Half-Life: Alyx - issues caused by case sensitivity

Proton to native save migration

If you played Half-Life Alyx using Proton before the release of native Linux support on May 15, 2020, you will need to migrate your saves. The save folders are ALL CAPS with Proton, but lowercase with the native Linux version.

Move the files from here:

[Steam folder]/steamapps/common/Half-Life Alyx/game/hlvr/SAVE/S0

to here:

[Steam folder]/steamapps/common/Half-Life Alyx/game/hlvr/save/s0/

If you do have saves in S1, S2, etc. you will need to move those files to the corresponding lowercase folder as well.

The default location of the Steam folder is /home/[your-username-here]/.local/share/Steam/.

Subtitles are missing

If you want to use subtitles and/or closed captions, you will need to create a symbolic link for every directory along the game's path that uses uppercase letters, as discussed here. For example, if Half-Life Alyx is installed in the main library at ~/.local/share/Steam:

cd ~/.local/share/
ln -sv ./Steam ./steam
ln -sv ./Steam/steamapps/common/Half-Life\ Alyx ./steam/steamapps/common/half-life\ alyx

changed title from Half-Life Alyx save folders are ALL CAPS with Proton, but lowercase with native Linux to Half-Life: Alyx - issues caused by case sensitivity

changed the description

ciopfs would be more convenient for this.

Interesting. Looks like Ubuntu users have it in their package repository, though Arch users would build it from AUR, but that's not much of a hurdle.

I see it hasn't been updated in over 12 years and uses FUSE v2, which is in maintenance mode. I doubt any distros will be dropping it anytime soon, so that might not be an issue.

I've had to read the example they gave a few times to understand what was going on. Not very friendly documentation. Would it be like this, then? (I haven't tested this)

cd [Half-Life Alyx folder location]
mkdir -p ./.data # make hidden folder for ciopfs functionality
ciopfs [HLA location]/.data [HLA location]/game # Links the two directories using ciopfs

EDIT: Then they would have to add this to /etc/fstab:

[HLA location]/.data	/ciopfs/mnt	ciopfs	allow_other,default_permissions,use_ino,attr_timeout=0	0	0

I'm assuming they meant to write .data and not data there but it's unclear

I found about this workaround through this issue comment. I should've attached it earlier since it is more straightforward.

Ah, thanks. Do you know if fstab is still needed for a persistent fix? The comment seems to suggest no

I prefer to do it by editing the game's launch script. Hell, in the case of SteamVR itself, I completely replaced the launch script with my own. That way, ciopfs kicks in only when needed and the mount point could be removed on exit with a trap.

I want to be clear though, I haven't needed to do it in this specific case, so I don't know whether it will work. In the case of Source 1 games, it might break the entire game if ciopfs is used, but I could confirm that it worked in SteamVR Home, another Source 2 game.