Muzman on 23/4/2014 at 18:07

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Yeah, same thing happened to me with both. Could not get it fixed at all and neither of them are popular enough for trouble shooting types to post detailed knowledge anywhere

For Dark Messiah I just did what J Moyer said and used the key to get it on steam (unless you're against steam for some reason). Works fine though.

Invisible War makes no sense at all. The only way I could get it running was copy the install folder holus bolus from my old machine on to my Win 7 one. Works ok. And no I cannot find any difference between the one installed from disk and the one copied over. Could be some obscure setting somewhere.
But if you've got an XP machine lying around you might try installing it there and copying it over.

IW's graphics and configs generally are a total nightmare. The only wide screen mod I've got to work properly is Deus Ex Widescreen utility which runs in the background smacking it about the head if it tries to revert to defaults.

Muzman on 24/4/2014 at 10:42

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You might be right actually. I can't confirm it needs to be resident. I do know that if you don't run it every time before you play or after a crash etc IW will revert to some terrible default. So too if you accidentally touch certain graphic settings (anti-aliasing doesn't even agree with its own settings and needs to be ini hacked to work sometimes).
I'm using the 2.2.0 beta though. The final might do a better job ( not that it's their fault really, that version of Unreal Engine was kind of a nightmare anyway and Ion managed to make it worse). Once I hit upon a working formula I was hesitant to mess with it.

Muzman on 25/4/2014 at 10:13

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I wouldn't rule out that you could fix it so it stays that way. But I seem to recall trying something like that and discovering the game would just delete and rewrite the ini file instead. Don't quote me on that though.
One of the problems is that the settings for graphics and things are scattered through several ini s and repeated in a few places. Some of it in the user info kept with the save games. That much I know is true. If they don't all line up, they break and go back to hard coded defaults. It's a nightmare.
I remember the writer of the widescreen utility mentioning he had to hex hack a bit to really get it to work.

Internal AA will break just by breathing on it too hard; it'll stop working if you change resolution and some other settings sometimes, it'll stop if you go to desktop while the game is running for any reason, then it'll sometimes lock itself in that state after you quit and refuse to work.
One time I was trying to tweak the performance while recording video and adjusting the AA a bit. It had been working well for a while on 8x, but a bit slow for dumping video at the same time. So I tried shifting to 4x and the AA stopped working altogether. 8x still worked ok however. After some ini hunting I noticed that the setting stored in three different places in two different ways, if I remember rightly. One using 1,2&3 to indicate the three AA values of 2x, 4x and 8x, another place using 2,4&8. As if that wasn't bad enough, one of the places always recorded a 5 instead of a 4 when you chose the 4x setting. All the settings don't match - the AA no work.

I basically tweaked all the settings to my liking without the widescreen mod, saved games, quit the game and loaded a few times, then rand the widescreen thing and tried to never touch the internal settings again.

It was always pretty buggy in this respect though. I'm quite convinced it was specced to run at 640x480 with bloom on and nothing else (and it turned out that the bloom setting included a fake out and reduced the resolution. But that's another story)