Games won't start

[peperminator]

I've had this issue for a few months, and I've found no fix up to this date; A few months ago my games decided for no clear reason that that they wouldn't start anymore. Every time I tried to start a title, they would "open" Steam would say the title was "running" and then after a few seconds the application would close again, and steam would say they were "synching" right before they closed.

I'm running Steam on an iMac
using MacOS 10.13.5
I use Sophos Antivirus detection, but even when I disable Sophos the problem still occurs.

The games that won't start are Kerbal Space Program and Cities: Skylines. and these are the only games in my library.

Some of the "fixes" that I've tried are:
-Verifying the integrity of the game files
-Clearing the download cache
-Reinstalling Steam
-Reinstalling the games
-Disabling the anti virus software
-Running the Beta partition in Steam Beta Update
-Clearing the NVRAM
-Deleting the Steam.AppBundle directory
-Directly running the games through their install directory

So far, nothing has helped and I was hoping maybe some of you might have a solution for this.

[jmtanzillo]

I would recommend that you also clear your NVRAM because sometimes problems can lurk there.

[mikela]

If you try to start KSP or Cities directly with Steam not running does that work or do they seem to open and then close immediately as they do with Steam? If you right-click and open properties for one of them in Steam (say KSP), then go to the Local Files tab and then click on Browse Local Files it will take you to the game's install directory where you can directly open the game's app file.

If the game works when started directly, that points to either an issue with Steam starting the games or with the Steam overlay. If they do work for you, the next step would be to try disabling the Steam overlay from In-Game tab of Steam's settings. There is a checkbox to "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game."

If you aren't able to start either of your games directly and haven't done so already, I would recommend deleting the Steam.AppBundle directory which is where the current Steam version is actually installed (the one in /Applications is just a launcher for it). I have instructions for doing so posted on another thread that you can find here:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/2/1752358461531983094/#c1752358461532405794

[GodzillaJP19]

wont show servers help

[peperminator]

Originally posted by mikela:

If you try to start KSP or Cities directly with Steam not running does that work or do they seem to open and then close immediately as they do with Steam? If you right-click and open properties for one of them in Steam (say KSP), then go to the Local Files tab and then click on Browse Local Files it will take you to the game's install directory where you can directly open the game's app file.

If the game works when started directly, that points to either an issue with Steam starting the games or with the Steam overlay. If they do work for you, the next step would be to try disabling the Steam overlay from In-Game tab of Steam's settings. There is a checkbox to "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game."

If you aren't able to start either of your games directly and haven't done so already, I would recommend deleting the Steam.AppBundle directory which is where the current Steam version is actually installed (the one in /Applications is just a launcher for it). I have instructions for doing so posted on another thread that you can find here:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/2/1752358461531983094/#c1752358461532405794

Hey! huge thanks for your reply, this is the first time I've received a serious reply to my problem. Unfortunately they did not work, when opening the games directly, they still immediately close upon startup. Deleting the Steam.Appbundle directory didn't give me a different result. So I'm afraid I'm still stuck with this issue. If you have any other suggestions please post them, at this point I'm willing to try out anything that might work.

[peperminator]

Originally posted by jmtanzillo:

I would recommend that you also clear your NVRAM because sometimes problems can lurk there.

Just did this, no succes unfortunately

[mikela]

Weird, if the games are closing when you try to start them directly there might be some issue with them. Do you ever get crash report dialogs when they close? Try opening the Console application then go to the User Reports section in the list on the left and see if you have any crash reports that show up in the resulting list for KSP or Cities. They should be named like KSP_<Crash Date>.

[peperminator]

Originally posted by mikela:

Weird, if the games are closing when you try to start them directly there might be some issue with them. Do you ever get crash report dialogs when they close? Try opening the Console application then go to the User Reports section in the list on the left and see if you have any crash reports that show up in the resulting list for KSP or Cities. They should be named like KSP_<Crash Date>.

It is indeed really weird, and I can't explain it, at all. Just opened up my console app and checked for user crash reports. But I don't have any user reports at all, even after attempting to open KSP nothing showed up.

[peperminator]

For all of you who are still interested in this issue, I've made a little screen recording of what happens when I try to open any game. https://youtu.be/iI8k3pMm2-s any help would be greatly appreciated!

[mikela]

Hmm, I see what you mean by opening and immediately closing. I had thought perhaps the games weren't even showing in the dock before closing. That looks like the game may be deciding to quit rather than crashing or something similar.

Would you be comfortable running some commands in the terminal to try to start the games directly and see what is printed? If so, start up the Terminal application, then run the following commands (there are two commands, separated by blank lines, any other lines breaks were added by auto-formatting):

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal\ Space\ Program/KSP.app/Contents/MacOS


./KSP

[peperminator]

Originally posted by mikela:

Hmm, I see what you mean by opening and immediately closing. I had thought perhaps the games weren't even showing in the dock before closing. That looks like the game may be deciding to quit rather than crashing or something similar.

Would you be comfortable running some commands in the terminal to try to start the games directly and see what is printed? If so, start up the Terminal application, then run the following commands (there are two commands, separated by blank lines, any other lines breaks were added by auto-formatting):

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal\ Space\ Program/KSP.app/Contents/MacOS


./KSP

Okay so I ran the commands.
The first one

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal\ Space\ Program/KSP.app/Contents/MacOS

didn't react in any form or way. It ran just like any other command would do.

The second one however did actually bring up a reply.

iMac-van-Gerdri-6:MacOS Pepijn$ ./KSP
Mono path[0] = '/Users/Pepijn/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program/KSP.app/Contents/Resources/Data/Managed'
Mono config path = '/Users/Pepijn/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program/KSP.app/Contents/Mono/etc'
Player data archive not found at `/Users/Pepijn/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program/KSP.app/Contents/Resources/Data/data.unity3d`, using local filesystem
Segmentation fault: 11


I'm not sure what all of this means, but I hope you can figure it out.

[mikela]

Thanks, that was indeed informative. The last line is the important one, a segmentation fault is a type of crash in the program. So, for some reason KSP (and presumably Cities: Skyline just the same) is crashing during startup and not leaving any kind of crash log behind.

From a bit of Googling that I did it looks like KSP and Cities: Skyline may share a common software framework, so that may point to why they are failing together. Could you try installing and playing some other free games and see if you find any others that work or don't work? I often use "You Have to Win the Game" and "Shooty Skies" when I'm testing something in Steam which are both free and work on macOS if you'd like to give them a try for comparison.

[peperminator]

Originally posted by mikela:

Thanks, that was indeed informative. The last line is the important one, a segmentation fault is a type of crash in the program. So, for some reason KSP (and presumably Cities: Skyline just the same) is crashing during startup and not leaving any kind of crash log behind.

From a bit of Googling that I did it looks like KSP and Cities: Skyline may share a common software framework, so that may point to why they are failing together. Could you try installing and playing some other free games and see if you find any others that work or don't work? I often use "You Have to Win the Game" and "Shooty Skies" when I'm testing something in Steam which are both free and work on macOS if you'd like to give them a try for comparison.

Just installed "You have to win the game" and it worked without any issue or crash, so the shared framework might be the issue, do you happen to know how to resolve that?

[mikela]

Good to hear that some things are working, sorry they're not the games that you want to play though. You might want to try posting about this on KSP's tech support forum to see if they know anything about it. I might be able to help out but I haven't seen this issue before, with any luck someone on the KSP forum has.

There is a support post there that details how to locate log files and other information for posting a tech support request:
https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83212-how-to-get-support-read-first/

It mentions that KSP writes a log file that you can find easily in the Console app. If you open it, then expand the '~/Library/Logs' section in the list on the left, there should be a folder inside it named Unity. Clicking on that should show a 'Player.log' which is the log file for KSP. If you wanted to copy that file to pastebin or something I'd be happy to take a look at it for you, otherwise hopefully someone will take a look at it for you on the KSP forums.

[peperminator]

I would like to thank you in the first place for helping me trough this journey in order to solve my problem. But here's the really weird thing, I don't have a folder called 'Unity' inside my '~/Library/Logs' section of the console app. And I've searched, and I wasn't able to find it anywhere at all. So I'm not really sure what to do now......

[luke.mulligan17]

hey everyone

i am having a similar issue as well, my game will be almost completed loaded, like on the weird bird thing going around in a circle, it will then stop and stay on these screen, i thought the game needed time to load (citie skylines) but after an hour im assuming something is wrong. ive ben googling and reading these forums and not much is helping, the game tells me its not responding as well. i have a 2015 version of mac. ive seen suggestion that i might need more ram, but before spending money more money, wanted to see if you guys had any other ideas

cheers