Download and install — Windows, Linux and Steam Deck

TWO FRONT ENDS

The same engine, and you can run either or both at once. Pro Engineer is a graphical window — the circuit, your car drawn from its own model, twenty-seven channels on one cursor. The terminal application is the one below: no window manager needed, it runs over ssh and on a Steam Deck in desktop mode, and it is what installs the in-game panel.

The in-game panel comes with the terminal archive. Either front end can be the one you use, and it is the desktop application in that archive that writes the panel into the game and feeds it — so a driver who wants the overlay wants the archive too.

WINDOWS

Download, unzip, run. It finds the game, writes the in-game panel into its Lua app folder, and creates the shared memory the panel reads. Nothing has to start in a particular order, and there is nothing to install.

# unzip anywhere, then
ac_pro_engineer.exe

If your antivirus complains, it is a false positive. Two things trip the heuristics together: the binary is new and carries no publisher certificate, and reading another process's memory is exactly what telemetry is. The releases are built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit, and the whole thing can be built from source below.

LINUX & STEAM DECK

Run the native Linux binary, not the .exe. The desktop side works on its own and needs nothing else. The in-game panel additionally needs the bridge running inside the game's Proton prefix — why is here — and protontricks to start it there.

./ac_pro_engineer

# for the in-game panel, leave this running too
protontricks-launch --appid 244210 shm-bridge.exe

The launcher's overlay card reports which bridge is on disk, whether it fits this build, and can fetch a matching one for you.

CSP needs Windows libraries Proton ships only as stubs. If Content Manager opens on a black screen, or the game crashes the moment a Lua script runs, that is what proton-setup.sh in the release archive installs. It also puts the fonts in, which the panel needs to draw at all.

FROM SOURCE

Rust, a workspace, no system libraries to hunt down. The Linux build additionally wants the Windows target if you want to build the bridge yourself.

git clone https://github.com/Rgosh/ac-pro-engineer.git
cd ac-pro-engineer
cargo run --release

# the Proton bridge, on Linux
cargo build --release -p shm-bridge --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

IN THE GAME

Custom Shaders Patch's app sidebar → enable the panel. It is listed there as Pro Engineer, which is what it is called inside the game. The panel is already there: the application wrote it when it started, and rewrites it whenever it differs from the running build.

If the automatic install cannot work — a game folder it may not write to, an install in an unusual place, a second copy of the game — the panel is also in the overlay/ folder of the archive. Drop the ac_pro_engineer folder into assettocorsa/apps/lua/ by hand and that is the whole remedy.

IF THE PANEL IS BLANK

This is the question the project is asked most, and there is a screen for it: the panel's own status window names which of the three pieces does not fit. In order of how often each is the answer:

Still stuck? Open an issue with what that status screen says. It carries the three versions and what the mapping looks like, which is most of the answer already.