[Linux] Game won't start, stuck on logo screen (wine and native)

[knuxyl]

I spent a lot of time on this post in hopes I provided enough information so a fix can be found for this great game.

I've been running this with wine on debian testing and it was working yesterday. Today it just kept hanging at the startup logo screen. I waited quite a while and realized it wasn't going to open.

I then just uninstalled the windows version and installed the linux version and I'm getting the exact same problem. I have no idea what's going on.

The game just gets stuck at the startup fullscreen logo (or in a small box in the top left and rest black). The startup video doesn't load.

I tried adding -logfile log.txt and it worked the first time but now it doesn't work anymore. I've tried starting from terminal and the gog shortcut. It seems to work randomly once out of every 30 tries.

Someone mentioned something about steam so I went ahead and uninstalled steam (linux version) and deleted all remnants of it (rm -R ~/.steam*) I don't use steam, it's garbage drm spyware daemon anyway. Removing steam did not fix it.

I'm running the latest version available from gog as of 4/21/25 which is 7.50.

I finally just fixed my GPU so I can play this at max settings and now the game won't work. Of course my luck. I was having overheating issues so I cleaned out my gpu and applied new thermal paste. I've known I needed to do this but it's a hassle getting my desktop out of its cave and disassembling. I was using the windows/wine version because it didn't run as hot and I was being lazy about fixing the gpu.

Now my temps are down 30-40 degrees celsius and X4 won't work, but all my other games do. I have 18 games installed and all of them startup fine and hardware video acceleration is working as well with this gpu, so I know for sure the GPU is not the issue. I was playing Outward at max settings with GPU in the low 40s when it used to be low 80s.

I randomly download all the latest updates/games I have on gog with lgogdownloader in a script I wrote so I couldn't tell you if it updated from when it was working. I have not updated any package on debian since this was working.

This is the logfile. I waited roughly 3 minutes before closing the game. The last line in the logfile shows up almost immediately and it never logs anything else.

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$cat ~/.config/Egosoft/X4/log.txt
Logfile started, time Mon Apr 21 06:10:36 2025
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[General] 0.00 'llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)' gfx-driver v0.0.1 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)' gfx-driver v0.0.1 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[ALSOFT] (WW) Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
[ALSOFT] (WW) Cannot connect to server request channel
[ALSOFT] (WW) jack server is not running or cannot be started
[ALSOFT] (WW) JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
[ALSOFT] (WW) JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
[ALSOFT] (WW) jack_client_open() failed, 0x11
[ALSOFT] (WW) Failed to initialize backend "jack"
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)
[Init   ] 0.00 Entering startmenu in 7.50 (553255)
Entering startmenu in 7.50 (553255)
[matroska,webm @ 0x7f3aa62d9ee0] Unknown entry 0x56AA
[ALSOFT] (WW) 60 Effects not deleted

This is my system configuration

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Asrock B650M PG Riptide WiFi - 3.20
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
AMD Radeon Pro W600
2 x 48GB DDR5 4800MHz
Debian Testing
Gnome desktop - 48
Kernel - 6.12.21
Mesa - 25.0.3-1

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$ uname -a
[quote]Linux scizor 6.12.21-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.12.21-1 (2025-03-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux

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$ lspci | grep -i vga
[quote]03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 23 WKS-XL [Radeon PRO W6600]
11:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Raphael (rev c9)

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$ cat "/usr/lib/os-release"
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux trixie/sid"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

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$ glxinfo | grep -E "OpenGL version string|OpenGL renderer string"
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (radeonsi, navi23, LLVM 19.1.7, DRM 3.61, 6.12.21-amd64)
OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 25.0.3-1

[xrogaan]

The game just gets stuck at the startup fullscreen logo (or in a small box in the top left and rest black). The startup video doesn't load.

You may want to install the multimedia codecs necessary to play video and audio files.

Read more: https://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs

Edit: To clarify, I base the recommendation on both the quote and the logfile with an error line related to the matroska video.

[knuxyl]

The codecs are already installed, and apparently work considering the startup video has started a couple of times. I have a full multimedia suite for encoding video files and never suspected a lack of codecs. Thanks for the idea though.

I was just trying to record a secondary monitor to demonstrate it not working and everything I've tried but when I would launch the game with the gog .desktop shortcut it would open on my primary monitor, so I would use CTRL+Super+Right to move it to the secondary monitor and it was working. I then tested letting it load on my primary monitor where it would open and it wouldn't load. I have to move the game to the secondary monitor while it's still black before the fullscreen logo to get it to work. It's worked everytime I've tried it now. This makes no sense but it's what fixing it for me, moving it to a secondary monitor before the fullscreen logo.

This issue has been narrowed down to a multi-monitor setup with possibly video playback or just a general disfunction.

This is still a problem because I mostly play on my 4K TV with the same PC but all other monitors are disabled at that time and I don't want to have to launch the game on the TV, go to the monitor, move the window to the TV, go back to the TV, minimize the game, disable the monitor, and bring back up the game. I don't want to have to leave my monitors on to play on my TV.

[xrogaan]

Okay then, could you try running X4 into gamescope? Something like this:

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gamescope -W 1920 -H 1080 -r 60 -- ./X4

That may help you with your multi-display issue.

[knuxyl]

I've never come across that, thanks. I'd rather a fix from the devs than a workaround though but I'll try that later.

[PGeyer-Ego]

Hi knuxyl,

This is particularly strange.

Is the monitor you're wanting to use it on using a different GPU than the others? If you're thinking this may be related to video playback, you can try launching the game with "-skipintro" to skip the starting video and see if that helps. The matroska warning is unrelated, it happens on all computers because of how the video was encoded and seems to be harmless, but we can try skipping the video regardless. You can also try adding "-debug all" to the command line flags and see if it gives any more information. "-logfile log.txt" should write to log.txt if there is data to write, but this will probably be in your savegame directory (~/.config/EgoSoft/X4/log.txt - note the capitalisation for Linux builds)

I'll look into seeing if there's anything we can do to reproduce this in the meantime.

Thanks
PG

[knuxyl]

Well we're getting somewhere
with -skipintro it loads the 3d menu background and moves around but the menu options never load. I actuall distinctly remember this happening before, probably months ago.
The logile didn't seem to do log anything new with -debug all

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Logfile started, time Thu Apr 24 22:57:49 2025
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v25.0.3 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[General] 0.00 'llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)' gfx-driver v0.0.1 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
'llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)' gfx-driver v0.0.1 (Vulkan 1.4.305) check=1
[ALSOFT] (WW) Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
[ALSOFT] (WW) Cannot connect to server request channel
[ALSOFT] (WW) jack server is not running or cannot be started
[ALSOFT] (WW) JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
[ALSOFT] (WW) JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
[ALSOFT] (WW) jack_client_open() failed, 0x11
[ALSOFT] (WW) Failed to initialize backend "jack"
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)
[Init   ] 0.00 Entering startmenu in 7.50 (553255)
Entering startmenu in 7.50 (553255)
[matroska,webm @ 0x7fa2522ede00] Unknown entry 0x56AA
[ALSOFT] (WW) 60 Effects not deleted

I didn't specify but the W6600 is the main GPU where the 3 monitors are connected, and the RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO is the iGPU that has the TV connected but this display is disabled while the 3 monitors are enabled. When I play games on the TV there seems to be no issue with using the dGPU for processing and iGPU for video output. I would share some screenshots of the monitor configuration but I'm behind VPN and host blockers and librewolf (firefox fork) doesn't always cooperate uploading pictures, especially to random free upload sites.

Also please fix the annoying loading screen everytime the volume osd comes up and disappears.

I have uploaded a video showing what it does. This is recorded on my main monitor, I have 3, the main monitor is in the middle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6UtHkSvzCw

[CBJ]

Well we're getting somewhere
with -skipintro it loads the 3d menu background and moves around but the menu options never load. I actuall distinctly remember this happening before, probably months ago.

This is normally caused by mods that are not compatible with the current game version.

Also please fix the annoying loading screen everytime the volume osd comes up and disappears.

I have uploaded a video showing what it does. This is recorded on my main monitor, I have 3, the main monitor is in the middle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6UtHkSvzCw

That may not under our control. If something takes over and resets the game's output window then the game has no option but to recalibrate.

[db48x]

That may not under our control. If something takes over and resets the game's output window then the game has no option but to recalibrate.

That’s not what is happening. Another program’s window is simply being displayed on top of the game, that is all. It shouldn’t cause X4 to change what it is showing in its own window. It doesn’t cause other games to do that. You’d be understandably annoyed if your web browser, or your email client, or your spreadsheet went to a splash screen every time you adjusted the volume

[CBJ]

I understand what's happening, and why it's frustrating, but the game only does that in response to Vulkan telling it that it needs to reset. We have no control over when Vulkan does that, and no option but to handle it when it does. Other games that don't do it may not be using Vulkan, and therefore may not be getting that signal.

[knuxyl]

Well we're getting somewhere
with -skipintro it loads the 3d menu background and moves around but the menu options never load. I actuall distinctly remember this happening before, probably months ago.

This is normally caused by mods that are not compatible with the current game version.

Ah that may be why I remember it, I did try mods before. This is a fresh install of debian testing though and I have not installed any mods.

I understand what's happening, and why it's frustrating, but the game only does that in response to Vulkan telling it that it needs to reset. We have no control over when Vulkan does that, and no option but to handle it when it does. Other games that don't do it may not be using Vulkan, and therefore may not be getting that signal.

this is not entirely true, i have tons of games and emulators (native linux) that use vulkan in fullscreen that do not have this issue. i reinstall my operating system several times a month and the shortcuts on my desktop were just my windows test games. X4 is literally the only application on PC that I have ever seen request to redraw the entire application on volume change. Are you saying Egosoft will not be looking into this? I can't imagine if a new World of Warcraft update had come out and was doing this to players for Blizzard to just say "we have no control". As a software engineer, I know this idea of "no control" to not be true, especially when it comes to Vulkan. If anything, Vulkan gives much more control than any other gfx api.

This bug wasn't even the purpose of this thread, which was that this expensive game won't even load.

I just installed Alpine linux instead of Debian which comes with newer basically everything so I will test X4 later and see if the bug was with the wayland manager or with the game.

[knuxyl]

Testing with alpine made it worse.

X4 doesn't use POSIX standards in the uses of the std C library because of glibc (a knock at the industry, not you guys) so musl isn't working, even with gcompat (glibc compat). Things would be so much simpler if we moved away from the jurassic era of dynamic linking products sold to consumers. An operating system doing it is fine, a cross platform space simulation video game, kinda dumb (again, not towards you guys).

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Logfile started, time Fri Apr 25 22:27:39 2025
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v24.3.4 (Vulkan 1.3.296) check=1
'AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)' AMD-driver v24.3.4 (Vulkan 1.3.296) check=1
[General] 0.00 'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v24.3.4 (Vulkan 1.3.296) check=1
'AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)' AMD-driver v24.3.4 (Vulkan 1.3.296) check=1
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)

Wine version still doesn't load, and now I can't even move the window to a different monitor while it's loading so nothing I do can get it to load.

So the issue is with the game itself and not the display manager, desktop environment, graphics drivers, or libc... I would say it's possible to be a wine bug with multi monitor setup but the native linux version wouldn't load as well on the glibc system. It had the exact same symptoms.

And for other alpine users of Gog, you need to install gcompat for gog setup files to launch. extracting the .sh won't help.

[xrogaan]

Well we're getting somewhere
with -skipintro it loads the 3d menu background and moves around but the menu options never load. I actuall distinctly remember this happening before, probably months ago.

This is normally caused by mods that are not compatible with the current game version.

Ah that may be why I remember it, I did try mods before. This is a fresh install of debian testing though and I have not installed any mods.

If you didn't wipe your /home directory, make sure your don't carry old config files over in .config/EgoSoft/X4.

[knuxyl]

I wiped the entire computer. It is a completely fresh install. I had reinstalled the entire OS before posting here. Now I've done it again. Both times without using any mods, configurations, old save games, etc. I don't mount /home on a seperate partition and keep it, I do compeltely fresh installs. I also haven't played this game enough to have saves or configs I want to keep because this game is a hassle and annoying with the volume popup issue.

[xrogaan]

I wiped the entire computer. It is a completely fresh install. I had reinstalled the entire OS before posting here. Now I've done it again. Both times without using any mods, configurations, old save games, etc. I don't mount /home on a seperate partition and keep it, I do compeltely fresh installs. I also haven't played this game enough to have saves or configs I want to keep because this game is a hassle and annoying with the volume popup issue.

Your config is a bit exotic compared to what is officially supported. (I wish EgoSoft would graduate from Ubuntu 18.04 though.) For the OSD thing, running the game using gamescope circumvent the issue entirely: as it is running in its own container, the DE will not interact with the game itself. If gamescope helped you play the game before, here is another reason to use it

[knuxyl]

I wiped the entire computer. It is a completely fresh install. I had reinstalled the entire OS before posting here. Now I've done it again. Both times without using any mods, configurations, old save games, etc. I don't mount /home on a seperate partition and keep it, I do compeltely fresh installs. I also haven't played this game enough to have saves or configs I want to keep because this game is a hassle and annoying with the volume popup issue.

Your config is a bit exotic compared to what is officially supported. (I wish EgoSoft would graduate from Ubuntu 18.04 though.) For the OSD thing, running the game using gamescope circumvent the issue entirely: as it is running in its own container, the DE will not interact with the game itself. If gamescope helped you play the game before, here is another reason to use it

I've never used Gamescope. And the issue doesn't seem to have anything do with anything "exotic" going on, it seems related to an incompatibility with wayland and multiple monitors. I'm honestly suprised it even launched on Alpine considering it's using Musl. Hellpoint won't even launch. But it's doing the same thing Debian was doing. This isn't a niche case problem. I'm just not going to play this or buy anymore egosoft products, that volume OSD is a complete deal breaker and they're trying to play it off as a vulkan requirement (which it isn't) so they don't have to look into it. I'm not setting up some complicated containerized solutions just to play a game. I have plenty more. And this is the only one that has given me any problems, and there's 2 major ones.

[xrogaan]

Suit yourself. gamescope isn't complicated. Container is the proper term to describe what it is doing, simply running a game within its own X space (if you've heard of xephyr, that's the same idea). gamescope'd default doesn't work on wayland anyhow.

The OSD thing is a vulkan quirk. I don't know why they chose to implement a full refresh whenever the game lose focus, but that's how it is. However, you're right. Many other vulkan games don't suffer the same quirk (Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for instance). It may be due to a feature of X4, that allows the game to run minimized with a smaller power footprint. There is no difference, from the software point of view, between being minimized and the OSD popping up.

I would love to see somebody from egosoft to describe the necessity behind the logic.

[Pwalafryr]

hi,

try to add also the argument -windowed with -skipintro

After you can switch to borderless in the game options, that the only way i can run the game.

[knuxyl]

Suit yourself. gamescope isn't complicated. Container is the proper term to describe what it is doing, simply running a game within its own X space (if you've heard of xephyr, that's the same idea). gamescope'd default doesn't work on wayland anyhow.

The OSD thing is a vulkan quirk. I don't know why they chose to implement a full refresh whenever the game lose focus, but that's how it is. However, you're right. Many other vulkan games don't suffer the same quirk (Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for instance). It may be due to a feature of X4, that allows the game to run minimized with a smaller power footprint. There is no difference, from the software point of view, between being minimized and the OSD popping up.

I would love to see somebody from egosoft to describe the necessity behind the logic.

It's complicated compared to double clicking the game shortcut. It's a relative comparison, not objective. I'm on linux, "complicated" isn't the issue, the issue is having to preform extra steps. When I want to play a game, I just want to click it and play. I appreciate the input about gamescope but that is not something I'm willing to devote my time towards.

[knuxyl]

hi,

try to add also the argument -windowed with -skipintro

After you can switch to borderless in the game options, that the only way i can run the game.

I've already wiped the PC and I'm not reinstalling X4. I should have tried -windowed, that would have probably worked. But still what is preferable is the egosoft employees actually taking input from its customers and looking into problems about their broken product instead of trying to pass the blame off to something else about a minor problem when the reasoning is certainly not true, while also ignoring the major problem.