AppName: cnc3game.dat ModName: d3d9.dll

14Apr07

The Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars screen crashed and these code splashed on the lcd screen: AppName: cnc3game.dat ModName: d3d9.dll. That’s what you get for playing high-end RTS game on pseudo-fitted gaming rig called laptop. The rig only met one-third of the required minimum system requirements:

2.0 GHz or AMD equivalent / Windows Vista 2.2 GHz
512 MB RAM / Windows Vista 1 GB RAM
8x DVD drive
6.0 GB free space
GeForce 4 Ti, ATI Radeon 8500 video card

As three portable machines running seamlessly on a Wi-Fi network, the room heated with the constant heat vapour exhausted from the processor heat-sink. The new one almost became game dedicated rig while running Folding@Home to compensate the drained utilities resources for good of humanity, one laptop running Second Life while leeching torrent files from Swedish server (and another hundreds of machine elsewhere) and this 7 years old laptop became my work engine.

Face bathed with low emission light as the sweat trickled, the constant crashing was getting on my nerve last night. And so I experimented with different graphics options in the game settings. I finally got it right at medium level. The funny thing is, the game never fails to crash every 2 minutes on very low and low setting as opposed to high and ultra high setting—which is “eldritch” in nature—on the latter two high-end setting, the gameplay gets jerky, playable only if your patience is on par with Khan Noonien Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).

Got it patched to version 1.4 and set the graphics options to medium, it fixed mine, and now hoping to blast off Scrin bases to kingdom come.

Graphics options set to medium:

Graphics options from very low, low, medium, high to ultra-high (in sequence):

Another thing I like about the game (beside the great RTS gaming experience) is the full motion video (FMV) scenes—and to line up the casts of geek-dom is like “geek character orgy of sheer awesomeness.”

I am so happy that Command and Conquer 3 is finally here. It doesn’t reinvent the RTS genre or anything, but it’s got the perfect blend of speed, action, fun and pretty graphics. I’m having a blast with it.

I also absolutely love the FMV scenes. I think FMV, like 2D video games, is a medium that the industry has dropped to the wayside just because we can do more technologically demanding stuff. We can do incredible CGI cinematics. We can do completely 3D video game worlds. But just because we can do new stuff, doesn’t make what we used to do worthless.

[…]

Here are some pictures of the actors as their characters in-game, as well as what other stuff I know them from. You can decide for yourself if I did any semblance of a decent job capturing them, if you’re not already familiar with the actors. I gave Billy Dee Williams his old Lando hairdo and swashbucklin’ cape, just for kicks.

Jennifer Morrison (Allison, from House, M.D.) is also in the game, but I didn’t put her in the comic. G.D.I. already had three people, and I wasn’t sure that House was “geeky” enough to fit with the other references.

[Source: Ctrl-Alt-Del]

Technorati Tags: command and conquer 3, tiberium wars, games, cnc3game.dat, d3d9.dll, folding@home, khan noonien singh, star trek, geek, full motion video, fmv, real time strategy, rts, ea, webcomic, ctrl-alt-del, humour, troubleshooting, graphics, tv shows, movies, battlestar gallactica, starship troopers, star wars, lost, kane, house

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Filed under: comics and webcomics, games and metaverse   |  8 Comments