NEW Fix for CTD when starting campaign (Nvidia, High End Cards)

[macsen rufus]

Apologies for the serious thread necro.... it's down to me having a dead PC and needing to get a replacement, ideally capable of running both MTW and M2TW. I'm trying to get this laptop to do it, it should have the oomph, but it has a lot going against it, too. The oddest thing is that it can play a demo for Rise of Nations (from an old mag freebie DVD), but won't play the full game.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is I might have an explanation for why the 'button fix' works, and anyone with ReadBIF ought to be able to fix it for themselves. But as I don't have a game machine right now, I have to go from memory.

When I saw this solution, I looked at the files in question, and the one thing that stuck out was that most of the BIFs for the campmap and panel in the original game have colour mode #FFFF - all except the very ones that need to be replaced. Sure enough the NTW replacement buttons ARE also in #FFFF mode.

With ReadBIF you can open up the files and select the colour table. The final (ie bottom right-hand) entry in the colour table sets the colour mode. If this is set to pure white, the colour mode will be #FFFF (for some reason the originals are just a gnat's whisker off pure white, probably produced the day after CA's office party, or something....)

I THINK, if memory serves, that the indexed colours can be edited in ReadBIF - I can't test it now, alas - but failing that, the frames can be exported to .BMP and edited in Photoshop or similar then re-imported. However it's done, just save the modified BIF over the original file and I expect it will work fine, and with the original image instead of the + and - signs from NTW.