Game Launch Error- Blank Screen, Custom Mouse Cursor and Music Plays

Support
1

Hi! I have been having an error since upgrading to Lutris 5.20, as my games worked fine on 5.18.

I do want to also mention that I have been having an odd error when launching Lutris, I am not sure if it is related or not (nor could find much help in solving it online when looking around), where the /app/bin/lpsci will not work.

I have been having issues with the Sims 2 and Hitman Absolution when launching them, although oddly enough, the Sims 1 works fine without this error.

My games will launch, but will have a blank screen, the game’s cursor, music plays (the game is fully reactive other than the blank screen, the sound of going between menu options is there when I move my mouse around when it has launched). I assumed this was fixed when I upgraded to 5.22 earlier today, as it did launch the Sims 2 perfectly functionally, I could see the main menu and everything worked. There is no rhyme or reason to the issue, other than about 75% of the time, it launches this way. As I was writing this post, when I had tried to launch it after 2 times with the same issue prevailing, it launched perfectly fine. I can tell when it is going to launch right as it does an off center window before going full screen after a seconds pause. I restarted my computer after as I was having an issue that was unrelated, and when I tried to boot up the game, the error came back. As I stated earlier, this issue was simply not there before I moved to 5.20, and has persisted past the upgrade. When it worked during the writing of this post, I had not restarted my computer or done anything different than any other time I had launched the game (and it didn’t work) so I am not sure what caused it to work those two times it had.

The results of the --submit-issue terminal command are in this pastebin; the output of lutris -d are in this pastebin and I have game logs for both Hitman Absolution and the Sims 2 that I will link in a reply due to the link limit for new users on the forum. My screenshot program does not capture my cursor, so I do not see much point in including screenshots of what would be literally just a black screen (for Sims 2) or a white screen (for Hitman). System specs wise, I’m on Fedora 43 (with KDE Plasma 6.6), using Wayland, and with these hardware specs:

Processors: 8 Ă— AMD Ryzen 5 3550H with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.2 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

I appreciate any help, thank you in advance!

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Here is my error logs for running The Sims 2 and Absolution (both dropbox links to the file that was created when I saved the game logs directly from Lutris). Thanks again for any help!

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The lutris -d pastebin logs are gone, could you provide them again? I would like to see the exact error that caused lspci to fail…
lspci is a command that lists all the pci devices (gpu, network cards, etc.) attached to the system. I can totally see that if that fails the game wouldn’t know what hardware it’s running on and as such what graphics drivers to use.
Other than that, doublecheck that your nvidia drivers are fine (they are known to be wonky and cause issues).

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Thank you! Sorry, I didn’t realize it would delete it. Here it is! Is there a way to fix that lpsci issue? I tried to research that on my own but couldn’t figure out how to fix it (as every solution did not make a ton of sense). My drivers are working perfectly fine as far as I could tell, I was able to run Hitman Absolution without a single issue on Bottles, so I do think it is probably the lpsci. Thank you for explaining what it did, as that really does make sense why it’s having an issue. The really weird thing is if my computer is up and running for a while, and I open Lutris (the lpsci error still comes when it launches), I can usually after a few tries get the Sims 2 working with no issue? It won’t work soon after it boots up but after a few hours it works. It’s not a foolproof method as it will still have issues and I have no idea why it works after a bit of time and a few tries, but figured it was relevant information, or could be! It’s very odd!!

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Are your pastes private? I can’t access this one either…
The easiest way to test lspci is to run the following sequence of commands in a terminal:
which lspci
lspci
lspci --version
/app/bin/lspsci
/app/bin/lspsci --version
this will, in order, tell you what the location of the default lspci is, tell you what the default lspci thinks your system looks like, check the version of the default lspci, check what the lspci at /app/bin/lspci thinks your system looks like, and tell you what the version is of the lspci at /app/bin/lspci
The goal being to compare them (see if one is outdated, and if they agree on what the system looks like). If which lspci (the first command) returns /app/bin/lspci then that means that that is the default lspci and as such you can skip the last two commands.
My lspci is version 3.10.0, the latest is 3.14.0 (my distro lags a bit with updates).

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Thank you!! I have no idea why they keep being deleted, I have them set to public. I will put one in my Dropbox so it doesn’t get deleted again! The first command did return /usr/bin/lpsci, everything matched up on the second command, it shows my version is 3.14.0. Do you think this means I need to redirect where Lutris is going for the lpsci? Thank you so much again, and I apologize for the pastebin frustration, hopefully this works!

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Aha, that gave me access to the logs, thank you!
So what I’m seeing is that it’s not that lspci isn’t working, it’s /usr/bin/vulkaninfo that isn’t working, and then it’s falling back to lspci. vulkaninfo gives information about the rendering capabilites of your system.
What’s weird is that it’s saying that the file /usr/bin/vulkaninfo straight up doesn’t exist. Files don’t “sometimes” exist, that’s not how that works, so it’s weird that sometimes it doesn’t give the error…
The next oddity is that it’s detecting both your gpus as “No GPU”, despite successfully getting the gpu’s id. Looking up the id tells me that it should be Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Picasso/Raven 2 [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] and NVIDIA Corporation TU116M [GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile].
Can you try the following commands:
vkcube (checks if vulkan is properly installed)
vulkaninfo (see if it’s just looking in the wrong place)
update-pciids (updates the list of hardware ids and their corresponding names)

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Of course, I’m glad the logs finally worked! That is SO strange!!! Vkcube opened up a window of a spinning cube, so that seems it is working well! Vulkaninfo spit out a bunch of information rapidly, to the point I could not get the start of the information it was spitting out. Update-pciids was listed as readonly. Not sure if any of that is helpful but if I can get the game working after my computer has been up for a few hours, I’ll run it through the lutris -d command and get those logs here! No promises because it is VERY hit and miss for when it works, but it may help narrow down why it’s working sometimes and not other times! Thank you again, I NEVER would have guessed that this was what was going wrong.

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Ah yes my bad, you need to run it with administrator priveleges:
sudo update-pciids
Could you also try checking where vulkaninfo is (since you clearly have a copy of it, but not in the location it expects):
which vulkaninfo

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No worries! It updated, and the vulkaninfo path is “/usr/bin/vulkaninfo”. Thanks again for all of the help, I appreciate it a lot!!

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OK that actually helped me a lot.
You see that is the path that it is looking for. Now, it makes no sense that it says that it doesn’t exist when clearly it does.
But looking online I found that there is an edge case where sometimes you can get “does not exist” errors when running 32 bit games on 64 bit systems without 32 bit compat tools installed…
Very strange still that it worked before, or that it still sometimes does, I’m wondering if it is something to do with missing 32-bit support…
Could you try sudo dnf install libxcrypt-compat, that should install 32-bit compatability libraries? It’s kinda a long shot, as there’s a chance that it’s an issue with flatpak, which would be a bug with lutris (flatpak doesn’t let you install 32 bit libraries yourself, the application needs to ask for them).

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Oh, that makes sense, do you think it’s due to me playing older games on my system? It’s so weird that the error doesn’t appear with older games (I really only play the Sims 1 on Lutris in terms of very old games so maybe that’s it but that plays with no issue at all) and only with newer ones (relatively new that is).
After installing that, I launched Lutris and the error still appeared (as the error appears when I am launching the application and not launching the game), and tried to launch the Sims 2, which despite saying it was playing (as the option on the bottom toolbar read “Stop” rather than “Play”), nothing popped up after a few minutes (it usually launches VERY quickly for me even with these errors). The same happened with Hitman, so I will try and restart my PC and see if that changes anything. I gave it several minutes before restarting my PC and Hitman did eventually open and actually WORKED with video and all!! But I have also had my computer running for a while, so it really could just be that as it has been in the past. If it works even after a fresh restart and after a few launches to make sure it actually works every time, it might have fixed it, even if the error continues to pop up when opening Lutris.

I ran the command and it said it installed so I will edit this post after I check that to see what happens. Thank you again, I would have seriously been SO lost without your help, this wasn’t remotely close to what I had assumed happened and is so much more complicated than I thought, so I really appreciate all of the help!!

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Yeah it turned out to be a tricky one! No problem, let me know how it goes and if it’s fixed!

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Thank you! Unfortunately I think it was just the “computer has been running for a few hours” fix, as after a restart, the lpsci error still occured at application launch and both games launched with a blank screen, custom cursor and music! So I have no idea what is going on still unfortunately! I really wish that had been the fix!
Edit: I am on Flatpak, I do not remember if I mentioned that prior or my code did, but do you think that’s what is causing the issues? I would try a fresh install of Lutris if you think it could fix it, but some of my games cannot really be reinstalled and I am not sure if the game info and any save information is deleted when I would uninstall and reinstall it.

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If you’re talking about installing the version from the repositories, you can install both at once, no need to uninstall anything. If you’re talking about reinstalling the flatpak, game data by default is stored in a folder called Games in your home folder, you can always back that up if you’re worried about losing your games, however I just tested it real quick and it seems uninstalling and reinstalling the flatpak does not clear your library.
A fresh install might fix it, since it does appear to be an issue with lutris (as the error appears launching lutris not launching a game), but to be honest I’m not entirely sure.
If you decide to install it from the repositories, you’ll need to transfer your library. First, you’ll want to check the configuration in the flatpak version (right-click the game → configure). The important part is the runner (wine I assume), the executable location, the identifier (that’ll give you the banner/icon), and any custom things you’ve previously changed, but you can also transfer your playtime, etc. You can then add the game by using the + top left and then “Add locally installed game”.
Unfortunately, lutris does not seem to have a way of scanning a folder for installed games, which would make this a lot easier.

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Thank you!! I will definitely back that folder up and try reinstalling. Is the repository version more stable or should I stick with Flatpak? I’m not sure either, I really appreciate all of your patience and help with this, I seriously would have been lost otherwise!

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The repository version is usually better integrated with the system, but it’s a lot of work to transfer the library so I would first see if reinstalling the flatpak fixes it.
I use the repository version (on Linux Mint though, so it’s a different repository).

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That makes sense! I will do that now, and see if that fixes things! Thank you again so much for all of the help!

1 Like
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The lpsci error is STILL there with a reinstall of the flatpak and my games library loaded fully upon the first launch, so unsure if I should remove all the user files and try a reinstall again? I have had my computer running for the last hour plus transferring files so I am not sure if that impacted it, but Hitman worked (and launched much faster than the last time). Same with the Sims 2. I feel if the workaround is just not gaming the minute I boot up my PC, then that may be worth it, as this makes no sense. I will however boot up Lutris via the -d command on the command line and see if I can get code for both to see what is going different this time, and then I will reply again with that, if you don’t mind taking a look at them!

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Yeah sounds good!