• New OpenMW settings window with a navmesh rebuild action.
• OpenMW accepts any mod folder that is not just documentation.
• Also a WIP

Steam DRM, Proton and prefixes

• Steam DRM now defaults to on only for Steam library installs, so GOG and other installs no longer start Steam in the background (#203).
• Steam edition instances keep the DRM bridge on wherever their files live, which fixes Stock Game and Game Root copies opening the Steam launcher instead of SKSE/F4SE.
• The launch and the library panel now share one Steam DRM decision, so the checkbox matches what a launch does.
• Proton versions older than 11 are hidden unless you opt in with a checkbox, which warns that no support is provided for them.
• Opt-in custom prefix location, with an "unsupported" warning.
• New option to skip linking save data from Steam prefixes.
• Accept in-prefix symlinks such as umu's pfx link (#194), and stop linking launcher, driver, mod.io and IO Interactive AppData folders (#195).
• Wineboot failure messages now include the tail of the Proton output.

Fixes

• Root Builder now deploys files highest priority first, so the right mod's root files win (#202).
• Preview paths are matched case-insensitively, so files whose folder case differs between mods can be previewed.
• Keep the trailing slash on FOMOD file destinations.
• Morrowind: fix a save parsing overflow on Linux, and stop QSettings from corrupting Morrowind.ini keys.
• Witcher 3: accept DX12-only installs (#196).
• Show Fallout NV and TTW plugin header flags in plugin lists.
• Fix a use-after-free when the style changes (#198).
• Stop in-process restarts from emitting aboutToQuit (#204).
• Log usvfs output instead of opening a console window (#193).
• Packaging: stop bundling libexpat, which broke Mesa EGL and crashed Qt WebEngine at startup on systems with a newer expat (#214).

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who reported issues and sent pull requests for this release. I'm almost done with my schooling and then will be moving in January so it might be a little slow on the upkeep.