Raze does not have a graphical process

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Kzer-Za
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Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Kzer-Za »

I'm trying to launch Raze 0.6.0 with Duke Atomic Edition. My system is Linux with kernel 5.4, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT, nonfree drivers.

When I start Raze, it kind of runs "in the background", without spawning a windowed or a fullscreen process that could be observed. Its process is spawned and can be found with ps axu or a GUI task manager, but it does not have a window or any means to switch to it. I observe the same issue in Eduke32 when the Polymer renderer is chozen, so I always launch it with Polymost, then EDuke32 runs okayish. So first I thought that Raze has Polymer enabled by default and tried to edit raze.ini, but it has an empty [.VideoSettings] section. It does have vid_preferbackend=0 and vid_rendermode=4 in [GlobalSettings]. I have tried changing them to random numbers, but it changes nothing.

raze.log also does not have anything pertaining to video.
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

First, please check whether you are running in Weyland. This can be checked at the login screen, before you enter your password, it asks what session you wish to start. If you are using Weyland, switch to X11.

If this doesn't work, then we need a ton of info about your system. What is your Linux distribution, what is your desktop manager, and if you have customized it, what is your windowing manager.
Kzer-Za
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Kzer-Za »

I'm on X11, the distribution is Manjaro, DE is XFCE, window manager is the default for XFCE, i.e. XFWM.

Now, when I started collecting information for the answer, I looked through the available settings of XFWM and found the setting responsible for the issue. It's compositing of XFWM: after I disabled it, I successfully launched Raze. Though I must say that by default it was enabled: just when I saw it, I thought "what if?" and tried disabling it.

Like I said, it kind of solves the issue, but I must mention that now (with compositing disabled) in some videos tearing can be observed, and besides, like I said, by default compositing was enabled, which means that most people having Manjaro + XFCE would have it enabled.
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

Indeed. But Window compositing should not pose such problems.

If you disable Window compositing, you should try xcompmgr (I think it should be available through pacman). If you run it through the terminal, you can just do "nohup xcompmgr &" and press enter - that should disassociate it from the terminal and allow it to run until your X session closes. (You can do killall -sig INT xcompmgr to kill it later if you want)

I'd like to know if you can run Raze successfully using this.
Kzer-Za
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Kzer-Za »

I have tried launching Raze with xcompmgr and the picture is very interesting. In half the cases (2 out of 4) Raze was launched successfully and without any issues. In the other half the cases (also 2 tries out of 4) it launched, but the picture displayed on the screen was that of what was displayed on the screen before launching Raze. At the same time Raze was obviously running: there was Duke music playing and all the keypresses were accompanied by the sounds of choosing/activating Duke menu items. But, like I said, the picture of the game was absent and after I tried to switch to other windows with Alt-Tab, Raze stopped receiving keypresses, but the picture never changed, the screen kept drawing the picture that was on it before launching Raze. I had to switch to another virtual terminal and kill both Raze and xcompmgr for the screen to "unfreeze".

(That's different from having the inbuilt into XFWM compositor enabled: with the latter there is no music from the game and no freezing of the last screen, Raze process is spawned but does not affect the desktop behavior in any way).
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

Wow... that is really not good. It worked fine for me on Ubuntu, but the versions of the packages in question are likely all very different. It's really hard to know what is at fault here - be it SDL or Raze, itself, or something else.

So now I wonder - does the same thing happen with GZDoom? I also would like to know if it happens with EDuke32 itself, as well. - if you are willing and have time, this will help to narrow down the issue.
Kzer-Za
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Kzer-Za »

GZDoom is working fine. Sometimes, very rarely I saw the issue with the picture drawn on display being the picture that was there before launching GZDoom (now I think that it was probably due to XFWM compositor enabled, but it was maybe 1 time out of 20). But that was with the version 3.something, and after recently updating the system and GZDoom I have not seen it again.

As for Eduke32, I have not really played it, just launched several times. In the first post I misremembered what was wrong with trying to use its Polymer renderer: with it Eduke32 simply refuses to launch. But with Polymost everything seems to be okay. There is no midi music for some reason (though in general midi on my system is working), but I have not seen visual glitches as long as Polymost is used.
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

Hmm, okay. Thank you. Guess this means I'll have to suck it up and get a Manjaro environment up and running.
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

Just posting here to confirm that when I finally got to try this on Manjaro on my Pinebook that I had the issue. I do not know what happened here, but I suspect the SDL package that currently comes with Manjaro might not like the combination of the things Raze does and that particular environment.
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mjr4077au
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by mjr4077au »

Just my two cents, but if you can get over the hurdle of installing Arch Linux rather than using a friendlier fork that may or may no be in sync with its upstream provider, you'll probably find you're better off. I've been continually testing Raze under Arch Linux and haven't had any issues with it against the SDL version they ship. I can't clearly see whether Manjaro is shipping Arch's SDL package or another, perhaps older version.

I'm not suggesting that your OS is an issue and that you should change your OS to accomodate a game, but rather just a passing comment.
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

I'm fairly certain that I won't have much issue installing Arch Linux - my main issue is that I've not much space left on bare-metal devices that I can boot from, and using virtual machines is far from ideal.
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mjr4077au
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by mjr4077au »

I didn't mean you so much but more for the OP. Sorry for not being clearer! 😁
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Rachael
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by Rachael »

All good. :)
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mjr4077au
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Re: Raze does not have a graphical process

Post by mjr4077au »

To the OP, just wondering if you've had a chance to revisit this? I've finally tested the current master branch under an up-to-date Arch Linux and don't experience any issues.

As Rachael has kindly noted, the issue appears to be a distro-speicifc bug as she couldn't replicate it on Ubuntu and I can't either on Arch Linux. If you haven't already, I'd report the the issue to your distro's bug tracker and go from there :)
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