By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.
The original GTA 3.exe is nearly unplayable on new cards without wrappers.
Best solution: Use GTA III: The Definitive Edition (if you own it) OR
Install RE3 – the open-source engine rewrite that runs natively on modern hardware (legal if you own GTA III assets).
Ensure you're using the latest graphics drivers for your video card. You can download the latest drivers from the official website of your graphics card manufacturer:
Sometimes, modern high-definition monitors confuse the game. GTA 3 struggles with screen resolutions that are too high or widescreen formats.
Steps:
If the file doesn't exist, simply launch the game options menu (if you can get that far) and lower the resolution immediately.
Update graphics drivers
Run the game as administrator and compatibility mode
Use safe/low settings or switch renderer
Verify game files / reinstall textures
Install legacy runtime components
Check shader/texture converter tools and mods
Try community patches or compatibility fixes
Use driver or OS rollback
Test on another GPU or machine
If fixes get too messy, consider:
Because the error is a software communication failure, the fix is almost never hardware. You do not need a new video card; you need a translator.
The definitive solution for the modern era is the use of community-created wrappers, most notably the "GTA3 Limit Adjuster" or "Widescreen Fixes", but specifically, a DirectX wrapper like DdrawWrapper or dxwrapper.
These tools sit between the game and the operating system. They intercept the game's archaic requests for texture conversion and translate them into a language modern DirectX versions can understand. By forcing the game to run in windowed mode or emulating the legacy texture handling, the wrapper allows the video card to skip the conversion process it no longer knows how to do.
If you are overwhelmed by the options, here is the Speedrunner's Fix (Works 99% of the time):
Do these three things simultaneously, and you will banish the "Cannot Convert Textures" error forever.
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.
This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.
In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.
I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.