Rift is a highly polished MMORPG from Trion Worlds. I have written a preliminary Rift review after playing slowly through the content to level 30 for those that are interested. One of the top features of Rift is that the graphics are quite stunning.  With a high end system the results can be eye popping. Even on lower settings the game is aesthetically pleasing and a joy to play.

Quick overview of 3D Vision

3D Vision allows you to play hundreds of PC games in full 3D using a combination of 3D glasses, an LCD screen of at least 120 Mhz,  and a module that syncs the glasses with the frames in the game. The results blew away my expectations. This is nothing like the cheesy low quality 3D you will find in the movie theatre. My system is a ASUS G73S gaming laptop with 3D vision built in.  With 1900x1080 resolution and a 1.5gb 460M GTX Nvidia card I could not be happier.  Basically 3D Vision rocks and I have a full review available here.

Rift and 3D Vision

Unfortunately due to a configuration with Rift and an existing Nvidia profile, Rift has very poor 3D vision support. When a game launches, the Nvidia 3d driver looks for a profile in the root directory. I’m not sure of the exact mechanism Nvidia uses but Trion apparently does not provide any profile. For most games this would not be an issue. When no profile is specified, Nvidia looks up the executable in a database Nvidia keeps of their own profiles that can tweak many games into playing well in 3D vision. This allows Nvidia to provide quality 3d support for many games in which the developer has not been involved. 

There is a twist with Rift though. Apparently years back there was another game released that used rift.exe as their game executable. So now when you launch Rift, the Nvidia driver looks up a profile that is for “The Rift” which is totally incompatible with the awesome new Rift MMORPG. The game is essentially unplayable in 3D vision. Fortunately there is a workaround.

Getting 3D vision to work in Rift

Hopefully Trion will have a patch in place that will fix this issue. Until then you take the following basic steps to play Rift in 3D Vision.

DISCLAIMER: At this point I will say that everything you do to make 3D vision work is on you! I’m only sharing what has worked for me and anyone using these suggestions takes all risk in terms of corrupting their installation or running into issues with Trion’s TOS.

This is the basic steps for enabling 3D Vision in Rift:

• Rename the Rift.exe file to another name. In my example I’m renaming the Rift.exe to Rift1.exe.
• Modify the game launcher so that it points to the newly name Rift1.exe file.
• Use the low renderer while in 3D mode

Obviously renaming the Rift.exe should be easy enough to do. If you are not confident doing this then you should just play the game as is and wait for Trion to profile proper 3D vision support.

Changing the Launcher XML to run the renamed Rift.exe

The one part that is a little tricky is how to change the launcher XML to point to the new file name. I personally used a program called Resource Hacker. It is available on Download.com here.

After downloading and installing the program. Run the reshacker.exe. You will then need to open the ‘riftpatchlive.exe’ from the installation directory you chose for Rift. Note, it is possible that Trion could change something that would require you to open another program or change something else.

One last warning: These instructions are working for me now. I can’t guarantee they will work for you or will work in the future. Use at your own risk. Backup riftpatchlive.exe. Just to make sure.

Changing the Launcher XML

Once you have opened the file in the resource hacker, you will be looking for rift.exe. This you want to change to the renamed rift.exe in the installation folder. In this example, I have used rift1.exe.

If the picture is hard to see... the path to the XML you need to change is RCData->103-0.

There are two places you need to rename Rift.exe. Both are inside tags labeled <Executable>.

After making the change you want to click the button to ‘compile script’, then choose file and save. At this point you should be able to run the game.

Another warning: Because Rift is being patched so frequently some of those updates can wipe out your changes to the launcher and your EXE names. You may  need to go back in and change the XML and the EXE name depending on the scope of the Rift update.

Rift 3D vision, low renderer and other issues

Unfortunately the high end renderer is pretty much unplayable in 3d. Fortunately if you choose the checkbox for the low quality renderer and reboot the game, the game actually plays pretty well.

 Naturally you will not get the quality level out of a LOTRO or WoW which has taken the time to add quality 3D vision support; but the results are far better than running the game under 2d max settings in my opinion.

Conclusion

Rift looks absolutely amazing in 3D even just using the default Nvidia profile. Hopefully Trion will put in quick fix to avoid us having to manage these launcher and exe naming issues for much longer.