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.)

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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!