Hi guys. Just like a few of my other blog entries, I'm here to cover the bad news and the workarounds.

1) OSX will desync with other operating systems if playing the Blizzard map (used by the CTF_Blizzard mission as well).
Fix?
Download:
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard/ma...
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard/ma...

And place those in /applications/games/Hedgewars.app/contents/resources/hedgewars/Data/Maps/Blizzard on the OSX machine.

2) Snow and Christmas themes, and maps that use them, will crash if Reduce Quality is all the way to the left, due to flakes not being optional on those themes. If possible, increase the Reduce Quality slider by 1 to the right. If not possible and you are able to do your own build, I can provide a patch against 0.9.15. Basically amounts to applying:
http://code.google.com/p/hedgewars/source/detail?r=e73707bb99c006db16ae6...
Another workaround if you want to try these themes and must use maximum reduce quality is to create a scheme with a border. This will disable snow.

3) CTF Blizzard map, as well as suffering from (2) will also crash if the Reduce Quality slider is 1 to the right of far left. Fix is to either increase it 1 more to the right or download:
http://hedgewars.googlecode.com/hg/share/hedgewars/Data/Maps/CTF_Blizzar...
and copy it to your local Data/Maps/CTF_Blizzard directory.

Oh, and looks like http://hedgewars.org/node/2598 still applies

Note. This only impacts users using the German, Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese locales. Thanks to Henek for investigating and identifying the offending strings.

A crash was discovered as of this release, probably related to the increase in translated text. It impacts only these 3 well maintained locales, and only under Windows. The reason for it isn't precisely known (Freetype2 bug? some underlying Windows system thing it uses?). We do have a couple of workarounds though.

1) Easiest. Just switch to English or some other language you understand that is not German/Swedish/Brazilian Portuguese in config settings. Don't forget to restart Hedgewars after changing languages.

2) Change the crashing strings. Henek has thoughtfully fixed the few strings with similar ones that don't seem to crash.
a) Download http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6618468/Locale.zip
b) Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Hedgewars 0.9.14.1\share\hedgewars\Data\Locale and copy 3 files in the zip there.

We're gonna look into this, hopefully a better solution can be found.

Let us know if any other locales have problems!

Oh, then there is solution #3... install Linux

This is an artillery style game, all movement is only using portals. Keep an eye for the bonus crate fountain at the end.
Best watched in high def of course.

Followup. This is sheepluva demonstrating how not to portal hop.

The problem is most likely that your graphics card can't load that particular file, that it is simply too large.

A workaround for this is as follows:

1) Download http://m8y.org/hw/Data.zip
2) Go to your Hedgewars installation folder, find the Data subdirectory.
3) As a user with permissions to write to that folder, go to one directory above that Data folder and unzip Data.zip. This should overwrite all the Splash files with an empty image.

If you are still having trouble after this, try enabling the Reduce Quality setting in Options.

Note. For everyone else, this is just a zip full of empty pngs, and won't actually help performance. Also, the issue has been fixed for the next version.

BTW, I'm slowly coming to the realisation that some people are running into this because they are running opengl in software mode.
Check:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\.hedgewars\debug0.txt (or whatever your user directory is)
If you see something like:
0: OpenGL-- Renderer: GDI Generic
0: |----- Vendor: microsoft corporation
0: |----- Version: 1.1.0
0: \----- GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 1024

You're running in software mode.
Try finding updated drivers for your graphics card.
http://niuki.net/2010/03/drivers-for-gma500-with-opengl-support/
for example...

The game will run a lot faster.