[IMPORTANT] White screen on Windows 10 laptop and Windows 8.1 laptop

[uKomodo]

Issue When launched (either complied or fresh from the website), GB Studio launches, but only prompts a white screen.

Expected behavior I expected for GB Studio to launch.

Screenshots

Platform I am using Windows 10 Home Build 1903, however I've launched GB Studio on my older laptop running Windows 8.1 (Ver 6.3 Build 9600). I have tried GB Studio 1.1.0 and 1.2.0.

Additional context I have tried:

• Checking if GBS was blocked my an anti-virus
• Run as admin
• Compiling GBS
• Squirrel and manual installations
• Reinstalled about 12 times
• Dev builds
• Clearing window state

[RichardULZ]

@uKomodo Also said on discord Visual Studio Code (another electron app) was working fine.

The white screen of death seems to have a wide range of causes and cases, https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/7049#issuecomment-295653629 Some suggest it happened running 32x builds on 64x, or to clear the app in %appdata% in case something had corrupted, or that deleting d3dcompiler_47.dll from the app folder fixed some users issues.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/FAQ#_vs-code-is-blank Visual studio Code states it may be a GPU acceleration problem, though this is not a white screen.

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2357#issuecomment-454553016 Checking for an uncaughtException may help narrow it down, no idea how to go about that though.

They have it compiling from source (with the white screen) so if anyone has ideas to try, would be nice to solve.

[chrismaltby]

@uKomodo and @RichardULZ thanks for looking so thoroughly into this.

I actually had plans over the next few days to introduce better error handling to catch issues like this where possible and display the error message in the window. I'll work on this and let you know when the dev build is ready to try again. It's not going to fix anything but hopefully it should help understand what's happening here.

[chrismaltby]

To update a little on this I've pushed up an update in commit 4b15a18035df77a20ad67002cd46cfc9a19ccb9f that attempts to catch uncaught exceptions and problems loading a project and now displays the following:

Viewing the stack trace shows the following:

and clicking "What can I do?" opens https://www.gbstudio.dev/docs/error which doesn't exist yet but I will create a page to give instructions on asking the Discord/Reddit for help and how to submit a GitHub issue.

But looking again at your screenshots it seems you can't even open the initial window where you create a new project or choose from recent projects to open. If that's the case these error messages won't appear for you. That screen is made slightly differently so I'll need to think about the best way to catch the errors there, and also what the most likely things are that might be causing issues for you.

Could you confirm if you are able to create a project at all or if this is literally the only screen you see when you open GB Studio?

[chrismaltby]

I've added a similar message to the splash screen now too.

@uKomodo do you want to give the developer builds another go and see if you get a better error message?

You should be able to use the links at the bottom of https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/blob/develop/README.md to get an up to date dev build.

[uKomodo]

Oh wow, I completely forgot about this. Thanks for the help, I'll get the dev version immediately.