Newest update breaks Debian compatibility

[MarcelBru]

Dear Goldhawk Team,

I love your games and am currently on the latest Steam build. Unfortunately, the latest patch has led the infamous "Failed to initialize graphics. Make sure you have DX11" bug to appear. I am on Debian Linux and have tried

- Proton experimental, hotfix and 10

- nvidia 535.216.01 up to the latest 575 drivers (that came out very recently)

 

I cannot play Xenonauts 2 atm since playing in D3D really isn't an option. I am aware that this is a Unity bug, I just wanted to let you know that us Debian users cannot play your game atm.. maybe you can see if Unity patches this one? Maybe give them a call?

Many thanks!

[Chris]

1 hour ago, MarcelBru said:

Dear Goldhawk Team,

I love your games and am currently on the latest Steam build. Unfortunately, the latest patch has led the infamous "Failed to initialize graphics. Make sure you have DX11" bug to appear. I am on Debian Linux and have tried

- Proton experimental, hotfix and 10

- nvidia 535.216.01 up to the latest 575 drivers (that came out very recently)

 

I cannot play Xenonauts 2 atm since playing in D3D really isn't an option. I am aware that this is a Unity bug, I just wanted to let you know that us Debian users cannot play your game atm.. maybe you can see if Unity patches this one? Maybe give them a call?

Many thanks!

Hi,

Thanks for notifying us. Although Xenonauts 2 doesn't support Linux, we'll still try and help our Linux users if we can. When you say "the latest update" do you just mean Milestone 5 (rather than a specific hotfix for Milestone 5)? Did Milestone 4 work fine then?

Is that error message common for people trying to play Unity games on Debian? I'm not that familiar with Linux gaming myself.

[MarcelBru]

Hello Chris, many thanks for responding:
This is the error message. Apparently, it's a Unity thing:
"Failed to initialize graphics.
Make sure you have DirectX 11 installed, have up to date
drivers for your graphics card and have not disabled
3D acceleration in display settings.
InitializeEngineGraphics failed"

The trouble began with the very last upstream patch you guys pushed. Up until then, everything was working. Strangely, even when I updated to nvidia 575 drivers, which are the latest to be released for any Linux system, the error persisted. I guess it might be something about unity (not) detecting DX11? The console is silent...

[MarcelBru]

Update @Chris
Using ghidra, I was able to disable the error message using jumper insertion. The game then proceeds to show a little Unity launching window that crashes without any stdout/stderr. I guess the drivers on Debian really are incompatible with Unity right now. Could you maybe tell me which beta to select to return to the patch before? Many thanks!

[Chris]

On 5/3/2025 at 4:36 PM, MarcelBru said:

Update @Chris
Using ghidra, I was able to disable the error message using jumper insertion. The game then proceeds to show a little Unity launching window that crashes without any stdout/stderr. I guess the drivers on Debian really are incompatible with Unity right now. Could you maybe tell me which beta to select to return to the patch before? Many thanks!

Hi, sorry for the slow reply - what I needed to know is what patch you're talking about. We're constantly releasing new patches for the game on different branches so I don't know where it broke for you.

I'm assuming you're playing on the standard Steam branch. I'm guessing you want to revert to the older Milestone 4 builds, rather than an older version of Milestone 5? In that case, you can switch to the Legacy beta branch and that will contain the final version of Milestone 4.

[Gijs-Jan]

@MarcelBru I've had this issue recently as well on Linux (Arch & Mint). The problem is that the i386 version of various graphics drivers got removed from graphics packages upstream on various distros (iirc - check this; or it was something along the lines of it becoming optional). Photon tends to use i386 instead of x64.
You'll want to opt-in to the i386 version of whatever distro packages you have, and reinstall your graphics drivers / ensure that the appropriate versions have been installed.