Black screen bug: solved by playing on Linux / Proton 4.11-13

[Yujah]

Still Life 2 has for many a game-breaking bug where the screen goes black and only sound is heard when leaving the cellar after the cellar-computer has been made available. Not any of the solutions found here or elsewhere solved this for me, but running the game in Linux through Steam Play did.

That is: Still Life 2 runs nicely under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using Proton 4.11-13 (as settable via on Linux Settings -> Steam Play -> Enable Steam Play for other titles -> Run other titles with: Proton 4.11-13).

Personally I on Windows 7 created a save just after leaving the cellar and before entering the hallway, transferred said save over to Linux, entered the hallway on Linux, immediately saved again and transferred the save back over to Windows. All the rest I played on Windows again without issue, but as far as I saw, the game runs perfectly on Linux, so you may wish to just play it there outright.

Hope this helps someone: was personally rather frustrated by not being able to progress after being some 8 hours in already. Just in case this is again N/A for others: although comparable CPU-wise my Linux system has much older graphics: AMD HD5770 for the Linux system versus GeForce GTX 970 for the Windows system. Doubt it'll be hardware dependent though.

Transferring saves is a matter of copying back and forth between on Windows <SteamLibraryDirectory>\steamapps\common\Still life 2\EXTDataSave and on Linux (by default) ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Still life 2/EXTDataSave; either that entire directory or the by modification time easily identifiable individual men00x.sav and corresponding men00x.jpg files in there.

As a primarily Linux user I must say to have found it interesting that apparently some legacy Windows games now work better on Linux than on Windows...

[Dryspace]

You might be forgetting that the GPU --- and in particular the GPU driver version --- can cause problems like this.

It makes much more sense that it worked because of an earlier GPU and driver.

[Yujah]

That's a rather nonsensical comment. Obviously the GPU driver is (very) different between a Linux and a Window driver, and not just "earlier" or "later": that's the major sense in which Linux and Windows are different platforms for an issue such as this when the game's itself a Windows game run through Proton. I.e., it's the major point of this post/tip.

As to blanket "earlier" wrt. GPU itself, no, if you google the issue you find it's a well-known issue over many different and many different generations of GPU.

In any case hope this 2+ year old post/tip may help someone the same as it helped me back then, and will leave it at that.

[Dryspace]

There's nothing nonsensical about my comment. It is a fact -- which I have experienced myself -- that older games develop problems when run on later GPU drivers, when everything else in the system is the same.

What's not clear is why running it on Linux, an OS it was not designed for, via multiple abstraction layers, would cause it to function properly.

At any rate, the bug is not applicable to everyone as I am playing the game now and did not experience the issue (though I did experience other glitches in this poorly-coded game).