TL;DR: Animates (the Windows-only AI companion) runs on Linux with Heroic + GE-Proton, a fixed WebView2 runtime, 4 one-byte-ish binary patches, a tiny push-to-talk bridge and a custom KWin effect that makes the black background transparent. Login, 3D companion, transparency, dragging and push-to-talk all work. No downloads here, just the recipe, so you can write your own tools.

Tested on: two Arch machines, Animates 1.0.9, Heroic (Flatpak) 2.22.3, GE-Proton11-7, KDE Plasma 6.7.5 on X11, AMD RX 7800 XT (RADV), PipeWire.

Animates is a Unity 6000.3 app with WebView2 windows, installed with Velopack. Here's everything it took.

1. Install

• Install Heroic and GE-Proton11-7.

• animates.ai/win https://downloads.animates.ai/windows/win/Animates.exe

• Run the installer with Proton in a fresh prefix:

  STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=<prefix> STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=~/.steam/steam <GE-Proton dir>/proton run Animates.exe
  

• It installs to <prefix>/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/AnimateApp/current/Animates.exe. When it finishes, Velopack launches the app and it hangs with no window: kill it with WINEPREFIX=<prefix>/pfx <GE-Proton dir>/files/bin/wineserver -k.

• Add it to Heroic as a sideloaded Windows app pointing to that .exe, same prefix, GE-Proton11-7.

2. Fixed-version WebView2

The Evergreen WebView2 runtime doesn't work, but the fixed-version runtime 109.0.1518.78 does. It's on NuGet as WebView2.Runtime.X64:

https://api.nuget.org/v3-flatcontainer/webview2.runtime.x64/109.0.1518.78/webview2.runtime.x64.109.0.1518.78.nupkg

It's a zip. Copy the contents of contentFiles/any/any/WebView2/ (the folder with msedgewebview2.exe) to <prefix>/pfx/drive_c/webview2fixed/, then set these environment variables for the game in Heroic (Settings -> Advanced):

• WEBVIEW2_BROWSER_EXECUTABLE_FOLDER = C:\webview2fixed
• WEBVIEW2_ADDITIONAL_BROWSER_ARGUMENTS = --no-sandbox --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-allow-origins=*

The second one opens a Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) port, used for push-to-talk. With the game running, curl -s 127.0.0.1:9222/json should list its pages.

Tip: Heroic keeps its config in memory, so fully close it before editing its JSON files by hand.

3. Four binary patches

Files are in .../AnimateApp/current/Animates_Data/. Offsets are for 1.0.9 only; check the MD5 first and back up the files.

#	File (MD5 of 1.0.9 original)	Offset	Change	Fixes
1	Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll (827d426bc1421dbacca467daaed1fdcf)	472266	17 -> 16	Black UI
2	Plugins/x86_64/WebViewHost.dll (9a382b1500b4a05fb4afbc8c8d6431f7)	55728	40 57 48 -> 31 c0 c3	Clicks go through the UI
3	Managed/NAudio.Wasapi.dll (06df328b05d90a91e3f353577ef8a126)	15350	02 -> 2a	Crash after login
4	Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll (same file)	268016	02 -> 2a	Companion can't be dragged

What each one does:

1. Black UI. The WebView tries to use DirectComposition, and Wine doesn't implement DCompositionCreateDevice2 (Player.log shows hresult -2147467263, E_NOTIMPL). The byte is the ldc.i4.1 before stfld composition; making it ldc.i4.0 sets CreateOptions.composition = false and the UI renders.
2. Clicks go straight through the web UI. The native export WVH_SetClickThrough becomes xor eax,eax; ret.
3. Crash right after login. AudioSessionManager.UnregisterNotifications in NAudio makes a COM call Wine doesn't implement. First IL byte -> ret (0x2A).
4. Companion can't be dragged. After onboarding, the game reads the alpha of the pixel under the mouse and makes the window click-through (WS_EX_TRANSPARENT) when it's transparent. Under Wine that read always says "transparent", so every click passes through. First IL byte of WindowsAPI.SetClickThrough -> ret.

Velopack auto-updates overwrite these files, so re-apply the patches after every game update.

For a different game version, find the offsets yourself:

• Decompile the managed DLLs with ilspycmd (needs .NET 8, can be installed to a temp folder without root) and grep for composition, SetClickThrough, UnregisterNotifications.
• Get the file offset of a method's IL body with Python + dnfile: find the method in TypeDef.MethodList, convert its RVA with pe.get_offset_from_rva(). If the header's low 2 bits are 3 it's a fat header and the code starts at offset + (byte[offset+1] >> 4) * 4; otherwise it's tiny and the code starts at offset + 1. Writing 0x2A there turns a void method into a no-op.
• For WebViewHost.dll (native), look up the RVA of the WVH_SetClickThrough export, convert it to a file offset, write 31 c0 c3.

4. Push-to-talk

Under Wine the game's windows never get keyboard focus, so Unity's GetAsyncKeyState never sees the PTT key (Alt/AltGr). The fix is a small daemon (I wrote mine in Python with python-xlib + websocket-client):

• Listen for Alt_L / Alt_R / ISO_Level3_Shift system-wide via XInput2 raw key events on the root window. It's not a grab, so Alt+Tab keeps working.
• On press (after ~180 ms held, and cancelled if another key is pressed so Alt+Tab doesn't trigger it), fetch http://127.0.0.1:9222/json, pick the page titled Context Menu or Agent Bridge, open its webSocketDebuggerUrl and send Runtime.evaluate with window.animateHost.requestOpenInput('listening').
• On release, do the same on Input / Context Menu / Agent Bridge with window.animateHost.closeInput().
• Run it from autostart. During onboarding those pages don't exist yet, which is expected.

5. The black background (the hard part)

On Windows the companion floats on your desktop thanks to DWM: Unity uses DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea with -1 margins and the WebView uses DirectComposition. Wine composites neither, so every window of the game has a solid black background.

What didn't work:

• Patching the game to use a color key (LWA_COLORKEY): no effect, because Unity renders through DXVK/Vulkan, not GDI.
• Cutting the window with XShape from outside: X stops updating the cut-out areas, so the character vanishes when it moves into them.
• Matching windows by PID: Wine reports the PID of the umu container, not the real process.

What worked: a custom KWin effect, a C++ subclass of KWin::OffscreenEffect:

• On windowAdded (and for existing windows in stackingOrder() at startup), match X11 windows whose class contains steam_app_default and whose caption is animation (the Unity window) or empty (the WebViews).

• For those, call redirect(w) + setShader(w, shader), and in prePaintWindow call data.setTranslucent().

• The shader is loaded with ShaderManager::instance()-> generateShaderFromFile(ShaderTrait::MapTexture, {}, path) and does:

  vec4 tex = texture(sampler, texcoord0);
  float m = max(tex.r, max(tex.g, tex.b));
  tex.a = clamp(m / 0.05, 0.0, 1.0);
  tex = sourceEncodingToNitsInDestinationColorspace(tex);
  tex *= modulation;
  fragColor = nitsToDestinationEncoding(tex);
  

  (#include "colormanagement.glsl" at the top.) What rendered over black is effectively premultiplied already, so setting alpha is enough.

Why it looks good:

• The game draws its background as exact black (0,0,0), so that becomes fully transparent.
• Near-black edge pixels become semi-transparent, so edges stay smooth instead of jagged.
• The character has almost no pure-black pixels, so dark clothing doesn't get holes.

Build notes (Plasma 6, X11):

• Link against KWinX11::kwin (find_package(KWinX11)), use kcoreaddons_add_plugin(... INSTALL_NAMESPACE "kwin-x11/effects/plugins"), C++23, and set QT_MAJOR_VERSION 6 before ECM. Qt Widgets/DBus/Qml/Quick are needed too.
• Ship two shader variants, name.frag (GLSL 1.10 style) and name_core.frag (#version 140): KWin in core profile looks for the _core one.
• Put "EnabledByDefault": true in metadata.json so it loads at login. Install the .so to /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/kwin-x11/effects/plugins/.

Warnings:

• Only works on kwin_x11; recompile after KWin/Plasma updates.
• After reinstalling the .so you need kwin_x11 --replace; unloading/loading the effect over D-Bus doesn't reload the library.
• Other non-Steam games launched through umu/Heroic share that window class, so pure black in their untitled windows turns transparent too.

Tips

• Always launch the game from Heroic. Double-clicking the .exe leaves duplicate instances hanging.
• If the game closes right after login, launch it again; the session is already saved.
• During onboarding the companion is click-through on purpose, same as on Windows.
• Useful logs, inside the prefix: AppData/LocalLow/Animation Inc_/animation/Player.log (Unity) and AppData/Local/Temp/WebViewHost.console.log (WebView).