PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum contains deliberat

holo88 · 11 Sep 2009

Geralt said:

GTA IV has similar anti-piracy measures - when driving your car it will randomly accelerate, some of the in-game computers don't work, etc.

odd enough. i did buy gta4 (why, i'll never know) and i had the screwy driving issue. till i realized i had to make like 8 friggin online accounts just to play the game. (ok 3 accounts but still) i think they went overboard with that one. a prime example of sadistic programming.

plus at the time i had to do an offline activation, which for ****s sake required i drive to my friends house, fire up his ancient laptop, figure out his neighbors wireless password (it was password), enter a 400 digit key, wait for an email, write down another 40+ digit key, drive home, and try my code 9 times to get it to work (case sensitive in the extreme)
just to find out that the game was buggy as hell, and got extremely boring after 30 minutes of play.... i paid money for that?! id rather have busted out the Atari and played Frogger. live and learn

Geralt · 11 Sep 2009

Yes - I have a legal version, too. It did do that to me for a little while, then it stopped. I'm not sure what was causing it - maybe some sort of conflict; I have no idea.

I recently (recently being a week or so ago) reinstalled GTAIV and decided to give it a go again. My performance was fairly ****, so I decided to try a few different things to increase it - I patched the game up to 1.0.4.0, defragged my hard drive, uninstalled some games/music/etc, updated all my drivers, exited all background programs and installed XLiveless (disables Games for Windows Live in GTAIV) but the performance was still the same - playable, but a bit low.

I then decided to rollback drivers to see if that would increase or decrease performance, and to my surprise the 181.22 (Nvidia) drivers worked beautifully. I am now running with everything on highest (except view distance on 50) and it's running great - much better than I remember it running when I previously had it installed.

So I played through about 20% of the game and it started raining - my performance dropped a little in the rain so I decided to see if I could fix it. I opened up the visualsettings.dat (C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\common\data) and found the two lines for rain particles. I lowered them both to the following:

The game now runs awesome at all times - so I played up to about 40% of the game, then decided to see if I could find any good mods. The first thing I decided to do was download the Ultimate Graphics Tweak, here:
GTAForums.com -> Ultimate Graphics Tweak

The Ultimate Graphics Tweak makes the depth of field, motion blur and shadows look much, much better. (I had to redo the rain particles tweak as the Ultimate Graphics Tweak replaces the visualsettings.dat). I had a look for some more mods, and some sounded quite cool but I only decided to try one: GrabScript. have you ever seen when you steal an NPCs car, how they sometimes grab onto the side of it and hold on as you're driving? Occasionally they will also grab helicopters that you are piloting. Basically GrabScript allows you to do the same - it's an awesome idea and works quite well, only problem is you can't get hurt and you will not fall off until you press the grab button.

So in conclusion - the game runs great, looks quite good and is very fun.

Helpful links:

Latest GTAIV Patch:
Rockstar Games - Help

GTAForums.com -> [REL|GTAIV] XLiveLess

GTAForums.com -> Ultimate Graphics Tweak