FAQ:trouble

Troubleshooting

Network

My buddy can not connect to a game I've opened. What can we do?

The engine uses UDP port 8452 by default, which can be changed in the lobby. If you are behind a router, and are having problems hosting, try forwarding the correct port and also make sure the firewall is not blocking it. If you do not know what a port or a firewall is, use a relay host instead: when hosting a game, tick the check-box labeled "Use relayhost".

Note that Spring engine will not connect to already running game, even if lobby client allows it.

Graphics

I am having really bad framerates (fps) on my dual core! What am I doing wrong?

Some of this helped other users:

• This error is sometimes reported by people having multicore-CPUs. To solve this, you could try to restrict it to run on one core. Download the file from http://www.robpol86.com/pages/imagecfg.php follow the instructions, and force the spring exe file (spring.exe) to run on one core.

• Installing the latest processor drivers and Windows hotfixes for your system may also help.

• Also you may try multithreaded version of Spring, which can be downloaded from here.

• Also try to disabling the "Exhaust" effect on planes could help: Press f11 while ingame, disable LUPS and Lups manager (by clicking on them to make them turn red)

How to Alt-Tab out of full-screen on Linux?

Play windowed with /grabinput, or use devilspie.

I use an ATI or Intel graphic card on Linux with Open-Source drivers, and the map is all white! Is there a solution?

Due to patents S3TC texture support is disabled by default. To enable it you need the tool driconf (note, you no longer require libdxtn):

$ sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev driconf
$ driconf


On the "Image Quality" tab activate "Enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available".

Related forum threads:

• Spring on Intel or ATI 'open-source' drivers

It crashes, hangs, ...

Possible fixes are:

• updating your graphics driver
• lowering the graphic-settings at SpringSettings
• disabling graphics effects at SpringSettings

Nvidia

I am having really bad framerates (FPS) on my brand new nVidia graphics card! What am I doing wrong?

Turn off 'threaded optimizations' for Spring in the nVidia control panel.

It crashes

try disabling shadows (SpringSettings)

Intel

Why does spring hang for a few seconds?

This bug occurs on maps like FolsomDamDeluxeV2, Tangerline. FPS suddenly drops to 1 and game runs very slowly. This seems to be an Intel driver bug. For Windows Vista/7 try updating driver up to 8.15.10.2246 or newer. For Windows XP there is no solution yet.

Related forum threads:

• Intel HD Graphics Driver issue?
• Performance issues on Intel X4500

Fonts are unreadable

This is a driver bug, try to update your driver.

It crashes, hangs etc...

Possible fixes are:

• disabling texture-compression at SpringSettings
• disabling reflective units at SpringSettings
• updating your driver

ATI

I've got the most recent drivers and the game crashes in atioglxx.dll

As of Spring 0.80.5, use only basic or dynamic water. Bump water with disabled shore waves should also work. Reflective or refractive water will make the game crash after 15-20 minutes due to a memory leak.

Spring 0.81.2 and/or Catalyst 10.2 drivers should fix this problem.

I've got a notebook and official AMD ATI drivers refuse to install, what to do?

Use ATI Mobility Modder or unofficial drivers - DNA or Omega. Use Google or get them from guru3d.

UI disapears after 5-10 mins of play on old ATI videocards

In cmdcolors.txt, simply comment out or remove the following lines:

stipplePattern 0xffcc
stippleFactor 1
stippleSpeed 1.0

The problem detected on:

• ATI Radeon X3200 with latest drivers (ref)
• ATI Radeon 9500 with Omega drivers 3.8.442 (ref)

I see the complete screen full of red/green/yellow or giant dots on minimap

File:Redui-minimap-bug.png‎

This is a bug somewhere in LUA drawing with ATI. Disable widgets that draw via F11 menu to find the one. There is no real fix. A Widget causing this is "Red UI Minimap". Setting "Max nano simultaneous particles" (SpringSettings) seems to help, too.

The textures looks scary

Try using different driver. This is a known ATI-bug.

It crashes always at start, hangs etc...

Possible fixes are:

• using basic water (SpringSettings)
• disabling vsync (SpringSettings)
• disabling Pixelbuffer objects (SpringSettings)
• disabling Anti-Aliasing (SpringSettings)
• updating or even downgrading ATI driver: ATI OpenGL drivers are very buggy, blame ATI for that!

Sound

The Sound is crackling/pausing in Windows, what can i do?

Try:

• Update the sounds driver
• Enable SystemSoundsService in Vista/Seven

I am having sound problems under Linux! What can i do?

In more then 90% of the cases, this is caused by pulseaudio. You can safely remove pulseaudio from your system. To do this, open your favorite package manager (eg. Synaptic under Ubuntu), and search for packages with "pulse" in their name. From these, keep only the ones whichs name starts with "lib", and remove all others.

Misc

I have a problem that is not described here! What can i do?

There is a number of things you can do, among these are:

• Search in the Help & Bugs Forum, and ask if you can not find a suiting topic.
• Look at the Linux only FAQ.
• Ask for help in the lobby in a suiting channel, eg: #springlobby, #de, #fr, #ai, #main
• Ask the FAQ-Bot in the lobby in channel #springlobby. To get a list of topics, write !faqlist and then use !faq <topic-name> to get the help text. For example, try !faq rename.