Screen goes black on launch (used to work)

[Machalel]

So I played this game a while ago and was working fine, but now i can't play at all - hoping for some help or ideas on how to fix.

Symptom: Loading the game, it starts in windowed mode. It then transitions to fullscreen and I can see the menu screen for about 0.2 seconds, and then the screen goes completely black (but the mouse pointer still works). The game doesn't crash, still plays music, and it's not frozen, but I can't progress from there.

Note - about a year ago I used to be able to play the game fine, and I haven't changed any components on my computer since.

What i've unsuccessfully tried so far:
Reboot, verify game files, uninstall & reinstall, delete all files & reinstall, new video drivers, executable properties -> DPI settings -> scaling override, random command line args to try to get windowed mode....

[MegaIng]

Find your save folder by checking the found path here: https://turingcomplete.game/report_bug

Make a backup of this and try deleting/moving it. You need to temporarily disable steam cloud sync so that it doesn't recreate it. Then restart the game. If it now works, you can move the schematics folder back into the save folder, only `progress.data` is contributing to the save not working.

However, this will mean that all levels are marked as incomplete, but your solutions will still be there. If you want to fix this, you can try editing `progress.data`, it's an sqlit3 database, one visual editor for this is "DB Browser for sqlite". It has two tables, one with settings, one with your level progress (and scores).

[Machalel]

Followed your instructions but unfortunately it's still doing the same thing. Menu shows up for a fraction of a second before just going black.

[MegaIng]

Then check your drivers, OS updates, ... The game hasn't changed at all in a year, so it's something on your end.

[Goblin]

When you browse the local files for Turing Complete through steam, there's an override.cfg file for me, you could see if switching that from false to true helps.

If not, I have a bit of an odd suggestion that's helped me a few times in the past for similar scenarios: try OBS, tell it to use game capture and see if it shows up in the preview window there. I had a similar black-screen-but-seemingly-functional issue with Unity games (not that this is one) for a while, and they showed up as normal in the game capture. So I used the preview window to navigate to options, switched to windowed, and it'd work. CLI arguments and editing the settings files didn't.
It's a long shot, and possibly too much effort if you don't already have and know how to use OBS, but if it works it works.

[Machalel]

Originally posted by MegaIng:

Then check your drivers, OS updates, ... The game hasn't changed at all in a year, so it's something on your end.

Ooof... re-installed and updated everything, still doesnt work :(

Originally posted by Goblin:

When you browse the local files for Turing Complete through steam, there's an override.cfg file for me, you could see if switching that from false to true helps.

Doesn't exist for me! Hmmm....

Originally posted by Goblin:

If not, I have a bit of an odd suggestion that's helped me a few times in the past for similar scenarios: try OBS.

Downloaded and attempted, but even in the preview window the screen is just black :(

[MegaIng]

You can try editing progress.data to not be full screen. I don't know the correct setting names for that of the to of my head, but they should be pretty obviously named.

[Machalel]

Update: It's now working for no discernible reason (I haven't changed anything since last posted)...

>_<