[Solved] Game hangs on startup, Linux, AMD

Asrael

Hello,

I reinstalled Natural Selection 2 from Steam the day after build 268 had come out, and was unable to get it to launch. I disabled all my mods and verified my cache, and can't get it to operate for more than about a second. The loading spinner will stop and the application ceases to respond to anything, forcing me to kill the process.

I've tried launching with -verbose, no log is produced. I can't run Techsupport.exe, since I'm on Linux. I have disabled Catalyst AI, and I downloaded the precompiled shaders into the Natural Selection 2 folder. Unfortunately it still crashes.

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 x64, AMD Radeon HD 6970 with the 14.10 fglrx driver.

I managed to attach GDB to it using the Steam launch options, and got a partial backtrace of what was happening when it hung:

#0 0xf7fdb425 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xf42573f8 in pthread rwlock_rdlock ()
from /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0
#2 0xf4427a9b in glXSwapBuffers () from /usr/lib32/fglrx/libGL.so.1
#3 0xf7fd5c1c in ?? ()
from <home dir>/.steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so
Backtrace stopped: previous frame inner to this frame (corrupt stack?)

Disabling the in-game overlay did not change the backtrace. Renaming gameoverlayrenderer.so to something else changed #3 line to be:
from <steamapps>/common/Natural Selection 2/libSpark_Render.so

Is there any more information I can provide to help this?

Asrael

After getting generally annoyed with fglrx, I switched to Mesa, and now it loads.