There is only really one new common issue this month:

Sacred – problem starting a new game on Open Internet multiplayer option

This problem seems to affect people with certain network setups that are designed to block network traffic, such as symmetric NAT or Firewall systems.

You can find out your current setup’s networking facilities by downloading our Test Tool and checking that the networking section. If it says that networking is only available via TURN, then you are going to experience this problem.

The way around this problem for the moment, simply, is patience. The game will connect in the end, although it can take between 30 and 60 seconds to negotiate its way past your network security systems. We are working on a way to speed this up, and we hope to have a patch out soon which will address this problem.

Welcome to a new monthly report for the LGP Blog. Here, I’m going to run though the common problems people have reported over the last month here at the customer services team, and report on how these have been resolved, or how to work around the problems. We are not addressing all the issues, just the top two or three that lots of people have had problems with, those that we think it would be helpful for people to be able to read up on!

X3: Reunion – Problems on a number of ATI cards – Patch Available

This problem manifests itself with the game crashing after the loading screen when starting a new game on a small number of ATI based graphics cards.

Finally after weeks of trying, we have managed to reproduce the error on one of our test servers. Our technical team have finished working on the solution and the patch is now available for everyone to download in our updates section.

X3: Reunion – Problem with the game not starting

This problem is one reported by a number of people who have been trying to run X3 using open source drivers for their graphics cards. Unfortunately, at this point in time, neither the ATI or Nvidia open source graphics drivers are capable of running X3, due to the requirement of Shader Model 3.

You can find out if your current setup can run X3 by downloading our Test Tool and checking that the Shader Level reported by the test tool is at least 3.0, and that Direct Rendering is possible.