Two Slashes

So it’s been a while since I last posted.  Things happen.  People have other things to do.  And I’m in the middle of my finals right now, so I’m in even more of a time crunch than usual.

A friend in my dorm had a problem had a problem playing his copy of Command & Conquer 3 earlier, and asked me to help.

The system he was attempting to run it on was a Compaq laptop, preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista, and overall it was a decent machine, with specs that should have been more than enough to play the game, albeit with a trip to the settings to turn down the graphics settings (as the machine had Intel graphics).  Indeed, this was something that he had already realized, and had proceeded to turn them down when he first installed the game.

He claimed to have tried numerous solutions, including trying several versions of his graphics drivers and game patches and setting all his graphics options to “Low”, to fix the problem, which was (in summary) that every time he tried to build one of a few particular types of building, the building would be animated as it was spawned…but the moment it finished, the game would be closed by Vista, which would proudly proclaim that the game had had a problem and needed to be closed.  However, the game would play fine and run great until those buildings were created, which made for some rather challenging gameplay when you realize that they were somewhat necessary for gameplay.

My first instinct (which still seems plausible) was that one or more files (and probably those responsible for containing the afflicted building animations) had been copied incorrectly or corrupted during installation, so my initial suggestions were to try to reinstall the game (again), and see if anything changed between installations.

Naturally, this did absolutely nothing but waste time.  At a loss, I decided to run a few searches on Google to look for anything that might be an indication of the problem.  Of course, I had plenty of posts of people with various problems between the game and Vista, even with the same error message, but nothing that quite seemed to match the problems I had been observing with the laptop in terms of recreating them.

After a bit of query manipulation, I came across a post on some far-off forums (I wish I could give credit and a link, but alas my history trail is so long that it would probably take me a month to find it.) that mentioned something somewhat similar, in that the same message occured when they tried to play the game (i.e. it would load, but immediately issue the message when it was ready for the user to play).  Curious, I read on, and found that his solution was to (and this is the awkward part) change the shader settings from their lowest settings up to Medium.

Curious, but doubting that this could be a possible answer, I had him try it, and it worked.  Now, I’m posting this not only to provide another source for people to find answers to the issue, but because I’m curious as to what would make someone think that this is the solution, and why it would work.  The only solution I can come up with after a few hours is that there’s an as-of-yet-unfixed bug in the shader code that causes it to have issues (at least with Vista), but only in the “low” quality settings.  Considering the numerous versions of patches released (and the fact that there were at least four in the first week of the game’s release), it leads me to believe that either EA doesn’t particularly care about their Vista userbase, or that they have yet to realize there’s a problem, even though I found several mentions of the same problem in different areas of the game.

Nevertheless, it still seems like a bit of a hacked solution.  It doesn’t really matter which of either C&C3 or Vista is to blame; for the most part, something like that probably would have been picked up if someone had done a little Q&A on a similar hardware setup.  (After all, the world doesn’t revolve around JUST ATi and nVidia cards.)

It’s a shame people just don’t make things like they used to.