Hi,
I’ve been having an issue with the ROBLOX game client over the past few days and I just can’t figure out what is causing it. Every time I try to join a game, the client opens up and shows a completely black window. The client is still technically responsive, I can move the window around, click inside of it, etc. Another thing to note is my cursor hides behind the black screen on the window. If I exit out of the window, the client will go back to the home page a few seconds later. After around 45 seconds, the loading screen will finally come, and the game will load and play perfectly fine.
Here is a screenshot of what the window looks like;
I’ve dealt with lots of tech problems in my life, and typically you’re able to boil certain things down based on any changes that may have been made before the problem occured. However, I hadn’t changed anything at all. I simply turned my computer off, slept, and turned it on. My graphics driver hadn’t changed, there were no Windows updates, I hadn’t downloaded anything - everything else on my computer works perfectly fine.
I’d list everything I’ve tried to solve the issue, but that would take ages. Disable antivirus, revert drivers, disable firewall, compatability settings, change storage devices, uninstall every trace of ROBLOX off my computer (including registry keys) and reinstall it, clear browser data, switch browsers, scan windows for corrupt files - … everything.
Now, let’s get into what I know. The obvious first step of diagnosis is Task Manager, however anything I tried was pointless. I noticed that when I press ‘Play’, two instances of
‘RobloxPlayerLauncher.exe’ are launched at the same time. Very quickly one instance of ‘RobloxPlayerBeta.exe’ starts, and both Launcher instances end. That one PlayerBeta instance would be the window in the screenshot. For the next 45 or so seconds, it sits in limbo using anywhere from 0% - 0.3% CPU and 240MB of Memory. After, out of nowhere, a second ‘RobloxPlayerBeta.exe’ instance appears and suddenly I am loading in the game and everything is normal.
I decided to look at the logs, figuring it would at least show me SOMETHING - even if it was understandable binary jibberish. It turns out, it barely tells me anything at all.
For the sake of security I won’t dump the entire log file in here, but I took an excerpt from the log that looks to be safe to share;
Log Excerpt
2022-11-19T01:10:17.531Z,2.531781,6748,6 [FLog::SingleSurfaceApp] vrService is created
2022-11-19T01:10:17.531Z,2.531781,6748,6 [FLog::SingleSurfaceApp] is VR connected: FALSE
2022-11-19T01:10:17.531Z,2.531781,6748,6 [FLog::SurfaceController] SurfaceController::RenderJob::stepDataModelJob: No DM yet. Continue...
2022-11-19T01:10:17.539Z,2.539781,6758,6 [FLog::SurfaceController] SurfaceController::RenderJob::scheduleRender: No data model. Bind workspace now...
2022-11-19T01:10:17.603Z,2.603781,6758,6 [FLog::Graphics] LayeredClothingMode updated: LC=1 HSR=1 TC2=1
2022-11-19T01:10:17.606Z,2.606781,6758,6 [FLog::Graphics] SceneManager: resizing main targets to 1002x750
2022-11-19T01:10:17.606Z,2.606781,6748,6 [FLog::SurfaceController] SurfaceController::enableVR
2022-11-19T01:10:17.657Z,2.657850,6748,6 [FLog::UGCGameController] Game Scripts are loaded
2022-11-19T01:10:58.290Z,43.290508,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] GameJoinUtil::makePlaceLauncherRequest, response:
{"jobId":"JoinPlace=5846386835;","status":0,"joinScriptUrl":null,"authenticationUrl":null,"authenticationTicket":null,"message":null,"joinScript":null}
status code: 200
httpErrorCode: 0
errorMessage:
2022-11-19T01:10:58.290Z,43.290508,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] GameJoinUtil::makePlaceLauncherRequest: requestCount: 1, url: https://gamejoin.roblox.com/v1/join-game.
2022-11-19T01:10:58.290Z,43.290508,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] Delaying request by 1.00 seconds
2022-11-19T01:10:59.396Z,44.396099,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] GameJoinUtil::makePlaceLauncherRequest, response:
{"jobId":"JoinPlace=5846386835;","status":0,"joinScriptUrl":null,"authenticationUrl":null,"authenticationTicket":null,"message":null,"joinScript":null}
status code: 200
httpErrorCode: 0
errorMessage:
2022-11-19T01:10:59.396Z,44.396099,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] GameJoinUtil::makePlaceLauncherRequest: requestCount: 2, url: https://gamejoin.roblox.com/v1/join-game.
2022-11-19T01:10:59.396Z,44.396099,1a70,6 [FLog::GameJoinUtil] Delaying request by 1.00 seconds
Now I don’t have any normal working client logs to compare mine to, but I’ll say what I’ve analyzed about these. Everything seems to be working smoothly and quickly, and all of a sudden after “Game Scripts are loaded”, the log completely pauses for 40 seconds before logging a “GameJoinUtil::makePlaceLauncherRequest”, and then all of sudden everything just boots back up and after sending 3 different requests of those, it speeds through the rest of what it needs to do and that’s when I get in the game. Comparing multiple of these logs, that 40 second time period is shockingly consistent and is usually the same amount of time by within a second.
I was surprised to see no one has mentioned having this problem theirselves, and I figured after boiling myself out of the equation - it seemed like this was something on ROBLOX’s end. However, without anyone else seemingly having this issue, I don’t know what is causing it to happen to me. If anyone has any ideas/questions/solutions, please let me know. I appreciate it.
