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".

I can not connect to the online lobby server?

See in the forum if others have the same problem.

The server might be temporary down for maintenance. Most lobbies should allow you to connect to a "backup server" or just try again after some time.

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. Enable "SetCoreAffinity=1" in your springsettings.cfg or ~/.springrc.
• Installing the latest processor drivers and Windows hotfixes for your system may also help.
• Also you may try multithreaded version of Spring, which comes with the installation pack labeled as 'Multi-threaded executable' option. WARNING: `multithreaded` means something different in this context than 99.9% of the ppl think!!! Also this engine version is LESS STABLE and is known to not work with most Lua widgets!!!
• 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 Linux with Open-Source Gfx drivers, and the map is all white!

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)!

Turn off 'threaded optimizations' for Spring in the nVidia control panel, enable "Compress textures" in SpringSettings.

After playing Spring, in background running firefox window is white or gray.

Disable Anti-Aliasing / decrease graphic-quality (<=high) in SpringSettings.

Shadows on Units doesn't work

Check if Shadows and AdvUnitShading is enabled, update your graphics driver.

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/downgrade your driver.

It crashes, hangs etc...

Possible fixes are:

• disabling texture-compression at SpringSettings
• disabling reflective units at SpringSettings
• disable ReflectiveWater
• updating your driver
• use linux! (yes, this hint sucks, but the open-source-drivers seems to work better...)

ATI/AMD

First of all, if you encourage a graphics related problem on ATI/AMD graphic device update your drivers to the latest version ATI/AMD dowload.

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 or newer should fix this problem.

if the game crashes immediatly after the loading screen is finished ("Finalizing") in the Zero-K or Gundam mods and the video card is based on the RV670 GPU (some models of: 3690, 3850, 3870, 4570, 4730, 3730, 3610, 4580, 4750, 3750, 2600 XT/PRO, 3830) Catalyst 8.12 drivers may fix it (windows xp 32-bit, possibly other NT5-based 32-bit platforms), however even with that driver there may still be a crash (not immediatly after the loading screen, as soon as the simulations starts) in Annihilation-based mods that use RED UI, the same lua-based atioglxx.dll crash also happens with the 1944 mod.

also note that later versions of Catalyst drivers for these cards reduce performance in OpenGL applications (windows xp 32-bit, possibly other NT5-based 32-bit platforms) (found at least in: spring, quake3 and Nexuiz), for spring the most significant drop (by ~15%) appears in 9.10 and higher Catalyst versions (more than 15%), if you have one of the lower-performing models of these and don't use shadows you may want to try the Catalyst 8.3 and 8.4 drivers (they do not support shadows but should work ~5% faster compared to 8.12) but those drivers may be less stable

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

First of all, make sure you're installing the 'AMD Mobility Radeon' driver pack branch. 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/AMD. Disable widgets that draw via F11 menu to find the one. There is no real fix. A Widget causing this is "Red UI Minimap" or "Chili Minimap". Setting "Max nano simultaneous particles" (SpringSettings) seems to help, too.

The textures looks scary

This is a known ATI/AMD-bug. Try using different driver, preferably other than 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 -> newer driver pack with fixed OpenGL driver should be fine.

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)
• set Shadows to "off" (SpringSettings)
• updating or even downgrading ATI driver: ATI/AMD OpenGL drivers are very buggy, blame ATI/AMD for that!
• set AtiHacks=1 (~/.springrc or springsettings.cfg)

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. If this is the problem, there are two known solutions to solve it. Use one of them.

disable non-ALSA (preferred)

Make sure you have the OpenAL-Soft configuration utility. You might want to run:

# install
sudo apt-get install alsoft-conf
# run
alsoft-conf

In the "backend" tab, keep only "ALSA" on the left column, then save. Done!

Side Note: ALSA is redirected to the PulseAudio layer when installed.

remove PulseAudio (alternative)

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 with names that start with "lib", and remove all others.

Misc

It crashes after Error opening cache\ ... in infolog.txt

  [f=0000000] Reading Estimate PathCosts [8]
  [f=0000000] Error opening cache\paths\...

this is a known bug in 0.82.7.1. Your cpu also has many cores? Then try to set HardwareThreadCount=2" in springsettings.cfg. Spring tries to create the PathCache with to many threads in parallel and crashes because out of memory.

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.