Wine version affecting save game location? (Xenonauts 2)

I am playing Xenonauts 2 (purchsed from GOG) through Heroic. When I first started I forgot to set Proton as my WINE version of choice in Heroic, but the game ran fine at first. I played a few hours and noticed performance starting to degrade, which is when I realised I had forgot to set the WINE version I wanted. I saved, quit out of the game, changed WINE versions, and started the game again. All my saves were gone. I changed WINE back, and my saves are there again. The autodetected save folder is empty (I detected it when Proton was selected, and I can't see a way to re-generate it) so I don't know where my saves are or indeed where they go. Why would this happen? How do I access my saves from another WINE implementation?

Log: https://paste.debian.net/1342383/

worthy-azure•1/4/25, 10:37 AM

Wine-GE creates symlinks within the prefix back to the relevant user folders in your home directory, Proton doesn’t. You have to manually moves your saves when you change from one to the other.

sacred-roseOP•1/4/25, 12:18 PM

Thank you. I kept searching within the prefix folders, which are many and labyrinthine; searching in /home was much easier. How do I tag this as solved?

dry-scarlet•1/4/25, 7:52 PM

its more than that, wine-ge stores its windows file structure in drive_c within your prefix.. while proton stores it at pfx/drive_c

dry-scarlet•1/4/25, 7:56 PM

so any saves written to somewhere in say the user's AppData folder, will not be seen if you change from wine to proton or vice versa.. this is generally for all games

worthy-azure•1/5/25, 5:18 AM

Unless I’m missing something, as long as the symlinks are in place and pointing to the correct folders in the home directory, where they actually are in the prefix shouldn’t matter a whole lot. AppData is a special case, since that doesn’t get linked back to the users home directory with either Wine-GE or Proton.

dry-scarlet•1/5/25, 5:27 AM

most games save in app data fwiw

dry-scarlet•1/5/25, 5:28 AM

as is ms's official recommendation for devs for some years

dry-scarlet•1/5/25, 5:30 AM

only games like before 2015 or so were saving in my docs in the game save folder

dry-scarlet•1/5/25, 5:30 AM

and then early 2000s games tended to save wherever, including in the game directory haha

dry-scarlet•1/5/25, 5:33 AM

thats why most of the time we suggest people not keep swapping their prefixes, and why its a frequent thing for folks to lose saves when they switch between proton/wine

Wine version affecting save game location? (Xenonauts 2)

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