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!
Any specific reason you aren’t using Heroic Launcher? It supports GOG.
I believe that Heroic Launcher is good and trustworthy, but nevertheless I don’t particularly want to be giving my GOG details to a third party. And in general, I prefer things to be simple and isolated. So I don’t really want integration with different accounts anyway. I’d prefer to just say “this is the thing I want to install, and this is where I want it to be installed”.
It might be possible to use Heroic Launcher in a way that would suit me, but the one time I did try to install a game with it, it didn’t work and I wasn’t sure where it had tried to install it, or why it didn’t work… and so I basically just went back to what I was doing in the first place - which was installing games in Bottles. (And although I’ve spent ages trying to work out this particular problem, the fact is that I can still play every windows game I have with Bottles, including this new one.)
[edit] I feel like a lot of the replies past this point kind of ignore what I’ve just said. The short of it is that I’m not intending to use Heroic in the near future. I understand and appreciate that many people think its a great product. But different people have different priorities and values. I have my reasons for not using it, and the testimonials don’t really address the topic of this thread. Note: the main goal of the thread is ‘how can understand and fix this bottle problem’, rather than ‘how can I get this game working’. I can already get the game working.
You are not giving them your details. Heroic Games Launcher is open source, you can verify their explanations in the FAQ:
"Does Heroic collect my data, username, or password?
No, Heroic is a privacy-centered application and does not collect any data from your computer or device. It does not collect your username, password, or any other personal information. You will login on the official Epic Games Store or GOG website and then Heroic will keep only a token that serves only to list, download and to launch games from those stores."
I’ve played Control using Heroic and it worked great.
I think Heroic uses a safe way to log in to accounts. It uses the service’s (GOG, Epic…) own website for that. You can also change the installation location of games. Defaults are ~/Games/Heroic for games and ~/Games/Heroic/Prefixes for their prefixes, but you can change those and can also install and move games one by one to other locations.
Some of the nice things about Heroic are that it can inform about and install game updates as they become available. You can also easily change various settings, such as the Proton version used for each game or globally.
EDIT: You can view Heroic’s log files under Settings -> Logs.
Aaand you can install exe-s very easily using heroic. I’ve install legacy games (win98/dos) and ive also installed modern apps like Ableton live 11 using heroic. Once Ive nailed the method it’s super simple. Since there’s only a few options to F around with it was fairly easy to experiment till it works