Arch Linux

ykonstant

Member

Registered: 2020-01-07

Posts: 21

Debugging Silksong native game after update

Dear all,

I have purchased Silksong through GOG and have been running the native binary for a while now with no problems.

A system update a few days ago resulted in the game launching into a slideshow of frames, taking several seconds to render the opening screen.  The keyboard similarly responds extremely slowly, with the options selector taking seconds to move.  Ultimately I have to kill the process as it is becoming entirely unresponsive.

I contacted GOG and unfortunately they say they cannot do anything, since they don't support Arch.  So I wanted to try and understand where the problem lies.  Unfortunately, I cannot find any interesting log locations for the game so it doesn't seem there is much error recording.  Running the binary from the command line similarly does not produce any interesting error messages.

Thus I want some advice on locating the package or config that caused this breakage.  The front runners currently in my mind are the usual suspects: the kernel, Xorg (there was a big update recently), nvidia drivers and something involving vulkan.  There was also some mention of freetype2 causing problems, but I tested a downgrade and there is no difference.

I tested two versions of the binary 1.0.283... and 1.0.288... and both had this problem.  Similarly, I tested Hollow Knight again from GOG, native linux binary, which uses the exact same engine, but that game ran fine without problems.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.  I could try downgrading packages one by one, but since those packages are very big and critical, if I do something wrong I may have a tough time getting my system back up.

Last option would be to launch a VM and run the game through the VM to see where regressions lie, but I want to avoid going through all that trouble.

Thank you for your time, and I am looking forward to suggestions!

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,248

Re: Debugging Silksong native game after update

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=309874

ykonstant

Member

Registered: 2020-01-07

Posts: 21

Re: Debugging Silksong native game after update

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=309874

Oh, that is very interesting! So it does seem to be the big Xorg update.  I wonder why Hollow Knight works fine... I will try to downgrade, although I am quite nervous about downgrading such a big package (still better than nvidia drivers or the kernel).