Battle Realms – Official Troubleshooting Q&A 🛠️

Overview

This guide is supposed to assist you in the process of troubleshooting or reporting any issues that may occur during your time with Battle Realms: Zen Edition.

☯ Introduction

You can easily navigate around the guide by using the bookmarks found on the right panel. ↘️

Please, seek solutions for you issues and report everything over at Bugs & Troubleshooting – Megathread.

When it comes to reporting issues, please, give as much information as you can. Detailed descriptions and steps to reproduce are vital, as well as your GPU manufacturer and other system specifications. Screenshots & videos help us out a ton as well!

If you’ve got save files, send them over to [email protected] .

☯ Things To Consider

We’ve worked hard on the game, but some issues are still present and will be there for some time.
Besides Multiplayer (see tab [11] of this guide).

• 1920×1080 is the only available widescreen resolution.
• Shadow or texture multiplication bugs caused by Steam Overlay.

☯ Disclaimer

☯ Issues That Can Be Fixed:

🛠️ [1] Unit model issues

Update 1.57.4 has improved the high-poly Wolf models.

You’ve probably wondered why certain units look different from how you remembered them.
Here’s why: Update 1.55 has introduced the experimental “Cinematic” Level Of Detail (different high-poly models with sharper textures seen in the game cutscenes).

That LoD now replaces the previous “High” setting.

Solution: Change “Level Of Detail” from “High” to “Very High” in order to get back to the old look of the units.

🛠️ [2] Resolutions

You’re wondering why you can’t use 1280×720, 1366×768 or perhaps even 2560×1040 resolutions. Here’s the answer:

Update 1.55 has only brought 1920×1080 (aka FullHD, currently in the experimental stage). No other widescreen resolutions are present at this point in time.

Make sure your screen resolution is equal to or above 1920×1080 e.g. If you have it at 1280×720, you can’t select 1920×1080.

Solution if you can’t find the 1920×1080 setting:

Scroll through the dropbox with mousewheel.

🛠️ [3] Screen Issues

After launching the game, you’re met with this:

This has been fixed in the Update 1.57.4

🛠️ [4] No Fullscreen / Black Bars / Broken Text

You got widescreen, but it’s not 1920×1080, so it has blackbars or runs in a window, you still want to run the game fullscreen however.

or

1920×1080. Your game is not fullscreen and has black bars all around the game window, text also seems weird:
Solution:

Go to your videocard control panel and make sure the game scales to “Full-Screen” if you want the blackbars gone.

Here’s a list of instructions for each GPU manufacturer:

• NVIDIA[www.nvidia.com]
• AMD[www.amd.com]
• Intel[www.intel.com]

🛠️ [5] Could not initialize display mode / Could not rasterize API

This means that the game, for whatever reason, is unable to render itself on your screen. Usually it has to do with screen resolutions, aspect ratios and the ancient Direct3D BR currently uses.
Note:

“Zen Edition” works fine with multiple monitors.

Note 2:

Every new update or integrity verification will result in the .ini file being reset, always dropping the resolution to 1024×768. Check your .ini file and make sure the correct resolution is set.

Note 3:

Make sure you’re using one of the native resolutions supported by your monitor. Best to use the one marked with (Recommended).

Instruction: How to find out the resolution of the screen on my monitor.[www.computerhope.com]

Solution 1:

Use the scaling option from the previous issue ([4]) and make it “Full Screen”.

Solution 2 (Only if the first didn’t work or there’s no option to ‘full-screen’):

Open Battle_Realms.ini in the core game folder. Change:

HardwareTL =1

to

HardwareTL =0

🛠️ [6] Windowed Mode

You want to run the game in a window.

Since Update 1.57.4, the game allows setting windowed mode (experimental) through the .ini file found in the core game folder.

In order to get into your game’s folder, please, see the picture and follow these steps:

• Step 1: Open Steam’s main window (not friend list). Click on the ‘LIBRARY’ tab.
• Step 2: Find BR in your game list, right click on it and select ‘Properties’ from the dropdown list.
• Step 3: In the newly opened window, click the ‘Browse…’ button and the game folder will open (check your Windows tabs if it does not appear).
• Step 4: Find the .ini file and open it. Change ‘Fullscreen=1’ to ‘Fullscreen=0’ in order to activate the windowed mode.

By tradition, AMD GPU (videocard) users who rely on dgvoodoo2 to have the best possible BR experience will have to take some extra steps in order to make it function properly, but we’ve done most of the work for you and came up with a new config!

If you’re an AMD GPU (videocard) user, grab our latest dgvoodo2 config- [link] (replace (dot) with .)

This method assumes using a third party software by the name of DxWnd[sourceforge.net].

• Download DxWnd[sourceforge.net].
• Click “Edit” -> “Add”.
• Click “Path” and find “Battle_Realms_EF.exe” (game’s installation location). Do not touch “Launch”.
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, leave the settings as is. Only input the resolution of the window and tick “No banner” option on the main tab.
• If you know what you’re doing, further customization is done on the “Video” tab.
• IMPORTANT! Do not launch from DxWnd directly. Make sure it’s running in the background, then launch Battle Realms from Steam. If you don’t do that, you’ll encounter an error.

• Enjoy playing BR in Windowed Mode.

🛠️ [7] Startup / Launch Issues

Solution:

Make sure that your antivirus (such asAvast/AVG) doesn’t interfere with the game’s executable (battle_realms_ef.exe).

Solution 1 – Intel GPUs:

Battle Realms seems to not like Intel’s Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA), which is enabled by default. You need to make sure it’s disabled in order to play BR, for that:

• Right-click the Windows desktop and select “Graphics Properties.” You can also launch the “Intel HD Graphics Control Panel” tool from your Start menu.[www.howtogeek.com]
• Click the “3D” icon when the control panel window appears to access 3D graphics settings.
• Set Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing to “Turn Off”.[www.howtogeek.com]

Solution 1 – AMD & NVIDIA GPUs:

Disable G-Sync or FreeSync features.

Solution 2:

Reinstall the game to a different disk (create a new steam library folder if needed)[www.technipages.com].

Solution 3:

Try setting the compatibility mode in the .exe properties to Windows XP SP 3 and launch it as Administrator.

If the game still crashes, please, provide details about your hardware and OS, crash reports if possible.

🛠️ [8] Visual glitches

Solution:

Disable the Steam Overlay, everything should be fine after.

Note: Most of the times it does not persist and goes away if you keep playing. Alt + Tab combination or pressing ESC key (to bring the in-game menu) may also help with fixing it, however any new popup on Steam will trigger the bug.

This is related to 1920×1080 (experimental) resolution not updating the screen properly. It goes away if you move your mouse (thus the camera in-game), we’ll have it fixed soon.

🛠️ [9] Extremely Low FPS.

You should normally be able to maintain 60 FPS and above even on low-end hardware if you’re running Intel or NVIDIA. If you experience issues on such setups:
Solution:

Make sure you don’t have other programs like MSI afterburner running and capping the framerate. Any overlays may intefere with the game.

🛠️ [10] Minimap issues

Solution:

Use Alt+Tab key combination and get back in the game, that will help.

If that, for some reason, didn’t help- change your resolution to something else and then switch back.

🛠️ [11] Multiplayer issues

First, always make sure you run the latest version of the game (now it’s 1.57.4).

As of Update 1.57, the Multiplayer aspect of the game has been massively stabilized. You may experience occasional desyncs in AI games however.

The more frequent issues you may experience are related to lobby connectivity.

Regarding lobbies in version 1.57:

There are still minor issues with joining, but you should be able to easily solve them. If you’re unable to join a lobby, quit to the main menu and try again. If that doesn’t help – quit the game and try to join the lobby again. If anything else fails- change the host if possible.

There is some P2P side which can be capricious with connectivity, but we’re trying to smoothen everything out.

Regarding synchronization errors:

Even the experiences varies from person to person, If you’re on 1.57.4, the chances for desyncs should be pretty rare. If you still encounter them, verify integrity of game files.

🛠️ [12] WorldMaster refuses to launch.

While “Zen Edition” supports multiple monitors, the WorldMaster itself refuses to do that.

Solution:

You’ll have to leave only one monitor active in order to get creative.

🛠️ [13] Sound Initialization Failed

This error pops up if the game fails to recognize your audio-output device.

Solution:

Try to (re)connect your audio output device.

🛠️ [14] BAD LEVEL

This error means that you don’t have the map from the save file you’re trying to load. It may’ve been changed by the game since the last time you saved, or you changed it yourself.

☯ Heads Up

Please, seek solutions for you issues and report everything over at Bugs & Troubleshooting – Megathread.

When it comes to reporting issues, please, give as much information as you can. Detailed descriptions and steps to reproduce are vital, as well as your GPU manufacturer and other system specifications. Screenshots & videos help us out a ton as well!

If you’ve got save files, send them over to [email protected].