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 That happens when your version is outdated or missing.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.

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.

Thanks a lot for the reply. I’ve been going through each of your suggestions.

Firstly, I’ve tested using a few different runners, including caffe-9.7, ge-proton10-15, wine-ge-proton8-26, kron4ek-wine-10.14-amd64 and a couple of others. In every case, it fails on the original bottle but works on the new. I’ve got what I think are the latest versions of dxvk (2.7.1) and dxvk-nvapi (0.9.0); 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.).

By default, the game uses dx12. But if I launch it with -dx11 then it uses 11 instead. So I tried disabling vkd3d and launching with that command option as you suggested; again, it fails on the original bottle but works on the new one. When using dx12, there are heaps of messages in the terminal (mostly identical, but with that failure near the end only for the broken version). Whereas with dx11 there are very few messages in the terminal. The broken version gives me 00b4:err:hid:udev_bus_init UDEV monitor creation failed. (every runner gives me 002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126). - but I seem to get that all the time on every app even when it works fine. So I assume that is irrelevant.)

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. Do you mean bottles itself, or the game, or something else - I’m not really sure how this stuff works exactly. In this case, I installed mono within the bottle manually by downloading and msi and running it in the bottle. I wasn’t able to find it in the dependencies list inside Bottles, so that’s why I did it manually. But I got the link to the msi download from the bottle dependency list on github. In both of the bottles, the windows uninstaller list tells me that I have 10.1.0 of the Wine Mono runtime.

All the mono stuff looks right to me, but given that I don’t know what I’m doing, I reckon its quite likely that the root of the problem is related to that stuff. Maybe I didn’t install it correctly or something.

I tried deleting the cache, and that didn’t work. I also tried copying the cache from the working version to the broken version; that didn’t work either.

Anyone, thanks again for your thoughts and info on this. I feel like the underlying message in what your saying is that I should just accept that it works in the new one and not the old one - and take that to be the standard practice for how I should do it anyway! Which isn’t exactly what I want, but perhaps it’s the best answer I’m going to get.