Steam Link - How to fix the black screen

[DMeville]

In-home streaming DOES work, but depending on your graphic settings in game (screen resolution, graphics quality) it may give you a black screen. Not sure why exactly this happens, probably due to fillrate (e.g., your computer/steam can't keep up with streaming so many pixels or something)

In order to get this working it does require a bit of tinkering on your end to find settings that will work for your set up. For me, I can run the game on Ultra, at a res of 1600x1200 and it streams perfectly. If I go up one step to 2048x1152 when I hit apply I get a black screen on the stream.

Steps:
1 - Start up the game and go into Options. (on your host computer)
Change the screen resolution to the lowest, and hit apply. Check (on the streaming/steam linked display) to see if the black screen is gone
2 - If the black screen still persists at the lowest res, decrease the graphics quality by one and hit apply. Repeat this until the black screen is gone, once it is continue to step 3.
3 - Go back into options and increase the res by one step, and hit apply. Repeat this until you find the largest res you can use without getting a black screen.

If screen res is more important to you than graphic quality, I found that alternatively you can set the res to max, but lower the Graphics Quality setting in the game options menu. If I do this I can run Party Panic at 2560x1440, but I have to drop my Graphics Quality from Ultra down two levels to Very High. Once I do this the black screen goes away.

I'll continue looking into this (eventually) to see if I can figure out what exactly is causing it, but I'm not sure there will be anything I can do. If it's a fillrate/streaming issue (like it seems it is) that's an issue with your hardware/network speed, or maybe even a limitation imposed by steam when using in-home streaming.

Hopefully that helps! Might take a little bit of work to figure out the proper resolution and graphic settings you need to set, but you should be able to see more than a black screen bow, and play through in-home streaming or steam link!

[DMeville]

Original Post: http://steamcommunity.com/app/506500/discussions/0/353915309350060153/

[hateball]

I didn't see this post, but I worked around it by setting "-screen-fullscreen 0" in launch options, then I could change graphics settings once ingame. First run no settings were saved for whatever reason, but the next time they were saved.

Sadly the game was absolutely unplayable over my (wired) Steam Link regardless of settings, so I had to ask for a refund. Not had any such issues with other games so I don't know what might cause it.

[DMeville]

Originally posted by hateball:

I didn't see this post, but I worked around it by setting "-screen-fullscreen 0" in launch options, then I could change graphics settings once ingame. First run no settings were saved for whatever reason, but the next time they were saved.

Sadly the game was absolutely unplayable over my (wired) Steam Link regardless of settings, so I had to ask for a refund. Not had any such issues with other games so I don't know what might cause it.

Sorry about that! Was it a really low framerate that was making it unplayable? Some Linux users have mentioned for some reason the game runs very slowly, I'm currently looking into this issue.

[hateball]

Yeah the frames were probably single digit. I didnt try the game directly on my host machine, as well... I would only ever be playing it over the Steam Link in my living room anyway.

[DMeville]

There's now a version of Party Panic in the secret branch that you can try out. When you have a moment can you download it (1.3.2) and let me know if ther performance has improved for you at all on Linux?

You can opt-into the secret branch by right clicking Party Panic in your Steam library and click "Properties". Next, open the "Betas" tab, and click the "Check Code" box (with no password) and it should then let you select "Secret" from the drop down box. Restart Steam and the secret branch should download the latest version.

Let me know how it goes!

[3draven]

Hi! I had same problem and resolved it by set resolution in game settings to resolution of my TV. Any game launched with different resolution does not work.