Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is an official 3D Vision Ready game title which in theory means that the game should play perfectly fine in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision and look great on top of that. However the road that the game needed to go trough was a bit long and hard, there was a day 1 patch to address some issues in stereo 3D mode and after that a few more patches that improved the stereo 3D experience making the game better…
However for a bit over a month now there has actually been a regression in that since the latest update version 553292 that as been out for over a month already actually brought back some issues when the you play the game in stereo 3D mode. Mainly the issue of the crosshair being rendered in 2D mode again, although with earlier patches it was working perfectly fine being rendered in stereo 3D mode. And since this is a quite serious problem for a lot of users playing in stereo 3D mode (and something you will not expect from a 3D Vision Ready title), the fact that it is not being addressed with a proper patch in a timely manner is actually very strange. The good thing is that there is a working workaround that fixes the problem by replacing one of the game files with a version from a previous patch that brings back the crosshair rendering in stereo 3D mode.
You need to download the file package.mft from the link below and replace the currently present file in the folder where you installed the game under \Dist\win32 for example if you installed the game in the default folder it should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Battlefield Bad Company 2\Dist\win32) and that is it, you are ready to go. The file is from the game patch version 529843 and you can thank the user metti from the Nvidia forums for discovering this fix and sharing it with us, so you should try it out now while waiting for the game developers to address the issue with a new patch. Have in mind that this is for single player mode, and although it will work in multiplayer too it may create some issues in multiplayer mode!
If you’ve missed the new free game from NASA (yes, a free game developed by/for the American government), then you might want to check out Moonbase Alpha now available on Steam. It seems that now NASA is looking to educate and train future astronauts trough a free game, much like it was with the American Army getting new recruits trough the previous free game called America’s Army… ;)
In Moonbase Alpha, you assume the role of an astronaut working to further human expansion and research on the Moon. Returning from a research expedition on the lunar surface, you witness a meteorite impact that cripples the life support capability of the recently established Moon base. With precious minutes ticking away, you and your team must repair and replace equipment in order to restore the oxygen production to the Moon settlement. There are several ways in which you can successfully restore the life support system of the lunar base, but since you are scored on the time spent to complete the task, you have to work effectively as a team, learn from decisions made in previous gaming sessions, and make intelligence decisions in order to top the leaderboards. And yes it is a multiplayer only online game where everyone is a real person that is quite interesting and might be fun to play for a while, but without a lot of excitement and action, so don’t get your hopes too high.
The game is based on Unreal engine, so playing it in stereoscopic 3D mode with 3D Vision as expected can bring out the typical issues, such as a problem with rendering the dynamic shadows and disabling these can help. Also since there is a lot of white, black and gray colors the game is prone to have some ghosting, but it still has a lot of potential to provide a quite realistic simulation with stereo 3D. The in-game HUD is rendered mostly in 2D, but that is not such a big issue and you might want to play a bit with the convergence settings to achieve best possible results. And you would probably want to lower the default brightness level a bit… And since the game is free all you need to have is a Steam account to download and play it, so it will be a shame not to try it, after all you might like it and who knows, you might be a future astronaut yourself… :P
Somewhere along the idea to upgrade the old 3D Test PC with water cooling (details for that project are available here) I got the idea to leave the other computer as a dedicated AMD/ATI test system and build a completely new 3D test PC for 3D Vision, again with water cooling of course. So practically you can say I’ve started working on the two projects at the same time, but the system that just needed the upgrade was finished much faster than the completely new system. The reason for that being that I wanted to make everything the right way, choose the components carefully and apply a matching custom water cooling and the end product to be really good looking and performing as fast as possible in order to have the ultimate 3D Test PC for testing stereo 3D content and of course to be able to game comfortably enough in stereo 3D with the 3D Vision. Now that there are just some minor unexpected details left to work out…
The photos above are from the almost finished Green Reactor PC with a lot of small finishing details only left to be done, so it is pretty much ready and working at this point of time. I’ll just update with some more pictures when all the finishing touches are ready… So stay tuned for more information and photos.
