Stuck at loading on boot after it worked for months

[MrMette]

I have been playing the game for months (I have almost 40 hours in the game, so it clearly worked), but apparently today it stopped loading. I am on Linux, but it worked flawlessly ever since I started playing so I don't think that has anything to do with it. I did play last night before going to bed as well and finished all tracks with one of the bikes (forgot which one).

I looked into the savegames thinking my savegame might have been corrupted and saw there were a couple of older ones that looked like backups. I tried putting 2 of those back (by renaming/copying), but no luck. I also tried to search the Steam logs to see if I could find any error, but I didn't see anything. Other things I have done include changing proton versions and rebooting the machine.

Is there any way to try and figure out why the game doesn't load (logs?) or ideally any idea on how to fix this?

[MrMette]

I tried a couple more things
- Loading it on an old Windows PC works (as in it can read the savegame, so that's not corrrupted)
- Reinstalling the game does not fix it, it did lose me my backup savefiles that were in that folder though because I forgot to copy the proton savegame folder first and apparently the savegame backup software I use (ludusavi) didn't save those to put them back (I assumed it did, which is why I didn't copy the folder).

Also, after re-installation and on first boot, it seems like it put back the options save into the prefix folder, but not the actual game save. So my guess is that it either hangs before doing anything with the actual gamesave file or that it can't read or write there (which I don't think is the case as it can put the options save back). I have tried to find info in the steam logs again, but I can't find anything unfortunately. So maybe one of the updated packages (I ran a systemupdate before going to bed) screwed something over or something, but again I can't find any errors in the logs.

(edit: I also just noticed that on the Windows machine those b0{1-3} files are present, so the game doesn't autocreate them either, which means it probably doesn't get to the part where it handles the gamesave files)

I have no clue if there is anything else I can test unfortunately. It's crazy as I have played the game (the dailies) daily for a long time now with no issues.

[MrMette]

Apparently it had to do with a systemupdate yesterday. The newest Pipewire update (which is a soundserver on Linux) apparently has a bug in the newest version if your sound is set to 5.1 instead of stereo. I noticed that I didn't get audio in some other games over Proton while my browser did have sound, which made me look into reports from other people.

I still have no idea why the issue with the soundserver makes this game not load, but switching my audio settings to Stereo fixed the issue in the other games and made Lonely Mountains Dowhill load again (even without reverting the update back).

So this whole thread is pretty unnecessary now, but maybe it can come in handy if someone ever come across the same thing (even though it's needs a lot of prerequisites to happen).