X3:AP is still on 3.1a, years after Egosoft have released 3.3... so I'm just gonna leave this here.

Not really. The binaries are on 3.1a as well.

The main issue I have is that I've switched my day to day gaming to a Linux box. I've previously played X3:AP on Windows 10 a lot and tried to copy my saves over to Linux. They're not recognized due to the difference in version...

I had a ton of time invested in that game. I could always start over, I know, but this is an awful reason to do it.

Yes, we demand a fix!

I've opened a support ticket with GOG last year and reopened it this year. Was told the proper people have been notified, but nothing's happened since :(.

Thank you for keeping at it.

I've heard rumor of said save incompatibility issues a number of times, but I don't have a Windows box to verify it myself.

That's certainly a sad state of affairs for multi-platform gamers. Version numbers aside, that on its own warrants a correction by EgoSoft. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much GOG can do aside from applying a bit of nag pressure. With EgoSoft seemingly 100% locked into X4 these days, I wouldn't count on a timely response.

Someone from the Egosoft dev team seems to have noticed my pleas: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=425370#p4939820

Still no ETA, but this is the first confirmation I have that they're aware of the issue, so at least there's that.

As an aside, you mentioned over there that you painstakingly got X3 running in Wine. I gave that a go last week with little success -- kept running into gstreamer plugin crashes (even after adding all the i386 gstreamer libs). Mind sharing your specs and used winetricks?

Also, stock WineHQ build? (I haven't bothered trying a proton or crossover build yet.)

If I can get it up and running, I'll add a writeup here and a summary over in Judas' wine thread.

Wine Staging from WineHQ. 32bit Wine prefix.

winetricks as follows:
amstream
devenum
quartz
wsh57
wmp10
vcrun6

And, most importantly, installed this (manually): http://howto.landure.fr/gnu-linux/installer-directx-9-0c-avec-wine/amov4ie.exe , otherwise the game will hang when it tries to play the intro video. Note that upgrading your prefix will override the files it replaces, so you may have to reinstall it each time you upgrade Wine.

This Wine AppDB entry was the most useful.

And last but not least, I have used DXVK - not sure how well the game runs with WineD3D.

UPDATE: This post was resolved -- see Edit #2 -- leaving for painful reminders and posterity :)

Well I got it to run fine (including video) on base WineD3D, but can't get any in-game voice or audio backtrack in the videos--I'm guessing it's a missing audio codec. Removing gstreamer1.0-libav:i386 (or disabling winegstreamer via winecfg) doesn't seem to make any difference, though at least it doesn't crash anymore when gstreamer is enabled.

Are you using gstreamer? And if so which codec libs are you running?

---

Edit: With winegstreamer.dll -enabled- and the gstreamer plugin -uninstalled- I got an "audio/x-wma" missing plugin error, which isn't too uncommon a problem.

---log---
0036:err:gstreamer:unknown_type Could not find a filter for caps: "audio/x-wma, wmaversion=(int)2, bitrate=(int)48024, depth=(int)16, rate=(int)44100, channels=(int)1, block_align=(int)2230, codec_data=(buffer)008800000f0000000000"
0009:err:gstreamer:gstdecoder_init_gst Failed to play stream.
0035:err:gstreamer:watch_bus decodebin1: Your GStreamer installation is missing a plug-in.
0035:err:gstreamer:watch_bus gstdecodebin2.c(4679): gst_decode_bin_expose (): /GstBin:bin1/GstDecodeBin:decodebin1:
no suitable plugins found:
---end log---

I'll keep at it a little while longer and see if I can find a fix. Honestly I wouldn't normally put in the effort, but I'm just tired of people having problems with the linux version ;)

---

Edit #2: Nevermind, audio problems solved. Was using an outdated winetricks installation and wmp10 was silently partially failing. That'll teach me to keep up to date, eh? ;)

Before I write this up, any particular reason you added vcrun6? Everything seemed to run well without it, though I only played for about 5 minutes.

My final working combo (on Linux Mint 19.3 + WineHQ's staging 5.6) was:

packages:
gstreamer1.0-libav:i386 (required for in-game voice audio)
gstreamer1.0-plugins-*:i386 (base/good/ugly -- "bad" conflicts between 32 and 64-bit versions)

winetricks:
amstream
devenum
quartz
wsh57 (auto-installed dependency of wmp10)
wmp10

extra:
amov4ie.exe -- it's also hosted over at PlayOnLinux now.

I was away for a while, but I'm glad you got this working :).

It might have been added as a dependency of something else I previously had in that prefix. Now that I'm having a second look over the winetricks logs, it's actually the first mentioned in the list, so yeah, probably not really needed.

Alright. It took a few days to get to it, but the full installation guide and The "Judas does this run in Wine" thread post are finally up :)

Well, I'll be damned... never thought it'd see the day we get an up to date Linux version.