Troubleshooting

This article aims to help you when you experience problems with DDNet.

Useful information for developers to debug problems are:

Crash/Assertion logs
Hardware information (GPU, CPU, RAM, operating system (e.g. Windows, Linux etc.)) - The used GPU can always be found by pressing F1 after client start. It should be highlighted in purple text.
Steps to reproduce the problem

Crashes

Crashes are unexpected shutdowns, that are most likely caused by a bug in the DDNet code, or in other software.

The rule of thumb is that, if you can reproduce the crash, you should reach out to the developers.

See external links or create an issue on GitHub.

Since DDNet 16 for Windows the client might create a crash log or assertion log which can be found in the config directory under "dumps". Just send them to the developers and they might be able to find useful information out of them.

If the client crashes at startup, it is commonly a broken graphics driver (see the GFX Troubleshooting) or an antivirus software (search the internet for how to disable it for a specific application/DDNet).

Note: Not all crashes / bugs are caused by DDNet code, you should always keep your system and your drivers up to date. Only reproducable or bugs with a crash log, that indicates a bug in the DDNet code, can be fixed easily.

Graphics problems

If you experience graphics glitches, and the developers cannot reproduce them, there is a good chance that your graphics drivers are outdated, contain bugs or simply are abandoned by the hardware company.

You can still try the following thing:

If you have a modern GPU try to update your drivers first, all of the following steps are fallbacks that also have drawbacks (e.g. worse graphics).

Inside the client go on Settings -> Graphics
Under "Renderer" select OpenGL 1
Restart

If you prefer to have a more appropriate solution for your problem, visit the GFX Troubleshooting page, which analysis graphics problems more specifically and gives extra details.

ALT + TAB problems

This is most likely a graphics driver problem. However you can still try to fix it by using "Windowed Fullscreen".

This is a special fullscreen mode, that makes the window act like it is fullscreen, even if it's not.

Note: There is a drawback on some systems. E.g. under Windows it might leave the Windows desktop compositor active, which results in less FPS, and in worst case more input delay.

Inside the client go on Settings -> Graphics
Click on "Fullscreen" (or whatever you last selected) and choose "Windowed Fullscreen" instead

(if you experience bugs changing this mode, just restart the game once and make sure "Windowed Fullscreen" is still selected)

Broken streaming

When you experience a bug with streaming DDNet over discord, you are most likely using a nvidia graphics card.

A user already reached out to discord, and they told him to:

Toggle off the "Use our latest technology to capture my screen" setting under User Settings > Voice & Video

If you have problems finding DDNet in nvidia shadow play.

Make sure you actually use the nvidia card to play DDNet (press F1 after a client start and see the purple text saying something like "gfx [...] Vendor:", it should mention nvidia)

Under Windows you can usually select the preferred graphics card under Windows' graphics options, or directly in the control panel of your graphics driver (e.g. nvidia control panel)

Network / Connection problems

DDNet and Teeworlds network code requires a stable connection with as less ping jitter as possible.

If you experience problems make sure to:

Use a LAN cable instead of Wifi
Turn off other applications on your computer and other computers in your network to tell if they are the source of the problem
Prefer DSL/Fiber over cable internet
Make sure it is not a DoS/DDoS attack on the server (did it ever work before, do other servers work fine?)
Try ping -t ger2.ddnet.org in cmd.exe for a few minutes, stop it with ctrl-c, and check the if the ping jumps there too or you have packet loss
Try to trace route the connection to the DDNet server (using tracert ger2.ddnet.org in cmd.exe) and see if there is bad routing (ask your ISP to fix it)