Cordial 0.23.0

Cordial 0.23.0: doctor, NVIDIA, and no more grey screen without Vulkan

Something not working? Run the doctor

cordial --doctor (or flatpak run io.github.luohoa97.Cordial --doctor)
checks your display, GPU, sound, keyring and Roblox install. Each line says
ok, warn or FAIL, with what to do about it. The same checks appear on the
Report a Problem screen, and they are included when you copy or save the
report. docs/doctor.md
lists every check.

Report a Problem is now one screen. It opens from the main menu and from
About, instead of two screens with different contents, and it has left
Settings. Under X11 the launcher now says X11 support is buggy, with a button
to the same screen.

The screen no longer goes grey when a text box takes focus without Vulkan

When Vulkan was not working, focusing a text box turned the game grey until
the box lost focus (#53).
Cordial now keeps the game visible. The text editor itself still does not
appear in that situation. Starting Cordial with GSK_RENDERER=cairo makes it
appear, and the log suggests this when it happens. The grey screen seen in
GNOME fullscreen with working Vulkan may have a different cause and is not
confirmed fixed.

NVIDIA

• The log and cordial --diagnostics now name your GPU and driver. On NVIDIA
  they add the kernel driver version and whether the Flatpak's NVIDIA
  extension matches it. A mismatch is a common reason for "no supported
  graphics device" in the Flatpak. flatpak update fixes it.
• NVIDIA drivers 535 and 550 are known to crash other clients at the first
  resize. Cordial warns if it sees one of them. Updating to a newer driver
  fixed it for others, and so did switching the renderer to OpenGL ES.
• If the driver cannot list the display's present modes, which happens on some
  laptops with two GPUs, Cordial retries instead of stopping.

None of this has run on an NVIDIA card, because none was available. If
you have one, the steps in
docs/nvidia.md
say what to try and what to send.

More settings apply while you play

Audio output, GameMode, controllers and the title bar now change in a running
game, alongside the four from 0.22.0. Switching audio output while sound plays
works on PipeWire. With Pulse, ALSA or OSS, the new output is used for sounds
that start afterwards. These were tested piece by piece, not in a full game.

Also new

• Import FastFlags from a Bloxstrap or Fishstrap ClientAppSettings.json,
  or from Sober's config, with the Import button on the FastFlags page. Bad
  entries are skipped and listed rather than failing the whole file.
• Delete a profile from the launcher. It signs the profile out first and
  refuses while that profile is running.
• The report now says whether this is an official build or an unofficial one
  from a fork, and where it came from.

Fixes

• Roblox's engine is no longer unpacked again on every launch (about 116 MB
  each time).
• A downloaded build's signature is now tied to that file, not to whatever
  sits at its path (#51).
• Cleaning up old builds can no longer remove the one just installed.
• Plugin archives made with tar -C dir ., as the plugin guide says, install
  again.
• A game that hangs while closing is now stopped after a timeout instead of
  staying open (#52). This is
  not confirmed on a machine where the hang happens.
• Under X11, keys held when the window loses focus are released
  (#41). Not yet confirmed by
  the reporter.

Some of these fixes, the FastFlag import, profile deletion and parts of the
doctor are adapted from Stacked, a
GPL-3.0 fork of Cordial.

What is still broken

The signed-in startup freeze is not fixed. It still happens on some
launches, in bursts.

Resizing the window does not redraw the game until you stop dragging.

A Roblox version released only for ARM64 is not shown on x86_64 machines.

Games that put the cursor in a text box for you may not accept typing, and
movement keys sometimes stop working after joining a game
(#29,
#64).

A game's DF FastFlags, such as DFIntTaskSchedulerTargetFps, can reset
partway through a session.

Some games show the mobile (touch) interface.

The cordial, cordial-bin and cordial-git packages on the AUR are not
published by this project. Use the release package or the signed pacman
repository instead.

Still open from earlier releases:

• a freeze and crash leaving fullscreen
  (#39);
• a crash on first touch with a touchscreen
  (#36);
• a crash on launch on some machines
  (#35);
• no window on some COSMIC, KWin or wlroots setups
  (#38);
• pointer drift during camera drags on Hyprland
  (#56);
• a rare crash just after startup
  (#63).

The notes for 0.17.0 to 0.21.0 listed a crash after a second launch
(#44) as open. It was fixed in
0.16.0.

ARM64 builds are still untested on real hardware. VR is not supported.