bucaneer

Now that you mention it, I haven't seen any Desert or Middle Eastern maps among the dozen or so downed UFOs with my base in Egypt. It's always Farm, Industrial, or for one remote crash Arctic. Playing v1.60 and v1.61 on Linux. I guess I didn't make the connection because none of them were located blatantly in the middle of the Sahara or something, but it is odd.

It creates a Wine prefix to be used only by Xenonauts, which can help prevent harmful cross-interactions with other Wine applications. A Wine prefix (also called "bottle") is a sort of virtual installation of Windows - it has Windows-style folder structure (e.g. "Windows", "Program Files", "Users", etc) and contains all the imitation .dlls that translate Windows-specific calls into Linux-specific ones, as well as various user settings. Problem is, some tweaks that may be necessary to make one program work under Wine may in turn cause a different program to break - say, one program doesn't launch unless you use an actual DirectX .dll from Windows, whereas another only runs when you use the version of that is provided by Wine. It is possible to set up individual configurations for each program, but creating a fresh prefix is a simple and foolproof way to avoid complications of that sort. In effect, this increases the total install size of the game (by ~300MB), but prevents potential idiosyncratic issues from cropping up for users who have done something with their Wine configuration that Xenonauts doesn't like.

Well, it runs. I've been playing the Windows version under Wine for a while so I don't think there's need for much testing aside from getting the game to launch. A bit sad that Autoresolve was removed rather than fixed - I assumed that since the crash happens only there and not in other similar conditions there would be some obviously distinct piece of code that could be identified and corrected. Aside from that, it may be worth noting that windowed mode doesn't work - even if the checkbox is ticked, the game launches in fullscreen. But it's possible to run the game in a window by configuring Wine to run the game in a virtual desktop, which is what I've been doing.

Have you tried using the proprietary Catalyst drivers? AMD open-source drivers should be good enough for a 2D game like this, but you never know.

Unrelatedly, how is the Linux port/wrapper coming along? Any leads on the autoresolve crash?

This is still a problem in V1.0 with Wine version 1.7.18.

What do they add to Steam? Cash, of course. People spent more than one and a half million euros on the special holiday cards that existed during the few weeks of the Christmas sale. Check out this forum thread wherein I argue (and provide evidence) that the profits from those holiday cards stand a good chance of competing with profits made by games that were among the top 20 or even top 10 best selling during the sale. As to why people buy them, the best reason I could find is that they have a pricetag attached to them.

One thing that makes this problem less visible is the overly favourable autoresolve outcomes. I've had one engagement that I simply couldn't find a way to win: two Condors with alenium missiles and basic autocannons vs. a Corvette. The best I could manage was let one of the Condors flank and empty its ammo reserves, then slip the other Condor past the Corvette's insta-kill rockets and have it fire both missiles and most of its autocannon ammo before getting shot down. This only did about 80% damage to the Covette. But the autoresolve gave this battle a 98% chance, and resulted in both Condors surviving with minor damage and some ammo left over. But since I'm playing on Linux I couldn't autoresolve without getting a CTD afterwards, so after many reloads I had to let the Corvette go. Obviously, the chances to win manually and by autoresolving should be brought closer. In fact, I think autoresolve should give somewhat less than optimal outcomes, just like air strikes give less money than ground missions. Autoresolve should be a way to avoid wasting time on easy battles you simply can't lose and not something that lets you circumvent challenge.

I can confirm this. It only happens after an autoresolve, when pressing either "Return to base" or "Select new target". Redirecting aircraft in other circumstances (i.e. dropships after a ground mission or interceptors after a manual air battle) functions normally. The crash occurs with both of the two recent Wine versions that I have on hand (1.7.13 and 1.7.15). Also, switching to v22 experimental build 2 does not help.