Trick to solve crashes while loading game/saves on Linux

[an_squirrel]

I use Fedora 42 KDE on a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 3 laptop, and was not able to play the game due to crashes that happened right after when the main menu is loaded, when the game is running at a higher resolution; and crashes that happened while starting a new game or loading a save game when the effective resolution was tweaked to be lower (either by raw resolution or by increasing the GUI scaling factor to 1.3). These crashes were due to game running poorly because of performance settings, but because of these crashes, it was impossible to tweak those settings in the game UI. This made the game unplayable, but I finally figured out how to fix this.

Instead of starting the game normally, in the launcher set OpenGL as the renderer, and launch the game as so.

IMPORTANT WARNING: if you're sensitive to graphical glitches in any way, if you actually start a game with OpenGL, in my experience it's very glitchy in ways that appear to me as likely to trigger your visual sensitivities. I don't have such sensitivities so I'm not sure, but be warned.

After launching, go into game settings, and tweak performance related stuff as necessary. Apply the settings, then quit to desktop. In the graphics settings don't forget to set the renderer to Vulkan. Launch the launcher again and check game settings to make sure the renderer is Vulkan. Launch the game. Hopefully it runs fine.

I've a bunch of DLCs and a couple small QoL mods, and the game runs playably on the laptop. It does feel like it runs a wee bit hotter than Windows 10 tho.

 

[an_squirrel]

Another tip on running game on Fedora 42 with a low spec system:

With its default configuration, extra swap space helps, by default Fedora relies on "ZRAM" which is completely inappropriate for this use case. You want to disable that with

$ sudo touch /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf

and then reboot. After reboot, add extra swap space using:

$ sudo btrfs subvolume create /swap
$ sudo btrfs filesystem mkswapfile --size 16g --uuid clear /swap/swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swap/swapfile

To have this swap partition on permanently, you can add a line like

/swap/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

to your /etc/fstab file. To achieve that quickly on the command line, use these commands:

$ cp /etc/fstab /tmp/fstab.backup
$ echo /swap/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

 

[an_squirrel]

Also, as for the crashes, I have crash dumps but the uploader keeps failing to upload. If any developers are interested, I can try to share in some other way, uploading here maybe.

But in sum I keep getting SIGSEGV, or at least that's what the "exception.txt" in the crash dumps tell me.

 

[AndrewT]

AFAIK the game's developers do not read this forum, I'm afraid. And as this is on an unsupported Linux distro it can't be reported in Bug Reports ...

These crashes were due to game running poorly because of performance settings, but because of these crashes, it was impossible to tweak those settings in the game UI.

Note that those settings are exposed in Documents/Paradox Interactive/Crusader Kings III/pdx_settings.txt , you could just manually edit that file.

 

[an_squirrel]

AFAIK the game's developers do not read this forum, I'm afraid. And as this is on an unsupported Linux distro it can't be reported in Bug Reports ...

I meant this more as a tip than a bug report. Sorry if not the right place to post. I didn't report it as a bug because I don't have the chance to test it with a supported distro, for the lack of time and extra hardware.

Note that those settings are exposed in Documents/Paradox Interactive/Crusader Kings III/pdx_settings.txt , you could just manually edit that file.

Problem there is I couldn't find much help about how to edit that file, what values to use. Some things were obvious, like resolution and scaling, but other things weren't without documentation.

And for anybody stumbling upon this thread, the file AndrewT mentions is at

"~/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Crusader Kings III"

in my setup.

 

[AndrewT]

Problem there is I couldn't find much help about how to edit that file, what values to use. Some things were obvious, like resolution and scaling, but other things weren't without documentation.

I don't have any documentation on that either. But any options for any setting should be visible in the launcher-game settings or game's own settings menus.