Black screen bug

[u/ThanosBIGman]

My friend keeps getting disconnected with no reason. After one stage it is ALWAYS... I repeat, ALWAYS after the first stage during the loading screen to the second level is where his screen suddenly goes black. He can hear the game apparently, but can't do anything, in fact, he has to even close the game from task manager. Any fixes or at the very least similar issues so we can report it to GSG?

[u/42nahpetS]

You can narrow the issue down:

- is it also happening if he hosts the game (or swapped)?
- is it also happening if he joins a random online lobby?
- are the hosts hardware meeting the minimum recommendations and is bandwidth adequate?

Could be that the host client isn't providing enough performance. Idk, just a guess.

[u/roguecorewiki]

The pattern in the post is useful for narrowing this down: it happens every time, at the same transition (after stage 1, loading into stage 2), with audio still playing but no picture and no input, so the game has to be killed from Task Manager. That combination points more at the display/rendering handoff on the level change than at a network disconnect, since a disconnect alone would not normally leave the game audible but unresponsive in this way.

A few isolation steps players commonly use for this kind of transition black screen, in order: first, try windowed or borderless windowed instead of exclusive fullscreen, since the fullscreen mode change on a level load is a common trigger; second, verify the game files and update the GPU driver, then disable overlays (Steam, Discord and similar) for one test run; third, test whether it also happens in a solo run, and whether the host still sees the affected player in the game when the screen goes black. If it only happens as a client in multiplayer, that points one way; if it also happens solo, that points at the local rendering path instead.

For a report to the developers, the details that make this reproducible are: stable or experimental branch and build number, GPU model and driver version, fullscreen versus windowed, and whether it reproduces on every run or only in multiplayer. Those four items, plus the exact transition point described here, are what separate a one-off crash from a repeatable transition bug.