When yo try to play Heroes of Newerth (aka HoN) on your computer and receive the following error
$ ./hon.sh
warning: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite
Crash log saved as '/home/malevolent/.Heroes of Newerth/game/crash_2.5.0.0_05.log'
Segmentation fault
It means you have problems with your graphic card. There are some reasons to fail, I will explain the nvidia possible issues
- You are using the open source driver of your card
- You does not set the optimal antialiasing settings
- The game start with a invalid gl_modesetting configuration
1. Using the opensource driver
At the moment I write this, nvidia propietary drivers are far better than opensource. I hope in a future open source drivers can beat the propietary ones, but if you want to do almost everything graphic-intensive, you shoul use propietary ones. Go and install them, on Arch
yaourt nvidia
2. Optimal antialiasing settings
Make sure you have optimal antialiasing settings on your NVIDIA Server X Settings –> Antialiasing Settings –> Enhance Application Settings
3. Invalid gl_modesetting configuration
That was the solution in my case, but many people had the issues I mentioned before. Anyway, S2 developers made a standard configuration file with some weird values. They use old nvidia and ati drivers and the game simply gives the error from above. To solve the issue, you must override that setting.
Firts of all, the config file is not where you installed the game (wtf!) but on ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game. Once you get the proper directory, you must edit startup.cfg and delete the content of gl_modesetting parameter, like I do here:
$ echo 'SetSave "gl_modesetting" ""' > ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game/startup.cfg
The game now runs, at least for me. I must mention that I have a 32bit machine to play games, but I guess that if you have a 64bit, you probably have even more problems.
Arch hacking and troubleshooting 
#2 fixed my problem. Thank you!
Glad it worked 😀
Dude, thanks for the post, but i didn’t have in that address the file startup.cfg, did you know if it could be in any other place? I have a 32 bit pc, and the third step is my solution i guess.
Thanks!
Sorry, I had missconfigured email notifications and only write here to solve my own problems. And hoping it can be of some help to others.
Have you found startup.cfg? You can always do a wide search like
sudo find / -name 'startup.cfg'
But it should be under your home, in a hidden directory called “Heroes of Newerth”
Let me know if you finally found it.
#3 works for me on ubuntu 64 bit
#3 made HoN work for me on Ubuntu 64 bit.
Thank you for sharing
#3 solved for me! Thank you. 😉
#3 solved for me on a 64 bit machine
echo ‘SetSave “gl_modesetting” “”‘ > ~/.Heroes\ of\ Newerth/game/startup.cfg
bash: /home/todsapon/.Heroes of Newerth/game/startup.cfg: Permission denied