Sony Vaio and Dominions 3 problems.

[Arghaii]

I own a NB SONY VAIO VGN-N31M/W, Intel Core 2 Duo T5300,
1,73GHz,2MB L2 cache,533MHz FSB , graphics card: SHARED 128MB Windows Vista Premium with 1gb RAM.

I cannot run the game Why? It either gets stuck in the Please Wait screen or at the main menu screen with distorted graphics. Is it because of windows vista? I have no problem runnin the game on windows vista on my desktop pc. Is it because of the graphics card? I thought dominions did not have high demands towards that direction. The GPU is Intel Graphics Shared 128 mb.
Also, a friend of mine with an older sony vaio and the same card had no issues running it (but had windows xp).

Please, if anyone can give me a solution, I'd be grateful. When I bought this notebook I had no intention of running games on it, because I was counting on dominions3 to accompany during the long hours of travelling or staying in boring hotels of boring towns.

[Morkilus]

Have you patched?

[Edi]

To be more specific, have you looked up all the upgraded graphics drivers for Vista for that model? Sounds like a graphics driver problem more than anything else.

[cleveland]

I have 128 shared intel graphics and the game runs just fine.

Edi is right, most likely out-of-date video drivers.

Start here:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphic...cs_accelerator

Once you figure out your chipset, plug that into intel's support page, and download & run the appropriate "media accelerator driver" executable. It will handle the rest automatically.

Hope that helps.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Ah...

Try changing your shortcut to look like this and tell me how it turns out...

"C:\Games\Dominions 3\dom3.exe" --noglext

[archaeolept]

i have the same issue for my dell laptop. The problem is the integrated intel graphics, though I haven't installed XP so it may be a vista issue as well. adding the --noglext flag works for me.

[Arghaii]

Change the shortcut into a file named --noglext ? I am not sure I get this.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Okay... windows vista...

Step 1: Create a new Dominions shortcut.
1a). Minimize all open windows.
1b). Open up your start menu, and type Dominions in that little box.
1c). Right-click and drag that shortcut to your desktop.
1d). Select create shortcut here when the menu pops up.

Step 2: Open the new shortcut's properties
2a). Right-click once on the icon to bring up a menu.
2b). Left-click on Properties.
A menu should pop up. You want to make sure the second tab from the left, Shortcut, is selected. If not, click on it.

As a side note, I install my games in a custom directory, so my example won't quite match up, but should be close enough. The shortcut already knows the proper directory structure, and you won't be messing about with that at all.

You should see something similar to:
Target type: Application
Target Location: Dominions 3
Target: "C:\Program Files\Dominions 3\dom3.exe"

You need to click in the target field, press End on your keyboard to go to the very end.

press space, then type --noglext
click apply.

It should now look like:
Target: "C:\Program File\Dominions 3\dom3.exe" --noglext

If this matches, click OK.

If this works for you and upgrading your drivers/graphics card doesn't... then you can do this to your regular shortcuts If this does not work for you, simply delete the new shortcut and continue using your old one.

[Arghaii]

Ah I get it now, thanks for the advanced tutorial

Btw, downloading the latest drivers worked. For some reason windows would not let me install them, not before uninstalling the older drivers, so I was misjudging my graphics card drivers as up to date.

Dominions is running fine now

Should I also add the --noglext to my shortcut? Or does it offer nothing extra now?

Thanks a lot for the help guys, you are the best

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

It'll offer nothing extra for you. It's only handy if the graphics are messed up.