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
34 points · 26 comments · view on lemmy.world

26 Comments

signor@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 2y (1 reply)

Have you rebooted your system or tried selecting a previous kernel version upon boot to see if the problem remains?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y

GZDoom and Orcs Must Die 1 work now, everything else still the same

redcalcium@lemmy.institute · 4 pts · 2y (3 replies)

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.

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y (2 replies)

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.

redcalcium@lemmy.institute · 3 pts · 2y (1 reply)

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.

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y

Nope.

Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de · 4 pts · 2y (1 reply)

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?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 3 pts · 2y

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.

iamak@infosec.pub · 3 pts · 2y (1 reply)

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?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 2 pts · 2y

didn't make em often enough, sadly

Perroboc@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2y (4 replies)

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?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y (3 replies)

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

Perroboc@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2y (2 replies)

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?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y (1 reply)

No clue, since mint cinnamon (afaik) doesn't have a GUI for managing gpu drivers i don't know how to approach it.

TerraRoot@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 2y

Can you simplfy the issue by disabling the nvidia in bios?

Sentau@feddit.de · 3 pts · 2y (1 reply)

DId your Nvidia drivers update recently? If yes try the older Nvidia driver

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y

nope, they didn't

ad_on_is@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2y (2 replies)

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?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 2 pts · 2y (1 reply)

At most i updated my system and kernel, didn't fiddle with anything else

ad_on_is@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2y

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.

Bo7a@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 2y (1 reply)

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.

dynamo@lemm.ee · 2 pts · 2y

No, the drive has been ext4 encrypted with LUKS from the start.

Poe@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2y (1 reply)

Try using an older version of proton?

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y

didn't work

nfsu2@feddit.cl · 1 pts · 2y (1 reply)

That must suck, I hope you get your answer man.

dynamo@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 2y

I think i'll take the opportunity and try Debian, maybe PoPOs