Black screens in recent GZDoom versions

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

Hello there.

This year, i decided to push my boundaries a bit,
and i released Six Mods Over Every Two Months.

And as you all can observe in the threads created, one thing is very consistent there: There'll be at least one person complaining about black screens that make it impossible for players to see TITLEMAPS, or the menus themselves.

At first i thought this would be a problem of Stray Jackals, my first mod released this year, because it tries to be fancy by emulating the PlayStation 1 opening, but it turns out the complaint extended to all the other mods as well.

And in before someone comes and says my mod is not optimized enough, the TITLEMAP code is a version of "ww-nazis!" by wildweasel, tweaked by Doomguy5th (with his authorization, from what i recall). The only thing it is supposed to do is to fade from black to a predefined static image, and that's it. No fancy effects. It's as simple as this:

---

Code: Select all

Script 102 OPEN
{
    SetHudSize(320, 240, 0);
    Light_fade(1,255,35*2);
    AmbientSound("DSQUAKE",1);
    Setlinetexture(1,SIDE_FRONT,TEXTURE_MIDDLE,"INTROPIC");
    Delay(35*2);
    Light_fade(1,255,35*2);
}

// INTROPIC being the image

With that said, i've been using this titlemap style since 2017, with my "Factotum" mod, and never before i have experienced, nor the players have experienced, such things. But something is definitely broken.

So my objective with this thread is to at least bring light to the problem.

Hope it helps.

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

Nothing? Not even a post to say the problem needs more detailing?

[Rachael]

I don't see anything wrong with your post but I am not the one who is going to handle this bug so there could easily be something I missed.

This one is currently beyond my skills. It's also a bit vexing, it's a very old bug, if it were easy to solve I am sure it would have been addressed long before now because this has been plaguing even GZDoom versions as early as 3.x.x.

[dpJudas]

If this is about very specific scenes suddenly causing GZDoom to draw nothing than black, then it is almost certainly due to some stale or unset RenderState field. I.e. if the scene is simple enough and no HWWall was drawn (or something of similar nature) then no call to renderstate.SetFoobar() was ever issued and all the following render code always assumed that Foobar would be enabled, but now its disabled, and this causes a black screen. Another candidate is that it never set up the matrices (VPViewport uniform or whatever its name is). Could also be something rare calls SetFoobar(true) and then forgets to call SetFoobar(false) when done.