I created a account just for this, but I don’t know if you guys already know this. When you go to your driver settings and change the video driver to anything else except for gl you will get unexpected results and you can’t fix it except for you to reinstall Retro Arch. When you change the driver to d3d everything will seem fine until you close the program and reopen it and you are faced with a completely dark screen. When you change the driver to sdl2, close the program, and open it again you’re program will crash. If there is a fix for this please tell me.
The xmb menu driver doesn’t seem to be compatible with anything but the GL video driver. If you want to use the other video drivers you’ll need to change the menu driver to something like rgui. You also don’t need to completely reinstall retroarch as you can just open the retroarch.cfg and change video_driver = “” and menu_driver = “” to the desired drivers.
Yes, it’s a big problem for end users. I experienced it myself and I had to figure out how to work around it. It was extremely frustrating at the time. Currently, you can and should edit the cfg file manually to work around it, but I agree that some sort of checking should be done.
On the other end of this is that currently, RetroArch has very few active developers; primarily 1 who fixes this sort of thing. If you can fix it in an elegant way and submit a pull request, he’d be happy to review it and merge it. He is usually busy working on things he’s more interested in, and one can’t blame him. RetroArch development is entirely voluntary.
Thanks for adding your voice. There are many users who have reported the very same thing. It’s possible that such a big user voice will inspire someone awesome to fix it.
Just out of interest, how many developers does RA have? I thought it was a big project so i assumed there was a big team.
Primarily, there’s one who works on issues like this. That’s Twinaphex (aka “Squarepusher”). The original developer, Themaister, is now working for a company that is preventing him (in what way exactly, I’m not sure) from working on RetroArch/libretro aside from Vulkan support. There’s also Radius who is working on the Nuklear menu driver and helps out here and there, Alcaro who also helps out here and there but mostly works on his own libretro-related projects, and a handful of others in similar positions (mudlord, Kivutar, leiradel, sronsse, and probably a few others I’m forgetting). While these devs helping where and when they can are great, none of them put in nearly the time and effort that Twinaphex does, coordinating and implementing major improvements and fixes. Twinaphex would like more help, of course. Everyone understands that this is ultimately voluntary.
As for me, I’m just a humble n00b who helps out on the forums. My technical expertise is limited to sshing into the server and rebooting it when it’s down and building from source to test things manually.
If I’m mistaken, please feel free to correct me. This is how I currently see the situation.
Kivutar does quite a bit related to menus (particularly XMB is his baby) and lakka, and radius totally handles the build-bot and does a lot with Android (he also implemented the override system, of note), but yeah, most commits come from Twinaphex and he’s ported the vast majority of the cores himself. There are a number of smaller contributors but, importantly, there’s no real hierarchy (that is, no one says “you’re responsible for [thing], so you have to do [whatever]”, much less “do [thing] because I said so”). People contribute what they can when they can, and very few patches/PRs are outright rejected. Libretro/RetroArch is the most egalitarian open-source project I’ve ever been involved with.
Back on topic, I don’t think the menu driver is the only problem. When I read this thread, I tried it out with several dailies over the past two weeks, and every menu driver available, and still got a crash with no useful information…just like the last post I made on the issue.
I tested the Vulkan renderer in Dota 2 to make sure Vulkan was working in general, and it worked just fine. So the issue might be on this end of things, but with logs abruptly halting, I can’t even begin to guess what’s wrong. It seems like other people on the forums have been able to use Vulkan on Windows, so what could it be?