Black screen is shown when building

Bugs
#1

Whenever I build a project, a black screen is shown.

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It even happens when I create an entirely new project and run it, it only shows the black screen. I’ve bundled it for windows (since it’s the only thing I can test currently) and it does the same thing.

I tried opening the astronaut walking tutorial to see if it happens there, and it seems that the problem also appears there.

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(There are 2 astronauts because I wanted to see what adding an extra object would do.)

Unlike the other ones, the object showed and it was just the background that had an issue. I’ve tried redownloading Defold multiple times, no change. However, this is not a problem when I build it has an HTML5. It only happens while using the engine.

The only time it had ever worked is when I downloaded this colyseus tic-tac-toe example: GitHub - endel/colyseus-tic-tac-toe: Turn-based multiplayer example powered by Colyseus

Has anyone else experienced this or know what’s going on? Thanks.

By the way, scripts work in game objects, for some reason sprites don’t show up/instances don’t appear.

Black screen problem might be related to creating new Files or the Defold.exe application
#2

Are you on Windows? Which graphics card do you have? It could possibly be the same issue as this one: Engine building error?(Please help me... I want to use this engine so much...) - #23 by Duppa_Weppa

#3

I can’t check my graphics card at this moment but it seems that changing the resolution is making it visible. So I should change the resolution like what they did in the other post? Also yes, I’m on Windows.

#4

Alright, I got the graphics card, it’s Intel(R) HD Graphics 530

Ok I’ve done the same thing and it works. Though it is inconvenient we have to do that until the bug is patched, it’s better than nothing.

#5

Actually, I’ve found another problem regarding this. It seems that the bigger an object is, the smaller the window resolution you need. I think the best thing to do for now is to use HTML5 until the problem is fixed.

Problem running Defold - ERROR:GRAPHICS: dmGraphics::OpenGLFlip(1275): gl error 1280
#6

Woah… I think you’re having a similar problem with me. I’m a Windows user too, and haven’t found any nice solution yet. :sleepy:

#7

The solution for changing the resolution worked for a bit, until I increased the size of of an object, so Im’m just gonna use HTML5 for now.

#8

hopefully this helps someone out there on the grand internet:

Short story: go to game.project → graphics → OpenGL Version Hint → set “Highest Version Available”. this fixed the issue for me!

Long long story:
I recently downloaded Defold because I was fed up with Unity, tired of Godot, and not interested in Unreal. Defold seemed to be the only engine that can export to all of the major platforms, so I wanted to give it a try. So I watched hours of tutorial videos, then decided to finally start my first project.

New blank desktop project. Build. Black Screen. WTF? Build HTML5. Renders perfectly. WTF again?? So I started searching and found various threads about this issue, but nobody had a solution. Some people found that adding more objects would cause other objects to render, some people found that their coordinates were off, some people found that changing the resolution was effective, but none of them worked for me. So I angrily deleted Defold.

After another afternoon of google searching “perfect game engine that exactly meets my requirements”, I kept thinking back to Defold. So I decided I want to spend a couple days figuring out the issue if I could, otherwise f*** it, no regrets.

So I started trying random stuff, curious about whether the issue persisted after publishing the app, and of course, the published version is just as broken. I started messing around with different bundle settings randomly and finally found that the win32 publish renders it perfectly. But there’s no option to change the regular build to win32, so I kept looking for a better answer. Publishing with win64 in release mode doesn’t work, but some extra things get rendered for 0.2 seconds when you exit the game. I tried various other bundle/publish configurations, but to no avail.

Then I finally started looking around again in the game.project settings, and noticed that the OpenGL Version Hint had an ascending list with the lowest version selected. Why would you use the lowest version as the default? That’s a bug IMO. I switched it to “Highest Version Available” and voila! After that, I tried every version in the list from 3.3 all the way to 4.6, but none work, it only works when I select “highest version available”.

FWIW, here’s some stats on my laptop:

Laptop model: ASUS TUF Gaming F17
Processor: intel core i5 10300H
RAM: 8GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 1650Ti
Driver version: 32.0.15.6614 (just updated it yesterday as part of my debugging)
OS: Windows 10 Home 22H2
DirectX: v12

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Black screen problem might be related to creating new Files or the Defold.exe application
Following along tutorial gets me a black screen
#9

This is a recent addition. When was the first time you tried Defold and got a black screen?

#10

My initial guess is that you also have an integrated Intel GPU, and that defold was selecting that one.
We generally recommend that users update their intel drivers as well.

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#11

Said by britzl: When was the first time you tried Defold and got a black screen?

My first time trying defold was just a few days ago, maybe Sunday, so it started from the first time I ran any project.

Said by Mathias_Westerdalh: My initial guess is that you also have an integrated Intel GPU

You are correct, and I didn’t realize that was relevant. My windows device manager does have “Intel(R) UHD Graphics” right above the GeForce. And the drivers are presumably out of date (3/16/2020). I’ll just updated to the most recent version (from 9/20/2024) and voila it also fixed my issue. So now I won’t have to change the game.project graphics setting to “higest available version”.

Thank you both for responding so quickly, it’s a really good look for your team! If either of you want to ask any more questions, please don’t hesitate, I’ll definitely respond. I look forward to being part of this community! And hopefully anyone else who doesn’t automatically update their display drivers will see this and not have to spend so much time on it.

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