Playing Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield in 2020 and Beyond

Obtaining the Game

Raven Shield (released 2003) is typically $3-10 on Steam. You can also get it on UPlay. These contain the Athena Sword expansion but not Iron Wrath (see EXPANSIONS.md).

Alternatively, you can use your original CDs if you also patch to version 1.60.

Community Resources

• AllR6 Discord

Playing the Game

Note: This doc uses <YourGameDir> to refer to the place you have Raven Shield installed. For most users, this will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rainbow Six 3 Gold.

Essential Improvements

1. Check the PC Gaming Wiki for any tweaks you might want to perform.
2. Borderless Gaming will run the game in a fullscreen window, allowing you to instantly alt-tab. You can download it from Github for free. Note: Click the BorderlessGamingX.Y.Z_admin_setup.exe rather than the link to Steam.
   1. Open <YourGameDir>\system\RavenShield.ini in Notepad and set StartupFullscreen to False
   2. Launch Borderless Gaming
   3. Launch Raven Shield
   4. Add Raven Shield to "Favorites" in Borderless Gaming by selecting it in the left-side list and clicking the > button
   5. Close and relaunch Raven Shield to use it with Borderless Gaming
   6. If you have issues getting the game to run in a borderless window, try the Delay Borderless Window option by right-clicking Raven Shield in Borderless Gaming
3. In the game options, rebind the controls as desired. For example:
   1. Bind Run to Shift
   2. Bind Reload to R
   3. Bind Zoom to RMB
4. If you'd like to play online, set your name in the Multiplayer Options.

Single-Player

You can now play the campaign, a custom mission, or a training scenario. To unlock all maps in custom missions, press ~ at the main menu and enter the command unlockall.

Multi-Player

Ubisoft shut down the authentication servers for Raven Shield in 2016, so we use OpenRVS to point our clients at a new set of servers.

1. Download the latest version of OpenRVS from RVSGaming.org. There is a copy of OpenRVS 1.4 in this repo.
2. Copy openrvs.ini, OpenRVS.u, R6ClassDefines.ini, and Servers.list to <YourGameDir>\system\.
3. You will need to update system\R6GameService.dll in order to remove another place where the game makes outbound calls to Ubisoft servers. Either run Chriswak's R6GameService_Patcher (source) or use the prebuilt copy from this repo. If unpatched, the game will hang any time it tries to reach Ubisoft servers during regular gameplay.
4. Launch the game and set your Internet connection speed to either T1 or T3 in the settings menu to raise Unreal Engine's netspeed to 20KB/s.
5. Join a server and party like it's 2003!

Note: Since we are using a fixed list of servers, some features will no longer work. The list cannot be filtered (using the bottom menu) or sorted, and latency will always be displayed as 1000.

Players can optionally edit Servers.list to choose which servers are displayed when RVSGaming servers cannot be reached. You can force the usage of this file by editing openrvs.ini and changing the value of ServerListURL to an invalid URL, such as http://127.0.0.1/servers.

Servers Currently Online

See RVSGaming.org for the latest list. If the site is offline, use archive.org to bring up a previous version of the page.

Expansions

See EXPANSIONS.md

Mods and Custom Content

See CUSTOM.md

Hosting a Server

See SERVERS.md