1y ago

Help. Various games stopped working and i have no idea how to diagnose the issues

What stopped working:

GzDoom (native, black screen after choosing .wad)
Orcs Must Die 1 & 2 (proton, either doesn't launch at all, or launches with severe graphical issues such as the menu and buttons missing or the whole thing being pink and green)
serious sam tfe, tse; painkiller black (wine via either bottles or pol, extreme speedup every 5 seconds)
luxor 3 (bottles, crashes on launch)
hotline miami 2 (proton, crash on launch)
lego indy 2 (bottles, sound effects at 150% loudness)

most of these worked previously, but seemingly broke out of nowhere, unless driver or kernel updates wrecked thwm, but if that is the case i haven't the faintest clue on how to troubleshoot that besides trying every previous kernel i can still download.

Device: Legion 5-15, 16gb ram, radeon 5 4600, nvidia rtx 3060 mobile, newest version of mint and newest LTS kernel. LUKS partition. I'll add more info when i get home.

So, tl;dr:

how to troubleshoot proton games
how to troubleshoot wine games in bottles and pol
how to prevent games breaking out of nowhere in the future

29 comments

Have you rebooted your system or tried selecting a previous kernel version upon boot to see if the problem remains?
- GZDoom and Orcs Must Die 1 work now, everything else still the same

Thanks for the great and detailled report. Here's an upvote for you :)
Maybe you can try another prefix, like using Wine/ Proton 7.x instead of the current 8.x. Or try the GE-versions.
That's what helped me the most so far, but I didn't have many issues by now.
Also, those glitches sound like a faulty GPU or driver. Maybe try a live USB and launch a game from that with another distro like Fedora?
Have you checked out ProtonDB if the games work OOTB or require some tweaks?
- Thx.
  Changing prefixes either does nothing, or makes it worse which would be the case for the ones that do start.
  Probably not a GPU issue, as these glitches only occurvin the listed games.
  Regarding protondb (an winedb too i guess) the games are, at worst, silver rated.

Instead of guessing, looking at the log might help. Launch the game with PROTON_LOG=1 %command% set in "Set Launch Options" setting in the game properties. The log file will appear on your home directory.
- Magica is claiming an issue with VCRedist, Orcs Must Die 2 doesn't close on its own so no log, Serious sams and painkiller don't show any problems. The rest isn't using proton.
  
  It's a long shot, but sometimes when I have issues with proton which I can't figure out, switching from Wayland to X11 (or vice versa) magically fixed it.

I think mint has timeshift enabled by default. Try going back to when the games worked and figure out what change caused the gamss to break?
- didn't make em often enough, sadly

How do you handle which GPU is used in which game? I would guess you have an AMD iGPU, and a Nvidia GPU for games, right? Maybe something along those lines got updated?
- That's correct, but i mostly let the laptop handle it, unless i know for a fact that a game needs/doesn't need the N GPU, in which case i either manually switch it over or (and this is the case for wine apps through bottles) i configure the program to only use the iGPU
  
  What are you using to switch the GPU? Have you tried alternatives? EnvyControl for example.
  Also, have you checked if you’re using ONLY Radeon-Vulkan for the AMDGPU, and not AMDVLK also?

Can you pinpoint what you did to your system before? Did you do a system update? Did you move game files around? Did you add any repositories trying to install something that also updated other dependencies, or alike?
- At most i updated my system and kernel, didn't fiddle with anything else
  
  I'm not familiar with mint, but maybe you can see whether you can easily downgrade to the previous version you had. And hold off on the updates until a fix is published for the broken stuff.
  But before that, take a look at the mint communities and see whether it's a known issue and whether there is a manual intervention needed to fix it. Something like "newest update broke some proton games", etc.

DId your Nvidia drivers update recently? If yes try the older Nvidia driver
- nope, they didn't

Try using an older version of proton?
- didn't work

Did you move files to an NTFS shared drive? Proton + ntfs is flaky as all hell in my experience, and the problems are impossible to troubleshoot.
- No, the drive has been ext4 encrypted with LUKS from the start.

That must suck, I hope you get your answer man.
- I think i'll take the opportunity and try Debian, maybe PoPOs

You should upgrade to Windows
- *downgrade
- Beehaw of course

29 comments