From Cold War Crisis Wiki

Cold War Crisis shares the good and the bad habits of SAGE. But a few fixes might get your system just right.

Contents 1 Custom Resolution 1.1 Warning! 2 Custom Map Height 2.1 Notes 3 FPS/Lag tweak 3.1 Notice 3.2 The Tweak

Custom Resolution

Tired of CWC and Generals not having a specific resolution you want? Well, here's a fix.

• Go to your Options.ini file in your general Documents Folder. On Vista this is: X:\User\Documents\Command And Conquer Generals Zero Hour Data\ folder. Options.ini is listed as a Configuration Settings file.
• Open with Notepad or similar program
• Find the line "Resolution" (without the quotes).
• Replace values with your desired resolution(the first number is the lenght, the second one is the width of the screen)

Example:

In the screenshot above you can see that I already made a different resolution. In my case this is 1680 and 1050, but anything your monitor supports can be filled in. The safest bet is to set your monitor to the desired resolution and put the same numbers in the Options.ini file to make sure your monitor supports it. Make sure you leave the space between the numbers, or the game may crash. Save the file and start CWC(Or Zero Hour) up!

Warning!

After you change the resolution, do not go into the In-game Options menu! When you exit the menu the resolution will be reset to the standard 800x600. You will be required to go back into Options.ini and change it back. So make sure you set all the details before you manually set the resolution.

Custom Map Height

This is a tweak for advanced players with powerful hardware. It increases the standard map height so you can see more of the map.

1. Download FinalBIG Utility [1]
2. Extract it somewhere, then run FinalBIG.exe
3. In your Zero Hour folder, open the CWC map, and open _499_CWC.cwc
4. In the Data\INI tree, find GameData.ini
5. Click Edit -> Extract, then save the file somewhere you can find.
6. Close FinalBIG, and open the GameData.ini file with Notepad or a similar text editor.
7. Find the line "MaxCameraHeight"(without quotes) and edit the value to whatever you wish.
8. Save the file and go to your Zero Hour directory\Data folder. Create a map called "INI"(capital)if you don't have one yet.
9. Paste the modified GameData.ini file into the INI map and start CWC

Screenshot:

As you can see, I have set the camera height to 500, and I find it more than enough.

Notes

• This tweak will NOT cause mismatches against anyone, this has been tested by me. If you only edit the camera there should not be any problem.
• If you set the MaxCameraHeight to a very large number, your game may crash or become extremely laggy. Setting the value higher than 1000 is not recommended, no matter how powerful your hardware is, at a certain point SAGE will bottleneck your GPU.

• If you apply this tweak, you might notice there will only be a small square of the map drawn, and the rest of the map will be black. This is due to generals.exe saving up memory and not loading the whole map for faster FPS. This can be fixed, but on lower-end systems it might(and will) lead to more lag, so only use if you have a powerful videocard.

To fix the square(Only use this IF you already increased map height, else this will just cause extra lag):

1. Open GameData.ini you modified with Notepad or similar.
2. Find the line "DrawEntireTerrain"(The one without the " ; " in front of it). Standard this is set to "No". Change the Value to "Yes"
3. Save the file
4. Start CWC

Screenshot:

FPS/Lag tweak

If you are having problems with your FPS dropping into single digits when playing against the AI on large maps(in particular), then the tweak beneath is for you. Cold War Crisis pushes the SAGE engine to its limits in terms of model and texture quality, so some system tweaking might be required to run on an acceptable FPS.

Notice

Any version after 486 is going to activate this entire tweaking process mentioned below automatically from the starter without you lifting a finger, however since it was not confirmed to work for everyone, you can manually disable the tweak being done automatically from the started by doing the following:

• Create a shortcut to the starter.
• Right-click it and select properties.
• In the line that is labeled "Target", add the the text -noPriorities (starting with a space).
• Use the shortcut to launch the starter.

Screenshot:

The Tweak

This is a method seen on an another website, the CWC team takes no credit for it except posting it here[2]

This will work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP only.

1. Start the game as you normally would. When it gets to the full boot screen hit the "windows key" so that you get back to the desktop.
2. Use CTRL+ALT+DEL to get into the task manager. We want to be on the processes tab.
3. Find the following 3 files. "generals.exe" "game.dat" and "~e5d141.tmp". These are created by the Zero Hour Game.
4. What we are going to do is change the way Windows allocates the resources to each of those files. This can be done by "right-clicking" on each of the files one at a time and selecting "Set Priority".
5. Setting Priority to each file as follows below:
   1. "game.dat" - set priority to "Low".
   2. "~e5d141.tmp" - set priority to "Low".
   3. "generals.exe" - set priority to "High".
6. Maximize the game and play.

This helped a lot of people get an FPS boost when playing against the AI in large maps.