Well, it seems that my uncle is a smart person and very computer literate (Did I ever mention he was the one that figured out and released the codes to Neverwinter Nights, not because he uses them or ever did, but because he was sick of everyone asking for them on the Bioware forums that they pestered him to death!? Well not to death since he's still living, but you get the idea. Also he was one of the first ones to figure out the codes to the SW:KotoR and such).
Anyways, he's the one that figures out all the bug fixes and is a big bug shooter (he's even given advice for ST games on forums from time to time, well not him but normally from me after I pose the question to him).
Anyways, if any of you frequent the forums for AoE and have logins, and actually want to tell the developers about what I would consider a MAJOR bug, my uncle figured out a simple solution.
What's happening, and this is also relavent to those playing it on widescreen monitors, is the idiot programmers who released the demo made it have a default start movie/screen of a resolution of around 2000+ or really high (I'd have to ask my uncle about which one it is exactly again). Because of this, anyone who has a LOWER resolution, OR has a widescreen or in many cases a differing resolution from their default has a chance for a reboot. This is what was occurring with our machine, and hence the game was hard rebooting the computer. He says it will do this for ALOT of computers which have their resolutions defaulted at 1024x768 or less at least, and other resolutions and refresh rates that won't mesh with the start screen.
The monitor and card combination try to force this set resolution to work, but the conflict becomes to great, and a reboot is going to be imminent...or if it's not as critical of a conflict, at least a crash.
So if any of you want to warn the developers and find out if the bug is not in the final gold version, PLEASE tell them in someway, anyway.
So yes, I got the game working. Just gotten from playing Act of War and Battlefield 2, so looking at it in that arena, the graphics for me thus far ARE NOT impressive for AoE.
Very disenfrachised on a first look. Will enable some higher settings for the second go around. No idea of gameplay yet since as soon as my uncle got it running and I took a look at the game and ran a quick skirmish to see if it really would run, I returned here to report that we did get it running. In fact it took my uncle less than 5 minutes. Makes me feel rather stupid compared to him, but anyways...
I'll just say he DOES have a lot more experience than I in this field (and apparantly a lot of others in the troubleshooting forums of various sites for this game which I scoured for a solution for hours).
Seriously, someone PLEASE pass this on to others. They need to increase their screen/video resolutions to the highest possible in order to run it if they are getting hard reboots.
Topic: AOE3 demo out today... (Read 2488 times)