Normally I don't do this, but since I'm bored with grinding on my other games, and I was told it "works perfectly" in wine in the release thread, I thought I'd ask if anybody here on gog has had success running this game in wine. For me, it just instantly exits, with no message, no crash, no log file(s) left behind, nothing but an exit code of 1. It's the same with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I tried a trace, but was overwhelmed and didn't feel like continuing. I have never really gotten wine-gdb working right, so that leaves me with nothing.

Then again, gog seems to have just released a bunch of interesting other games so maybe I'll just pass again, until the game gets a native version or otherwise just starts working.

Thanks. My takeaway from that post is "winetricks dsound corefonts". I suppose the post also implies use of the latest version of wine, which I already tried (as well as a few other variants, such as older stables and staging; I have a lot of versions installed on my machine and it's easy for me to switch between them). Neither affected the behavior of the game at all.

I should also mention that of the 370 Windows-native games I have installed, at least 43 of which do not work, none of the others behave in this way. When they do fail, they at least give some indication as to why (even if that indication may be misleading).

Thanks. That didn't work, but using Abyss.stk did the trick. I normally just copy the command line that gog provides in the .lnk file after installation, but it doesn't use the extra argument. I wonder why it's different, but it doesn't really matter. I will now verify if the winetricks were really necessary, but probably later today.

Edit: neither winetricks seemed to be needed on my machine. Naturally if there are little quirks I can't tell if it doesn't affect gameplay. I did need to run it in a full-screen virtual desktop, because otherwise the game would randomly shift up and left by 1/4 the screen for some reason. Probably one of the oddities of my window manager, and not applicable to anyone else. No matter what, I can't change resolution in the options menu, but it doesn't matter since I run it at full res anyway.

Summary: just run the game with the Abyss.stk command-line argument to get it to run, probably. If you get the shift issue, also use winecfg to set a virtual desktop at full-screen resolution.

edit 2: not sure if wine or not, but there are other issues with the game. I was going to try some things myself before reporting, but I got sidetracked and I'll look into them next week if I have time. So far, it crashes if I try to use grenades, and there seems to be no map ('M' brings up a blank map, and if the radar only contains dots and selected icons; judging from the screenshots, this is not normal). I have yet to try ship combat, so there may be more.

Just dropping by to second the statement that both the map and launching grenades do not work properly under wine. Launching grenades results in an instant crash of the game.

While you, dear developer, are apparently active in the forum thread, do you consider it legit to come about with wine-related problems during indev? I mean I bought the game with the prospect of it working under wine (about perfectly), as well as there being a linux version at some point, but I guess you also have to prioritise. Do you check for wine-compatibility every now and then?
This is not meant to be sarcastic or anything. I just understand that solo develoment is quite tough.

greetings labuvetteducampus

Thanks. That is not a solution for me. First, I use amdgpu. Second, I refuse to install proprietary drivers. Don't worry about it too much, though. I can't devote time to playing this game right now anyway, and I don't care right if it never woks. Only about 90% of my games work on wine, anyway.

If this game is using opengl, I may be able to track the issue down and fix it on my end, but that will have to probably wait until the city isn't shut down any more due to COVID-19 panic. Oddly enough, I have less opportunity to do things on the Internet and/or play games than before.

Last night, I finished my other tasks early and decided to see if there were any obvious issues I could find in this game. After trying the obvious track of shader compile problems, I realized I had wasted my time, since the game apparently does support opengl, but decides to use d3d instead. I should have instead tried to figure out why my machine was rejected. Based on the log, all it did was read the vendor and renderer strings, so I assumed it was using a blacklist or whitelist. Looking for matching strings in the executable pointed me to the whitelist. Forcing my renderer and vendor into the whitelist does, indeed, cause the game to choose opengl.

With opengl, the main map now appears, and grenades no longer crash. I did not notice any other issues. The radar still does not appear to have a map, but I only tested the game for 5 minutes as I had already wasted too much time chasing failed d3d shader compiles. Maybe I'll test a little more if I have time later this week.

So, what criteria do you use to select opengl? Is it just a whitelist, as it appears? Or is there at least a configuration option or command-line flag to force it to use opengl? Do you also use the renderer/vendor strings to determine render paths, as many games infuriatingly do?

I think the correct solution, for now, is not to use the proprietary drivers, but to use a shim that advertises mesa as the appropriate whitelist entry, or for the whitelist to disappear/be overridden entirely. No wine user prefers emulated (and apparently buggy) d3d over opengl, no matter how "inferior" the opengl driver may be (after all, it eventually gets translated to opengl, anyway, except when using wine-nine).

edit: for reference, I have posted a quick & dirty shim adapted from my earlier efforts to fix Stars in Shadow on my bitbucket account. Read the top of the source file for build and use instructions. You will also have to set the GL_FAKE_RENDERER and/or GL_FAKE_VENDOR environment variables. I don't know what the game prefers, but "HD Graphics" and "AMD", respectively, work for me.

FYI on native Windows, OpenGL is used rather than D3D (found this out while trying to add SMAA via SweetFX).