Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Technical Problems Video settings issues

Woops, somehow ended up posting this in the Original Sin forum, forgot where I was when I hit new. Anyway...

Ok, really not keen on trying to continue this at this rate. After originally installing BD (and D2), the next time I rebooted I found my desktop all cluttered and running on the basic theme at 640x480x16 @ 60 Hz. Shrugged it off as a fluke and hasn't happened since.
However now, after not playing BD for some 2 weeks, I decided to get back to it and had the game freeze (in the battlegrounds again, but was just there to sell stuff). Waited a bit, nothing, hit ctrl+alt+del and the screen showed up well enough, hit start task manager, got me back to what appeared to be a normal desktop, everything all right, so went back to the game, which was no longer frozen, left the battlegrounds, saved, quit and rebooted, just in case.
Well, upon reboot I once again found myself with the display settings in the same state, so once again had to get everything back in order, place things in their right place on the desktop...

What gives? I do just see a warning when going into the game, can't see what it says but assume it's something about changing display settings for compatibility with the game... May it be that doing that, possible also in conjunction with alt-tabbing at some point, si messing something up and causing this or...? (Still, I play some other old games and never had this happen before.)

Have you tried changing the game resolution? If DirectX isn't returning to the original resolution, maybe getting rid of that initial warning will help. Maybe try a lower resolution, or setting the game and desktop resolution the same.

A program like DesktopOK or Iconoid will let you save and restore the positions of your desktop icons.

Game resolution is the same as desktop resolution, 1280x1024. And there's no problem when exiting the game or alt-tabbing, but when booting again the next time these two times. I could play the game without it happening too, before this pause, but it does happen. (I also have the effects of other programs left open having been in a 640x480 resolution at times, like Winamp, normally locked on right side of screen, ending up on the middle even if minimized while BD is open. Not always, but quite frequently.)
Windows acts as if the settings are corrupted or something, because the first time it only showed me the upper-left ~quarter of the logo and welcome screens (so they were still at 1280x1024 but it only displayed 640x480 of them), this second time logo screen showed up fine, welcome screen also fine for a second or two, then momentary black screen and it reloaded at 640x480.

Speaking of DX, annoying that BD automatically installs all the stuff it thinks it needs. I had DX9, use Foxit for PDFs and installed D2 first, allowing that to install VC++ out of what it asked about. Then installed BD and it automatically (re)installed DX and VC and started on Adobe Reader (luckily that wasn't a quiet install and I could cancel it once it started).

Should it be running in a particular compatibility mode?

I have no idea why Windows would boot up at 640x480 if it was fine after exiting the game.

You can rename the ..\Beyond Divinity\Static\intro.mpg file to get the game to automatically skip it on startup, which might eliminate one switch to 640x480 and back, and possibly lower the chance of associated problems.

At least DirectX checks the installed version and skips files up to date, but it would be faster to just not try to install it again. Earlier releases of the games asked to install DirectX, so I assume that must have caused problems with people not being up to date, or something. IMO there should at least be a prompt / option for Adobe Reader, though, as pretty much everyone should already have a pdf reader.

You shouldn't need to run the game in compatibility mode, but since you are having an issue, that is worth trying. The disk version of BD needed to be run in Win9x compatibility mode to avoid a potential bug in Vista/7, but that shouldn't be a problem in the latest version.

Did that, renamed intro movie, put Win 98 compatibility mode on both the desktop shortcut (which I see is to launcher.exe -path .) and div.exe, just in case, was in game for about 1 min, then quit and rebooted... And saw a quarter of the welcome screen and desktop with fail-safe settings. Then rebooted twice more after restoring to normal as another check to make sure it doesn't happen on its own somehow now, and nope, was fine.
Wonder if the fact that I was able to play before this break and not run into this issue was due to the fact that I hadn't rebooted right after playing BD, so the potentially corrupted (or whatever) settings were restored somehow, maybe I had played another game in between. No idea and don't quite feel like testing now.

Never had anything like this reported before?

A couple people have had the game come up showing the top left corner of the main menu. That happened to me once... don't recall if it was a random glitch, or if it was just after I installed the game and it was fine when I ran the configuration program and set the resolution.

I don't recall anyone having a problem with Windows' resolution after rebooting, though, when the game appeared to exit properly.

Right now managed to avoid it happening again by setting the display settings again after playing (as in just go to settings, move the slider away from 1280x1024 and then back again so it'll think something changed, then hit ok). But also happened to look in system log and notice a bunch of "invalid state" errors from the display driver. Just one now, associated with when I played, so not even each time it caused the issue, but quite a long list of them while I was playing before that 2 week-break, and none during said break.

Have you tried setting the game resolution higher or lower than the desktop resolution?

Did you check for updated graphics and monitor drivers?

Nope (and I'd need another monitor to set it higher :p). And why should I be playing it in a lower one?

Monitor driver's ok, graphics one is, er, some 3.5 years old I think. As I said, play older games a fair bit, and there are potential issues with those, one actually listed under known issues in the release notes for several versions after this one (not last I checked anymore, but don't know whether that's because they solved it or because they think it too old to be worth mentioning anymore and since I keep hoping to get back and actually finish it someday, rather not risk it), so as long as this version works with both the old ones and the newer ones (and so far it did, no problem with any game less than 10 years old I tried but this, and at least from how much I poked through it even Divinity 2 seems to work just fine too), I'm playing it safe. Don't see why a game with an original release in 2004 would cause OS problems not caused by others with release dates ranging (at the moment) between 1998 and 2012.