Turbo Sliders Troubleshooting

• suomeksi

On most occasions, the game should work smoothly with the default settings. If, however, you experience any problems with the game, this document tries to help you make things work better.

Go to section:
• Crashes, if you experience crashes or the game does not start.
• Graphics, if you have problems with graphics or you experience lag (cars are not moving smoothly). In network games, lag can also be caused by Network problems.
• Sound, if you have problems with sounds or music.
• Network, if you have network problems.
• License, if you have license related problems.
• Miscellaneous, if your problems does not fall into any of these sections.
• If nothing helps, please post your problem in the Turbo Sliders Forum or contact developers.
• Of course, the manual can help, too.

Crashes

• The first thing you should do is to check the end of output.txt in the game directory. That file is regenerated each time the game is started and it can give a hint on what goes wrong. You can also try to run the game with more debug information by running it with command line parameter "-d 2".
• If you are using network for the first time (for example, when going to server list, connecting a host or starting a server), your firewall may launch a popup asking whether to block the program. It is a known bug that sometimes, firewalls fail to display the popup and Windows full-screen applications may lose focus. If you cannot get focus back by using alt+tab, you may have to kill the game with task list and restart. It helps if you tell your firewall program that sliders.exe may use network at will.
• Sometimes, Windows may need one reboot for things work.
• Make sure that you have writing rights for the files in the game directory.
• Make sure that subdirectories like data, cars, tracks etc. exist. If you have just unzipped the files from a zip file, sometimes they may all have been put in the root directory.
• Update your sound and video card drivers.
• Try running the game without sound (command line option "-snd 0").
• Try running the game in a window (command line option "-f 0").

Assertion failure

• If you see an error text "Assertion failed" or output.txt contains that line after a crash, you have found a programming error. Please report the file and line number in the Turbo Sliders Forum or contact developers so that it can be fixed. It helps if you can reproduce the bug and tell exactly when it happens.

Graphics

• Press F10 to see your FPS (frames per second) in the lower right corner. If FPS is constantly less than 50, something takes too much time. F10 also adds a message text which shows much much different things took time in the last frame.
• If the problem exists only in network games, remember to check the Network section, too.
• In network games, there are often more players than in local games so slow graphics have more effect.
• If you have changed any of the default graphics settings in the options menu, first try to restore them to default.
• These video setting changes can make the game graphics run faster:
  • Turn off alpha-blending
  • Turn off shadows
  • Turn off smoke and skidmarks
  • Switch double-buffering setting (requires restarting the game)
  • Switch full screen setting (requires restarting the game)
  • Decrease zoom level
  • Decrease resolution
• Make sure that no other programs are running when you play the game.
• Try booting the machine.
• If nothing else helps, buy a faster computer.

Graphics get corrupt

• When switching from full-screen to Windows with Alt+Tab and back, graphics can sometimes get corrupt. Usually, pressing Esc helps.
• If your graphics card does not have much memory, some tracks may cause problems. If you have changed video settings, restore them to default. You may also have to decrease zoom level and/or resolution.

Some tracks look broken

• Some people may make tracks that do not work correctly in all video modes. Using the default graphics settings may help.

Sound

• Make sure you have the latest drivers for your card
• If you seem to have lots of weird sound related problems, try changing the audio driver in the audio settings. You can also change the driver with for example the command line option "-audiodriver DirectSound". With "-sound 0", audio is disabled.
  • Integrated AC97 sound card has been reported to sometimes not work. This can be cured by updating the card drivers or by changing in-game drivers to DirectSound.
• If there is no sound and your driver is correct, try to decrease the number of engine and effect channels in the sound settings.
• Try booting the machine if using Windows.
• If the positioning effect does not work correctly during the game (car sound should be in 3D but with some sound cards, it may sound weird), turn it off or decrease the positioning effect value in the sound settings.
• Sometimes, upgrading OpenAL drivers can help in various problems. When writing this, the latest version could be found here. You may have to replace the dlls in the game directory but remember to take backups.

Network

• When selecting the server to use, prefer the ones with lower ping time. The more the ping time is, or the more it changes during the game, the more there will be lag and warping. Servers with ping times of less than 100 ms are the best, ping times of more than 200 ms are very bad.
• When playing the game, don't use any other bandwidth consuming programs.
• If you see red "serv diff" information in the lower right corner of the client screen, there are connection problems which cause various symptoms. With F10, you can debug the issue further. By changing prediction times (PageUp and PageDown by default), you can make "serv diff" tolerable (positive but not too much). Best values are something between 20 and 100. If it gets below zero, controlling your car gets very hard. On the other hard, if it is very big, your client is predicting too much into the future and you may experience warping when things do not go as expected.
• If ping time is changing very much, it may be hard to get the network game work. Ping should remain between the min and max prediction times. If this is not the case, the best alternative is to find a server with which the connection works better.
• If the server bandwidth is not enough and finding a better ISP is not an option, adding server send interval can be tested. Adding send interval always causes more warping, though.
• In network games, there are often more players than in local games, which makes graphics problems worse. See graphics section for more help on this. If server is lagging, everyone gets lag.
• Event send times can be added if you believe lots of packets get lost. The value is the number of times the client sends one event (for example starting braking or steering) to the server in successive frames.

License

Miscellaneous