FAQ:technical

Technical FAQ

What port numbers does Spring use?

Game uses port 8452 UDP 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.

What APIs does Spring use?

Spring uses OpenGL for graphics and OpenAL for sound. Also SDL is used for input and some other stuff.

What language is Spring written in?

The Spring game engine is mostly written in C++. TASClient is written in Delphi, SpringLS in Java, SpringLobby in C++. Widgets and Gadgets are written in Lua. Skirmish AIs can be written in Lua, C, C++, Java VM languages and Python.

Is Spring open source?

Yes, it is. Go to the downloads section of the site to download the source code.

Is there any documentation for the source code?

Doxygen is used to generate the documentation of springs' source code. An up to date documentation is generated from the develop branch. To generate the documentation yourself, install DoxyGen and run "doxygen" from within the spring source directory.

Is Spring a Portable Application?

Yes, spring can be run from any big-enough portable storage device. Sometimes config files and content files are saved god knows where ie in "my documents"

Is there an alternative way to connect to the lobby server?

Yes, using the IRC-Bridge through an IRC client. Keep in mind though, that this is not officially supported, and no guarantee is given for the reliability of this service.

What do the spring version parts mean?

See EngineVersion#Parts.

Why doesn't the spring engine use all my cpu cores?

Multi-threading is not an issue, it's software behaviour.

Examples of issues:

 1) Graphic glitches
 2) Bad performance

Examples of possible solutions (respectively):

 1) A dev with an AMD card who knows what they're doing
 2) Reducing cache misses (responsible for a significant portion of the speedup in 100.0)

Examples of sexy terms which sound like solutions but are probably more trouble than gain (in most cases):

 1) Multi-threading

From now on we'd recommend refraining from saying:

   Spring should be more multithreaded

As this is not only wrong but useless and annoying.

Instead you can say things like:

   Spring is slow for me and I'd like it to be faster

Which may or may not make a difference, but it will definitely make you look less foolish.

(see https://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33908#p573296 )