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 multi-threaded version of Spring, which comes with the installation pack labeled as 'Multi-threaded executable' option. Note: this version is less stable than the classic one and doesn't fully support some 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 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:
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:
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
- use linux! (yes, this hint sucks, but the open-source-drivers seems to work better...)
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.
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 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:
I see the complete screen full of red/green/yellow or giant dots on minimap
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, preferably other than 10.5, 10.6, 10.7. 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. 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
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.
