Getting Borderlands to work on PC

Hey everyone,

I managed to get a whopping 3x new games this week thanks to the release of the 4th Tales of Monkey Island episode, Tropico 3 arriving on Wednesday and Borderlands on Thursday. I tried giving Borderlands a go last night but it took me a couple of hours before I was actually playing it to an acceptable level on multiplayer. Here are a couple of tips for getting it to work on PC.

1. Getting multiplayer to work

I actually had problems even connecting to friends, not only with Hamachi on the LAN option, but even through Gamespy's Servers (now don't get me started on Gamespy!). Anyway, some guy here managed to find the solution, and before you think it sounds way too complex and convoluted, it's not. If you've already got Hamachi it's only a few clicks and then you can host Borderlands games, not on LAN funnily enough, but on Gamespy, using the Hamachi connection (yes it's very strange, I know)!

Follow the instructions on this site: http://www.greatpcs.net/2009/10/27/borderlands-pc-multiplayer-troubles/

It basically involves prioritising the Hamachi connection over your usual LAN connection to the router. Then miraculously you can play games online!

2. Turning off the voice-activated microphone

If like me you use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, then it could get quite annoying when you're trying to talk on your voice chat program yet everytime you do it repeats on Borderlands. Worse, even if you've got a button bound to talk on TeamSpeak or Ventrilo of course your voice is still going to be recorded on Borderlands since you can't bind a button to activate speech in the game. Not only that, there's no menu option at the moment to turn off the microphone in the game!

So the solution is to do a bit of tweaking of an ini file. The ini file is called BaseEngine.ini and it's located by default in C:\Program Files\2K Games\Gearbox Software\Borderlands\Engine\Config (at least on a Windows XP system). Inside there you should search for a flag called bHasVoiceEnabled=true

Once you find it, set bHasVoiceEnabled=false and you've turned off the in-game mic! Problem solvered!

3. Turning off company intro videos

Also, if you want to get rid of the non-skippable company intro videos that waste a minute or two of your life each time you start the game, this is how you do it:

1. Go to C:\Program Files\2K Games\Gearbox Software\Borderlands\WillowGame\Config (at least that's where you go on a default installation on a Windows XP system)
2. Find DefaultEngine.Ini. Right-click on it to open its properties and un-check the "Read-Only" attribute. Then hit OK.
3. Open DefaultEngine.Ini and search for the section [FullScreenMovie].
4. Delete any entries under [FullScreenMovie] (but only up to the next section which has its titles surrounded by square brackets!)
5. Save the file.
6. Right-click the file to open its Properties again and re-check the "Read-Only" attribute.

Comments

  1. Thanks for the post! Even though the intro movies are supposed to be skippable they never were for me. Just an FYI, if you buy the game through steam the location of the ini files on XP is:
    C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\borderlands\WillowGame\Config

    ReplyDelete

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