WOW in 3D

I noticed that my nVidia Control Panel gave me 3D controls that enabled a red/cyan (blue) 3d effect as well as the other 3D setting like the Avatar and Alice in Wonderland use. Since I didn't have the $600+ to spend on the monitor and glasses needed to do the other, I looked for some old school 3D glasses. I found Blockbuster had some but they were magenta/green...

I got home and Googled for 'World Of Warcraft nvidia 3d magenta green' and one of the results that came up ( http://gameolosophy.com/games/rpg/world-of-warcraft/how-to-play-world-of-warcraft-in-3d-works-for-other-games-as-well/ ) is what I used to get my results.

I have an EVGA nVidia GeForce 9800GT with 1GB of RAM Onboard the video card and am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit (OEM).

The process described below is specifically for enabling you to purchase a 15 cent pair of magenta/green 3D glasses, as available at Blockbuster Video Stores, to play World Of Warcraft in 3D. Though you can play other games in 3D as well, the main point of this is to first get the nVidia 3D settings to work with magenta/green glasses instead of red/cyan glasses.

To do this, make sure you have an nVidia card (duh) with the most recent driver. The driver installs the nVidia Control Panel, which you can access by right clicking on the Windows Desktop.

Open the nVidia Control Panel, and select 'Set Up Stereoscopic 3D'. Check the 'Enable stereoscopic 3D' checkbox. When the window comes up, it will use the red/cyan coloring, so just check the red octogon on the left and the blue triangle on the right and continue. Check the box that on the left, that shows the box within, floating... then continue. Then you're done with enabling the 3D...

Now, it's time to do the quick registry hack...

WARNING! I take no responsibility if you mess up your system and am only offering what worked for me.

That said, all we are really changing is actually allowing color to work with 3D, changing the red to magenta and changing the cyan to green.

So, Click the Start Button, and type 'regedit' (no quotes) and the 'Regedit.exe' app should appear, which you will click, and it *should* require administrator access.

Now that Regedit is running, I would just suggest going under the 'edit' menu, and selecting 'find' to search for 'Stereo3D', which after a few seconds (around 30 seconds on my machine) it will give you a result that is for me under the path
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\Stereo3D

Keep in mind, I run a 64bit version of Windows 7 so, your key path may be slightly different, though I would say that if it ends in \NVIDIA Corporation\Global\Stereo3D, then you're probably in the right place, especially if the regkeys I mention next are in that folder...

So, you're first going to look for: StereoAnaglyphType

it will have a data key of 1 or 0x00000001 (1) but when you double click on StereoAnaglyphType, you will see there is a textbox where you can replace the '1' with '0', which you should do. When you accept that, you will see that the 'data' has changed to 0x00000000 (0)

that was the first change. only two more...

first, the LeftAnaglyphFilter should be changed to ff00ff00
second, the RightAnaglyphFilter should be changed to ffffff00

the LeftAnaglyphFilter should show the data now as 0xff00ff00 (4278255360)
the RightAnaglyphFilter should show the data now as 0xffffff00 (4294967040)

The last step in setting up the changes to use magenta/green are to set the permissions for this registry folder, which you can access from the 'edit' menu.

Edit>Permissions

Select SYSTEM (though it seems at this step it's arbitrary which user you choose) and click ADVANCED

The window that then opens has the 'permissions' tab, which will let you select 'SYSTEM' and click 'Edit'. When the 'Permission Entry for Stereo3D' window pops up with "SYSTEM" as the user in the textbox, check deny on all of the entries, except for 'Full control' and 'Read control'. Neither of those two should be checked to either allow or deny. Click OK.

Now select "CREATOR OWNER" and we're only going to deny this the ability to overwrite the changes so, check Deny next to "Write DAC" and Deny next to "Write Owner". As above, dont check allow or deny on any of the other entries. Click OK.

You should now have two "SYSTEM" entries and two "CREATOR OWNER" entries, one of each with 'special' permissions. Click OK. Click OK again to close the "Permissions" window. Now you should also be okay to close the Regedit program window.

For good measure, you would be advised to reboot to ensure the settings have taken effect, though I don't think that is actually necessary in this case.

Launch World Of Warcraft and log in to the character of your choice. Press 'esc' to bring up the menu to change "Video" settings. On the left hand side, there is now a third entry for 3D settings (as this is one of the few games that actually has controls for 3D built into the GUI). You can enable or disable the Stero 3d effects within WOW, so long as the Nvidia Control Panel has it enabled.

I will share where I keep my settings but note that you will have to adjust when you zoom in and out. If you can find a happy medium where you're not so close that you can see what is going on around you in a battle but not so far that you split in to a two characters when you go into an inn, then you probably will be okay most of the time, though, I do find it necessary to make adjustments often, as required.

I usually keep the top slider at somewhere between 10% and 20% and keep the bottom one around 15% to 40%. The top slider adjust the focal point of where your character is in relation to your amount of zoom. The bottom slider adjusts the depth of field for the 3D effect. If you zoom to a point where you want to view the character in game, then go in to make the 3D adjustments, adjust the top one first, trying to pick a point, like the character's sword or shield on their back, and use the slider to align the two (magenta/green) so that your toon comes into focus. Then adjust the bottom slider. I find that if I have the top slider at 10%, it makes no sense to have the bottom slider any lower than 10%, since at that point, there's nearly no depth of field. In other words, the bottom one seems to always be adjusted slightly more than the top one, to the right. but both are almost always best when they are left of the half way point...

Top
_____0________________________________

Bottom
____________0_________________________

That's roughly what works for me, though, you WILL have to make your own adjustments to suit your visual comfort zone.

The long and short of it is that for a paltry 16 cents (after tax) you can now play World Of Warcraft in 3D.

Light Bless You...

;)