I recently bought Control - Ultimate Edition, from GOG, but I was struggling to get it to launch.

My usual strategy for non-steam games is to use Bottles. And so far that has worked well for every game I’ve tried. But for Control, the game installed fine but when I try to launch it, nothing happens.

I have read on ProtonDB that the game generally works with no problems. This includes a couple of mentions of success with the GOG version. I saw no hint of any problem to be solved.

I’m not sure where to look for error logs. So it’s difficult for me to trouble-shoot. I did find that if I open with a terminal, it complained that Wine Mono was not installed. The obvious fix for that is that I should install wine mono in the bottle, which I did, and that error goes away but the game still does not run. The terminal does still give a heap of messages, but to my untrained eye it looks fine.

Anyway, after stuffing around with different settings with no success, I tried creating a fresh bottle - and that worked. The game in the new bottle launches fine.

That’s great, but I don’t like the idea of stuff just not working for reasons I don’t understand. So I’m still trying to find and fix the problem in the original bottle. All of my other games are installed in the original bottle, and I’d like to keep it that way - for neatness and ease of keeping track of were files are etc.

But I don’t know what else to try. I’ve compared all the settings I can find for the two bottles and made them identical. And I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game (which takes ages, because its a big game) - no success.

So I’m wondering if there is some way I can ‘repair’ or ‘refresh’ the bottle, because obviously something is wrong. And although all my other games work fine, I don’t like the idea that they are living in a broken bottle! (I’m also considering moving everything to the new bottle, but I think that would mean I have to reinstall them all one by one and manually copy settings and saves - so that’s not very appealing.)

–

I’ve compared to terminal messages of the version that works and the version that doesn’t - and they are almost identical. But the broken version has this:

10751.554:0124:0138:info:vkd3d-proton:vkd3d_pipeline_library_disk_cache_initial_setup: Failed to map read-only cache: Z:\home\username\.var\app\com.usebottles.bottles\data\bottles\bottles\Game-bottle\cache\vkd3d_shader\vkd3d-proton.cache. (whereas the other one succeeds). So… that’s a hint I guess, but I’m not sure where to go from there.

So… if an experienced person out there has any ideas, I’d be appreciate the help!

  • StillDepressedMan@reddthat.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I’m not sure what you mean about ‘can’t download the newest Mono’; because I’m not sure when / what might be trying to download Mono.

    When you switch Wine to a newer version, if the Wine developers have updated Mono or Gecko, Wine will show a popup asking if you want to download them. That happens when your version is outdated or missing.

    002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\windows\system32\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).

    Thats tatally normal.

    but not the latest vkd3d (there seems to be a problem with the download of this in bottles at the moment. I have 2.10.).

    For your information, the current version is something like 2.14. But never mind, I don’t think this is related to the Directx3D implementation, wine or Mono if these things did not help. I just wanted to know if everything was up to date, because always is possibility that could help.

    Wine is far from perfect and sometimes things just break—sometimes because of a system update, sometimes because of a Bottles update, sometimes due to changes in the prefix settings, game update or just bug in wine causing data corruption.

    You’re in a good position since reinstalling actually helped you. That’s not always the case. Sometimes you need to wait months—or even years—for regressions to be fixed.

    Appendix

    I don’t know how familiar you are with Wine, but for the future remember: dxvk is not the default Wine implementation for DirectX 9–11. By default Wine uses wined3d, which is slower but often more robust. So if something doesn’t work, just try disabling dxvk.

    However, in Bottles there’s currently a bug (I think) where to switch properly you first need to change the Wine version to an older one, and then back to the version you actually want to use.

    It’s best to enable performance monitoring and check whether the game is running with dxvk, vkd3d, or wined3d to be sure.

    • blind3rdeye@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      When you switch Wine to a newer version, if the Wine developers have updated Mono or Gecko, Wine will show a popup asking if you want to download them. That happens when your version is outdated or missing.

      Hmm. But I’m not manually installing Wine. As far as I’m aware, the only implementations of Wine I have have been installed via Bottles (and via Steam, I guess). So for me, getting a new version of Wine basically means going to the ‘runners’ tab in the Bottles preferences menu, and clicking download on a newer version of something. And that has never shown any kind of popup. It just downloads it, and then I later select that new version in a menu for to choose to use it. So I guess I don’t really know when or if mono and gecko ever get updated. If it is integrated into the runner, I suppose they are upgraded like that - but I suspect they are not, because I manually installed wine mono to resolve that first error message.

      I reckon somewhere in this business is where the problem is.

      I don’t know how familiar you are with Wine, but for the future remember: dxvk is not the default Wine implementation for DirectX 9–11. By default Wine uses wined3d, which is slower but often more robust. So if something doesn’t work, just try disabling dxvk.

      However, in Bottles there’s currently a bug (I think) where to switch properly you first need to change the Wine version to an older one, and then back to the version you actually want to use.

      I didn’t know either of those things. And that’s good info for testing purposes. Thank you again.