story time: last week i went on vacation, but the saturday before i left i got a response from SAGE about my build. apparently they were getting a black screen with audio, and no other errors or details. i had my laptop with me but it's so awkward to actually code on a laptop that the most i could do was ask for more details and try my hardest to break shit. couldn't replicate the issue at all, asked a bunch of friends to try the exact build, nobody reported this issue. i'm even printing out hardware specs and we are using basically the same drivers and rendering options (according to godot). thursday i'm like, "sorry i can't find the problem, can you ask another mod if they get the same issue?"
today i hear from a new mod: exact same issue. i'm pulling my hair out. i can find a few discussions on google about it, but no resolutions. some of these are godot 3, some godot 4, none of them using godot 4.2.1, but all of them being reported by nvidia users. okay, that could be literally anything, nvidia isn't exactly known for stability. i have basically no leads, i can't find any specific resolutions or any bug reports, i'm screaming because i've already asked for more time to debug this and this was basically the cut off.
friend in vc asks me "are you using viewport scaling on the default viewport?" yes, that's oddly specific. he sends me this github issue. apparently, when using godot, if you use viewport scaling and the size of the viewport is different from the size of the window, AND the user has forced multisample AA on in the nvidia control panel, the screen will render black and output no errors. what?? that's fucking insane?? who does this??
twenty minutes fucking around with the control panel trying to find out how to force MSAA on with my specific card and i have replication. thirty minutes and it's fixed. couldn't believe the coincidence that these two particular guys were using this same power user option and NOBODY else i asked to test had it on.
i'm making a pixel art game. i hate computer graphics.
tl;dr - if you are making a game with godot 4 and some users report a black screen with audio and they are using a nvidia gpu, switch from viewport scaling mode to canvas item scaling mode if it's enabled in the project settings, and see if that fixes it.