[V7.19.2 - startup] Fails to start - stuck at 57%, linux

[komunre]

Gets stuck trying to load into the main menu, the loading screen just like in countless other such cases says "Strategic Layer - Day 23". The error seems to differ from those on earlier posts on this forum. Never launched a game before, never played a demo or any other version of a game, never had a savefile.

Reinstalled multiple times, tried many different betas, tried few proton versions, nothing had fixed it.

The game also sets itself to german localization, even though my system is english, steam is english, and I don't even speak german, so dunno what happens.

Player.log output.log

[fusion-waffle]

Hello!  I also play on linux but have never hit this issue myself. I had a look at your log files, in both of them an unhandled exception is raised inside the call Common.Display.DisplayManager.EnumDisplayDevices(string,uint,Common.Display.DisplayManager/DISPLAY_DEVICE&,uint), with the error message "Illegal byte sequence encounted in the input" while calling System.Object.__icall_wrapper_mono_string_from_byvalstr to decode some bytes into a string.

 

My guess is that your system is returning information about your display devices (monitors?) but for some reason it is encoding one of the strings (the brand name or model of a display, perhaps?) is using a byte encoding that the C# mono System.Object.__icall_wrapper_mono_string_from_byvalstr function cannot interpret. E.g. perhaps the game code expects the string to be encoded in UTF-8, but Proton & your system is returning data that uses some other character encoding.

 

Apparently there is a way to enable Proton detailed logging, which might help figure out what is going on with EnumDisplayDevices on your machine.

To capture detailed proton logs:

1. steam library -> right click xenonauts 2 -> properties... -> general -> launch options -> replace it with 

   PROTON_LOG=+event,+x11drv,+x11settings,+win,+system,+fshack,+msg %command%

2. launch the game as normal from steam
3. exit the game / let it crash
4. in your home folder, there should now be a log file steam-538030.log
5. Attach that log file back in this thread

I tried this out on my linux system, where xenonauts 2 works fine through proton, the log file contains some info about the emulated win32 api calls such as the problematic EnumDisplayDevices call - so maybe there will be another clue.

 

Another idea:  check what system locale are you using for character encoding -- run "locale" in a terminal, hopefully it confirms you are using UTF-8 encoding & not something exotic (e.g. i am australian, my locale output says LANG=en_AU.UTF-8 )

Edited April 21 by fusion-waffle

[komunre]

Hi. The locale has been a mix of en_US.UTF-8 and ru_RU.UTF-8, but after setting everything to en_US.UTF-8 the issue remains. Proton log is attached. I guess since it's display related it is important to note that I'm using Wayland.

steam-538030.log

[fusion-waffle]

Thanks for trying that and checking your locale.

 

I took a look at your proton log & compared it to my one.  There are some minor differences - your proton is using newer wine libraries than mine, but that's likely unrelated. I am using Wayland, ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS & an AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU.

 

In both of our logs, I can see three patches in that log where NtUserEnumDisplayDevices (wine's implementation of the win32 EnumDisplayDevices function) is being called:

1. first, gets called to enumerate display devices before a call to WIN_CreateWindowEx L"WineAppBar"
   1. this appears to be some Wine implementation detail, it is unrelated to Unity & Xenonauts 2
   2. OK
2. second, it gets called to enumerate display devices before a call to WIN_CreateWindowEx L"" L"UnityWndClass"
   1. this seems to be Unity engine creating the window to display the application
   2. this seems to create a 320x240 window somewhere
   3. your logs look similar to mine, this seems to be working fine
   4. OK
3. third, NtUserEnumDisplayDevices gets called before listing all the supported resolutions
   1. in my log, it lists pages and pages of supported resolutions after the first NtUserEnumDisplayDevices call
   2. in your log, after the first NtUserEnumDisplayDevices call, there is nothing
   3. no problem at the proton level is directly visible from this proton log file.
   4. per your Xenonauts 2 output.log file,  my guess is that Xenonauts 2 code Common.Display.DisplayManager.Initialize successfully made a call to EnumDisplayDevices (which ends up calling Wine's NtUserEnumDisplayDevices) but then failed to interpret the results, threw an exception & crashed.

So, unfortunately that doesn't give us any ideas of how to fix your issue.

 

It is interesting that the Unity engine is able to successfully call Wine's NtUserEnumDisplayDevices & create the UnityWndClass window -- that appears to work, so it isn't completely broken on your machine, it integrates with the Unity engine's code.  There may be some issue or limitation specific to the native code bindings that Xenonauts 2 Common.Display.DisplayManager.Initialize uses to call NtUserEnumDisplayDevices

 

If you have access to multiple computers, you could try running the game from a different computer that has a different GPU & monitor. It is possible a different GPU & monitor may not run into this issue.

 

Edited April 21 by fusion-waffle

[komunre]

It does work on Steam Deck, but I don't even have a dock for the s-deck yet, so I still want it to work on my main machine.

Edited April 21 by komunre

[Kouki]

On 4/21/2026 at 4:03 AM, komunre said:

Gets stuck trying to load into the main menu, the loading screen just like in countless other such cases says "Strategic Layer - Day 23". The error seems to differ from those on earlier posts on this forum. Never launched a game before, never played a demo or any other version of a game, never had a savefile.

Reinstalled multiple times, tried many different betas, tried few proton versions, nothing had fixed it.

The game also sets itself to german localization, even though my system is english, steam is english, and I don't even speak german, so dunno what happens.

Player.log 17.3 kB · 3 downloads output.log 1.09 kB · 3 downloads

Sorry for the slow reply but thanks for taking the time to post a bug report! Our tech lead has made a fix for this which should come out in a future patch!

[komunre]

Thank you very much! Looking forward to the patch!