https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39655
--- Comment #2 from Adam Bolte abolte@systemsaviour.com --- (In reply to Anthony Jagers from comment #1)
I have it working. Since I was unable to duplicate my success in other distro's, I'm not sure why. My feeling is that it has something to do with the native resolutions of the coded cut scenes vs the resolution you are trying to run the game in.
I ran:
$ xrandr --output DP-1 --mode 1920x1080
(which reduced my resolution down from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080) and tried re-launching the game. No effect. This is odd, since it worked for me in 1.8-rc1 as per my previous entry. I reverted to 1.8-rc1 and confirmed it does work, so suspected there may be a regression. Tried 1.8-rc2, and that was crashing. Went back to 1.8-rc1 again, and now that was crashing!
So in conclusion,. it's nothing to do with resolutions and all just completely random. :)
I would try to remove the intro movies pak. Rename or move Game2/_FastLoad/IntroMovies.pak. There is another pak you should experiment with, Game2/Videos.pak. This would disable cut scenes altogether.
This is interesting. If I rename Game2/_FastLoad/IntroMovies.pak, I get the blank screen with cursor, which I believe is supposed to be the main menu... but then after about two seconds I get the same crash. So perhaps another background thread independent of the video being played is the issue here.
Try to hand edit your config file. The steam forum has been helpful for me.
I got in ...common/Enemy Front/System.cfg the lines.
r_Driver=DX9 r_Fullscreen=0 r_Width=1280 r_Height=720 r_PostProcessHUD3DShadowAmount=0.3
Even though winecfg says my prefix is set to Windows XP, r_Driver was set to DX11. It must be related to being a fresh installation and all that new DX11 code added as of late. I tried changing the setting to DX9 and setting r_Width=2560 and r_Height=1440, and it actually worked right up until the menu (which still doesn't load but shows a black screen and a custom mouse cursor). However when I tried to run the game a second time, the crash during the cut-scene returned. As I hypothesised above, probably changing system.cfg had no effect at all and the crashing is entirely related to chance.
Delete the $HOME/Enemy Front folder everytime you try to restart. If it works you'll have low detail, which you can turn back on when you start playing.
I tried all the above system.cfg values, removed the EnemyFront folder, ran `wineserver -k`, ran `xrandr --output DP-1 --mode 1920x1080`... and crash.
The configs in the file Game2/_FastLoad/startup.pak maybe worth editing. It's a 7-zip file. This I learned from the steam forum.
Just a regular zip file by the look of it. But I'd rather find the root cause of the problems I'm observing than find a work-around.
I know this game used to work for me (and I played it for an hour or so), but that was some time ago - and I had to patch wine to avoid flicking (the Crysis engine bug which has since been fixed). I don't like patching my Wine install, so I ignored this game for about a year. During that time, I reinstalled using the latest version of Wine (which seems to have changed the defaults in the config since it had DX11 in system.cfg and you had DX9 - unfortunately I didn't keep my old wineprefix around), I have upgraded from Debian Wheezy to Debian Jessie, I have a new monitor with a bigger default resolution, I have made slight changes to my system hardware configuration, and there have been a ton of changes in Wine too (which is hard to regression test since you need patches to work around other bugs such as the flickering), I have updated my Wine build scripts to enable CFLAGS="-g -O0"... There are so many things that could potentially be related, but Wine should be able to deal with whatever the root cause is.