Black Screen Cities Skylines on Arch Linux

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 13:57

Cities: Skylines doesn't seem to work out of the box on the Steam install from the official repositories. Probably due to some expected functionality ubuntu 12.04 LTS that they built steam based on. Anyway, some quick steps to resolve the issue on Arch Linux 4.0.1-1-ARCH

  1. Start the game, this will generate the prefs file that we need
  2. Using nano or similar edit ~/.config/unity3d/Colossal\ Order/Cities\:\ Skylines/prefs
  3. Find the line <pref name="Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode" type="int">1</pref>
  4. Simply change the 1 to 0 to indicate the change to windowed mode
  5. Optionally change the resolution to something that will work.
  6. Restart the game from steam - It should now show the splash logo properly
  7. Either you can play the game as is OR change the fullscreen back to [...]type="int">1 which will let you use fullscreen

As an aside I personally prefer to plan in an undecorated window with openbox window manager.