Steam Silent Hunter III setup – Onkel Neal, 2022
Sometime between 2017 and 2019 I bought SH3 on Steam for the convenience of playing without a CD. I believe I started the game but probably only played a single mission… apparently I loaded the JonesSoft Mod tool and GWX, then stepped away to focus on Wolfpack.
FastFwd to now: I started SH3 on Steam to play some career missions to refresh my memory on the way the campaign feels in preparation for the Wolfpack campaign. I Steam started SH3 and it came up, GWX installed, but it was playing in a tiny window, so I changed the resolution and well, the game stopped running. The Ubi logo and intro video would appear but then only a mouse arrow and black screen. Oh boy, fun!
So, I did some research, found a bunch of possible solutions, I tried a bunch of things.
I did not want to download and run any tools that could be spyware. Not needed at all.
I tried changing my monitor resolution manually to 1024×768, then starting the game but that did not seem to help.
I tried running as Admin, using the exe properties Compatibility mode, etc.
I reinstalled the game to a different drive to keep the broken version separate from a fresh install.
After reinstalling, checking file integrity, monkeying around with the Compatibility mode, and cfg file, I got SH3 to run again in vanilla mode.
You can see what seems to have done the trick for me.
These are the right click Properties settings I used. Also, I
opened Change high DPI settings…
Here are the Change high DPI settings, then I clicked the link Open Advanced scale settings…
Which led to this settings page, I switched the Fix scaling for apps OFF.
Finally, here are what my SH3 config main settings are,
Note the VIDEO section, Resolution and Full Screen settings; I do not know if the game changed
to these settings when I was messing with the Compatibility mode or if this was a result of my
changing this config main file trying to luck out on the magic combination, but this is what the file
looks like now with the game running, in full screen mode. My monitor resolution remains set
at 1920×1080, so the Compatibility mode must be making the needed changes.
So, this is where I stopped. SH3 runs, full screen, and does not seem to have any issues, other than
a small popup message suggestion I run my monitor at 1920×1080, which I am looking into a way
to disable.
Hope this helps, questions and suggestions can be posted here.
Onkel
