Could not get application preferences directory

I have written a bunch of games in C++ and use a python script (subprocess.Popen) to launch them. This has been working just fine for over a year. Just recently, I’ve begun to get the following error when launching a game:

[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] INFO: Initialized input
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] INFO: Initialized user interface
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] INFO: Initialized renderer
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] WARNING: Could not get application preferences directory
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] INFO: Set audio mode 44100 Hz stereo interpolated
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] INFO: Initialized engine
[Tue Aug 13 08:49:52 2019] WARNING: Could not get application preferences directory

It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, my display just shows a grey screen and the game doesn’t come up. The directory

~/.local/share/urho3d

exits and if I run the game from the command line it works just fine. I have tried setting the userid and groupid using the Popen preexec_fn argument, but that has made no difference. The only thing I can think of is some sort of corrupt file system.

Does anyone have an idea as to what is going on?

I have no idea, but did you look into the definition of GetAppPreferencesDir()?

I did. I also looked at SDL_GetPrefPath.

const char *envr = SDL_getenv("XDG_DATA_HOME");

so I ran

env | grep XDG

and got

XDG_SESSION_ID=2
XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/var/lib/snapd/desktop
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000

obviously, I don’t have XDG_DATA_HOME defined. I’m not sure where this env should point since it has never been defined in the past…

Maybe this is useful then?