Bug: Dom3 + fortePivot = BSOD

[Edi]

fortePivot is a software used by some monitors (at least some LG monitors) to facilitate pivoting the screen display 90 degrees to accommodate the vertical position that the monitor can be changed to.

On Windows (at least Windows XP Pro with an ATI Radeon HD4870 graphics card) if fortePivot has been installed (whether or not it's running), trying to change the screen resolution in Dominions 3 or trying to exit the game will cause a BSOD crash. When changing the resolution the BSOD occurs 90% of the time and when quitting the game, 100% of the time.

The error causes various kinds of stop codes, ranging from 0x0000000A IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL to various others that do not have a text identifier.

I had cause to discover this issue when my old monitor broke and I bought myself a new one, a LG Flatron IPS231P-BN LCD/LED monitor that has the pivot function and uses the DVI-D input. My Windows XP kept crashing no matter what I did, whether it was updating graphics card drivers, running chkdsk and fixing any page allocation errors, defragging the hard drives and so on. I then uninstalled the fortePivot program, rebooted the computer and no more BSOD.

Obviously, this is not a bug in Dominions, but an incompatibility with another program that happens to cause a fatal crash, but it is something that everyone should be aware of. Illwinter has been informed of this little factoid by email.



I also discovered that Dominions has no support at all for the various 16:9 proportion resolutions, of which the 1920x1080 resolution would be the most important. A lot of new monitors only run the 1920x1080 resolution, which is 16:9 proportion, same as widescreen TVs. The various 1920x1200 resolution monitors (16:10 proportion) tend to be office use monitors or high end graphics processing ones (which cost an arm and a leg) these days, not gaming monitors. Almost all gaming monitors are 1920x1080.

All of the existing resolutions for Dominions 3 are either 16:10 proportion or the traditional ones (such as 800x600, 1024x768 etc). This forces me to use the 1680x1440 resolution, which is the highest available from the ones in the Dom3 video preferences menu.

Therefore a request to add support for 16:9 proportion resolutions (especially 1920x1080) to Dominions 3 has been made in that same email.

[LDiCesare]

Why not play in windowed mode and just increase the window size to your monitor's size? Supporting full screen resolution is nice but there are way nastier bugs (like pgup/pgdown no longer working on some laptops) that have no work-around.

[Edi]

I prefer to play in full screen mode. In any case, posting this thread was a sort of public service announcement more than anything else so that if anyone else runs into the same problem, they will know what it is instead of spending hours troubleshooting it.

As far as the resolution goes, support for 1920x1080 will be added. It appears Johan has also got himself a new monitor that uses that particular resolution...

[LDiCesare]

I just mentioned it as a workaround.
And it's always nice to know that Johan adds new resolutions or, more generally, keeps updating the game.