this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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First of all, I don't want you to help me with a specific problem. All the details in this post are just examples and I'm interested in getting a general understanding.

So I just wanted to play doom eternal, but when I press play on steam, after a couple of seconds the button switches from blue back to green with no game running. I checked protondb and saw that the game was gold rated, so it should run fine.

I checked the tweaks that people use and they suggest different proton versions. But no matter what I do, I basically get nothing. There are no error messages or log files. Same with other games I tried in the past.

So basically when a game does not work out of the box, I have no idea where to look for cues on how to fix it. Is there a verbose mode or something similar?

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Steam does spit out some diagnostic messages, and I believe -- don't quote me on this -- that programs that it runs normally have the same stderr/stdio, so stuff they write will show up there as well. Normally, these are not saved in a file. I generally launch it from a script, so that it'll save said log messages in a file that I can view.

gam-steam.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Some games (Wasteland 2) require more file descriptors
ulimit -S -n 4096

exec steam "$@" >~/.steamlog -console -nobigpicture -nochatui -nofriendsui -silent 2>&1 &

Leaves log messages in .steamlog in my home directory. You may or may not want some of those other options being passed to Steam.