[SOLVEDish] Cities Skylines has stopped working

statikregimen

Hello,

Wondering if anyone else has had any difficulty in recent months with Cities Skylines. I haven't played it since probably last year, but it used to always run great. Haven't found any clues in searching the web & forums.

I've tried running steam through the command line, but there are no errors...Steam thinks it starts and stays running, but using top, I can see a process for Paradox Launcher start, but it dies shortly after with no other related processes appearing to spawn.

Not sure what to share (or even look at) in terms of logs, etc...I've not had great success in troubleshooting games so far, but I have a few with similar behavior.

Most likely, I'll try to reinstall if nobody has any ideas after a few days. Just have a ton of mods and stuff installed that I don't want to have to reinstall =/

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE:
So I decided to reinstall from scratch (first uninstalled via Steam, then deleted the residual folder in my steamapps/common/). Also I noticed in ~/.local/share there was a folder for Paradox Launcher which had a file which references another path - I deleted all that as well. Now it spawns three instances of Paradox Launcher (edit: no window or anything) which stay, but the game never starts and the processes seem to use no CPU time.

It's probably also worth mentioning that I did recently reinstall Steam, and my system is up to date. It seems strange that I'd be the only one out there having this issue. The only unusual bit about my system that I can think of, is that I use Qtile, which can sometimes cause issues when creating new windows, but it doesn't seem to get that far even.

UPDATE 2:
By chance I rediscovered ~/.local/share/Colossal\ Order/ - I forgot Paradox is only the publisher, so I did a second complete reinstall, after removing that directory and again all the above directories. I thought sure that would do the trick since it would have had all my old configs (and mods?) in there, but alas, symptoms persist

UPDATE 3:
I've finally had a chance to try it on my work PC, and it has no issue even with all my old mods/assets installed. The two machines are extremely similar in both hardware and software. The only difference I can think of right now, is that I haven't updated my work PC's kernel since 4.19 while my home PC has the latest gentoo-sources installed. So I tried booting my home PC w/ 4.19, but no change (I actually expected to get a graphics error b/c I didn't rebuild my Nvidia drivers and they appear to be working in only some sort of failsafe(?) as I still get X. but not multi monitors - common when I update my kernel but forget to rebuild my drivers.

Also found another log, that I've pasted in a reply below.

Lastly, I did another system update last night, and now we're back to the game starting and immediately dying w/o spawning any processes - not even the Paradox Launcher I mentioned before.

paintchip · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2010 Posts: 58

I haven't tried to run it in a month or so, but it was running fine for me. Which version are you running? Also, you say that it spawns a launcher, does that look normal? Does it crash after you try to launch from the launcher?

statikregimen · Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2020 1:23 am Post subject:

Thanks for the reply.

Do you mean which version of the game? Should be the latest, fresh off of Steam after I reinstalled it last night. Not sure how to tell for sure.

The Paradox Launcher I mentioned is just 3 processes that spawn when I try to start the game - no window ever appears or anything.

paintchip · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2010 Posts: 58

Just to make sure, you are running the Linux version of the game, correct? Not a windows version through proton?

I think you can try running the game without the launcher

Right click Skylines in Steam library -> Properties -> General -> Set Launch options -> type in the box:

-nolauncher

I think the files may be kept locally as well in the below directory. You should be able to find the .sh file (start.sh or maybe citiesskylines.sh, etc.) and launch that from the terminal for error codes. I'm not in front of my main box right now, so I can't verify the path and command. I'm just thinking out loud about some stuff to try. I hope its helpful.

.steam/steamapps/common/Cities Skylines/*****.sh

statikregimen · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2020 1:33 am Post subject:

Thanks for the suggestions...

Yes, I definitely have the Linux version installed.

I tried running the game w/ the "-nolauncher" option which had no effect, then tried to find the .sh file you mentioned, but there are no *.sh files for this game that I can find

Edit: I forgot to mention, I did try to run the main executable directly, but it just hooked the running Steam and started the same old way. If steam isn't running, it starts it.

statikregimen · Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2020 12:13 am Post subject:

Doing some more arbitrary digging online, I found another log location in ~/.config/unity3d/Colossal Order/Cities_ Skylines/Player.log:

saellaven · l33t Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 654

I just tried and it didn't want to launch for me either... apparently, it's a problem with the paradox launcher.

I went into settings and changed the launch options to
/path/to/Steam/SteamApps/common/Cities_Skylines/Cities.x64 %command%

and now it works for me.
_________________
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openrc-0.17, ~vanilla-sources, ~nvidia-drivers, ~gcc

statikregimen · Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:41 pm Post subject:

Thank you...this also seems to work for me, except when trying to start a new game or load a save, it crashes trying to load

But I think that's unrelated. Probably a mod or asset. Nothing showing in the logs. EDIT: I disabled all non-essential mods and now the game is stable, so I will have to narrow down the culprit

Also, I have no idea how your solution works (I've never seen launch options set like this before), if you don't mind explaining!