Metro: Last Light black screen problem solved

I recently bought Metro: Last Light in Steam.

It launched fine but after see the intro and selecting audio and start the game for the very first time, only sound worked, no video at all. Re-launching the game did not help, rebooting the machine didn’t work either. Finally, reinstalling the game didn’t worked as I was afraid, too.

After that first time, I couldn’t even see the main menu or intro… Only the first frame and then a complete blackout.

As suggested somewhere else, I’d installed latest nvidia drivers (331.20), and tested with gnome kde, xfce and blackbox. Nothing at all…. annoying.

I realized, but, that when I pressed Alt+Tab, I could see the image on the KDE’s thumbnail, so the video was there somewhat… so investigating deeper, I finally found the solution.

If you have the same issue, you must edit the user.cfg file, in your steam installed files for that game, usually on:

~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/Metro Last Light/1100001073fc3fe/

But if you have another destination for your local files or a non-steam edition, make a search for this file where all the game files are.

Once you have this file opened, search for r_gamma parameter. Mine was at 1.5, so I lowered it to

r_gamma 0.5

As easy as that.

Heroes of Newerth does not start: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite

When yo try to play Heroes of Newerth (aka HoN) on your computer and receive the following error

$ ./hon.sh
warning: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite
Crash log saved as '/home/malevolent/.Heroes of Newerth/game/crash_2.5.0.0_05.log'
Segmentation fault


It means you have problems with your graphic card. There are some reasons to fail, I will explain the nvidia possible issues

1. You are using the open source driver of your card
2. You does not set the optimal antialiasing settings
3. The game start with a invalid gl_modesetting configuration

1. Using the opensource driver

At the moment I write this, nvidia propietary drivers are far better than opensource. I hope in a future open source drivers can beat the propietary ones, but if you want to do almost everything graphic-intensive, you shoul use propietary ones. Go and install them, on Arch

yaourt nvidia

2. Optimal antialiasing settings

Make sure you have optimal antialiasing settings on your NVIDIA Server X Settings –> Antialiasing Settings –> Enhance Application Settings

3. Invalid gl_modesetting configuration

That was the solution in my case, but many people had the issues I mentioned before. Anyway, S2 developers made a standard configuration file with some weird values. They use old nvidia and ati drivers and the game simply gives the error from above. To solve the issue, you must override that setting.
Firts of all, the config file is not where you installed the game (wtf!) but on ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game. Once you get the proper directory, you must edit startup.cfg and delete the content of gl_modesetting parameter, like I do here:

$ echo 'SetSave "gl_modesetting" ""' > ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game/startup.cfg

The game now runs, at least for me. I must mention that I have a 32bit machine to play games, but I guess that if you have a 64bit, you probably have even more problems.