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SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle

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Revision as of 03:16, 15 February 2018 by Garrbot (talk | contribs) (→‎top: updated GOG.com support ID)
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle cover
Developers
Sierra Northwest
Publishers
Sierra Entertainment
Release dates
Windows November 23, 1999
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle on Wikipedia
Police Quest
Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel 1987
Police Quest II: The Vengeance 1988
Police Quest III: The Kindred 1991
Police Quest: Open Season 1993
Police Quest: SWAT 1995
Police Quest: SWAT 2 1998
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle 1999
SWAT 4 2005

Key points

Game is unlikely to launch or run on modern systems "as is", requires significant tweaking to run.

General information

GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
GOG.com Support Page
Steam Community Discussions

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM details are not known
Windows
GOG.com
DRM-free
Tactical Game of the Year Edition
Windows
Steam
Icon overlay.png
Tactical Game of the Year Edition
Windows

Essential improvements

Skip intro videos

SWAT 3 may crash immediately after launching on Windows 7, 8, 10 because the codecs for the FMV videos are not supported on modern versions of Windows. Skipping the intro video is a good way of testing whether this issue is the cause of a crash on launch issue.
-nointro command line argument[citation needed]
  1. Create a shortcut to the program, located at <path-to-game>\Swat.exe.
  2. Right click on the shortcut and choose "Properties".
  3. Add -nointro to the end of the Target.
  4. Click OK.

Notes

For more information, see our article on command line arguments.

Performance improvement

Performance is very low on modern operating systems.[citation needed]
Use dgVoodoo2[1]
  1. Download dgVoodoo 2.
  2. Extract D3DImm.dll and DDraw.dll to the installation folder, where swat.exe is located.

Enhance AI

The amount of time the AI has to determine its actions can be safely increased on modern computers beyond the normal 20ms maximum for much-improved AI.
Increase AI determination time[citation needed]
  1. Go to <path-to-game>\Swat.cfg.
  2. Open Swat.cfg in a text editor.
  3. Find the following lines:
    aiofficertime
    aisuspecttime
  4. Replace the numbers they contain (i.e. aiofficertime=20) with 200 (i.e. aiofficertime=200).
  5. Save Swat.cfg.

Notes

aiofficertime and aisuspecttime are independent of each other - you could set aiofficertime to 200 and aisuspecttime to 20 to decrease difficulty by way of making suspect AI dumber, or vice-versa.
You can try increasing the AI determination time further to, say, 2000, but the improvements may be minimal.
This fix will need to be repeated anytime settings are modified from the in-game options screen.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

Template:Game data/row
System Location
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/560370/pfx/[Note 1]

Save game data location

Template:Game data/row
System Location
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/560370/pfx/[Note 1]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud

Video settings

General settings.
General settings.

Template:Video settings

Widescreen resolution

Edit config file[2]
  1. Start a game and go to options screen.
  2. Set the resolution to 1024x768.
    • It's recommended to set the other graphical options before editing config file as well.
  3. Save the settings and quit the game.
  4. Go to <path-to-game>.
  5. Open Swat.cfg with a text editor.
  6. Find a line: res=1024 768 and replace the values with your own resolution.
  7. After that find a line: display_mode=1024 768 2 1 and change the resolution values as well leaving 2 1 at the end (e.g. for 1920x1080, display_mode=1920 1080 2 1.
  8. Save the changes and run a game.

Notes

Menu is always rendered at 800x600 since the bitmap graphics are at that resolution.
Resolutions higher than 1920 x 1080 may fail to load when using this solution. For higher resolutions, DgVoodoo2 may have to be used.

Windowed

Windowed mode requires 16-bit color mode.
Available only in 800x600.
DxWnd and Windowed Borderless Gaming can be used together to force borderless window mode.
-window command line argument[citation needed]
  1. Create a shortcut to the program, located at <path-to-game>\Swat.exe.
  2. Right click on the shortcut and choose "Properties".
  3. Add -window to the end of the Target.
  4. Click OK.

Notes

For more information, see our article on command line arguments.
Use DxWnd and Windowed Borderless Gaming for borderless window mode[citation needed]
  1. Point DxWnd at your SWAT 3 executable. Make sure to set the "DirectX Version to Hook" to "automatic".
  2. Run WBG. You will see the WBG icon in your System Tray. Right click on that icon and select "Settings", "Global Settings".
  3. Under "Add Window", choose a keybind that you will use to "add" SWAT 3 to WBG (we'll be doing this later). Then, enter the resolution you want to play the game at. Finally, under "Force Key", pick another key you will use to actually set the game to run in a borderless window. Go ahead and close the settings window.
  4. Execute swat.exe through DxWnd.
  5. The game should start up in a tiny window in the top-left corner of the screen. When you get to the main menu, hit whatever Add Window keybind you set up.
  6. Alt-tab out of the game, and right-click on the WBG tray icon. Select "Settings", "Game Settings".
  7. Select SWAT from the dropdown menu. Enter your resolution one more time and make sure that "Manage Mouse" and "Lock to game window" are selected. Apply, and close the window. Close SWAT as well, just to make sure the WBG settings take.

Notes

When run through DxWnd, you can now use your WBG borderless window keybind to force SWAT 3 into a borderless window.
(Optional) Use dxwnd for 16-bit color mode[citation needed]

DxWnd can be used to simplify transition between 16-bit and 32-bit color mode.

  1. Launch DXWnd. Click on Edit and Add.
  2. In a name field type in: SWAT 3.
  3. In a path field click on a button ... and navigate to a folder where you've installed SWAT. Choose Swat.exe and press Open button.
  4. Go to a Color tab.
  5. And check a field Force 16BPP desktop.
  6. Click OK and minimize DXWnd window.
  7. Launch a game using a shortcut with -window command line argument.
  8. Once you end up playing, close a game and DXWnd. Upon closing, DXWnd is going to ask whatever you want to restore previous Desktop settings - answer yes, to switch back to 32bit color mode.

Input settings

Template:Input settings

Audio settings

Template:Audio settings

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
TGOTY : only in english.
French
Polish
Local retail version only.
Russian
Retail version only.

Network

Multiplayer types

Type Native Notes
LAN play
Versus, Co-op
Online play
Versus, Co-op

Issues fixed

Game crashes immediately after launching

For Windows 7, 8, and 10, the game will crash if display scaling on high DPI settings is enabled.
For Windows 7, 8, and 10, the FMV movies will cause the game to crash due to the codec no longer being supported. This usually gives a "DDERR_Generic" error message but sometimes the game just shuts down without warning.
Disable display scaling on high DPI settings[3]
  1. Go to the game's compatibility options.
  2. Check "disable displaying scaling on high DPI settings".
Manually download the FMV codecs[4]
  1. Manually download the required codecs from http://www.swat3lastresort.info/index.php/swat-3-video-directx-fix.

Issues unresolved

Low performance on Windows 8/10

Low performance on Windows 8/10 systems is commonly reported. This partially caused by the fact that 16-bit color mode is emulated in 32-bits. Launching the game in windowed mode may solve the problem, at the cost of the game running in 800x600 window. A better way to deal with this is to use DgVooodoo2
See the Windowed section in this article for information specific to this game.

Other information

API

Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

System requirements

Windows
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 95, 98, 2000, ME
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium II 266 MHz
System memory (RAM) 64 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 600 MB
Video card (GPU) 800x600 SVGA high color (16 bit)
8 MB of VRAM

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/560370/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (560370) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.

References