Asterix101: So, after much mucking about, the "solution" I found was this:
- Go to your stbc installation folder.
Inside, you *should* find an options.cfg file. If it's not there, open the game and let it crash, and the file should be created.
- Open options.cfg with notepad.
There are better editors for the job, but notepad comes with Windows and is easy to use. Use gedit, or kedit, or vi, or emacs, or nano, or pico, or whatever it is that the children of the Penguin use these days, if you are one.
- Delete all the text.
You may leave the [Sound] section if it exists, but the rest (particularly the [Multiplayer] and [General Options] sections), needs to go: some of those sections contain characters that cannot be edited correctly with notepad, and your game won't start if you muck them up. Deleting everything is safer.
- Add the following section:
[Graphics Options]
Texture Detail|2
Number of Lights|8
MipMaps|1
Display Depth|32
Display Height|1024
Visible Damage|3
LOD Skip|0
Display Width|1280
Fullscreen Mode|0
Effect Detail|3
- Save, start the game.
This *should* allow you to bypass the render error, at which point you should have a game that starts as a 1280x1024 window (which is acceptable if your screen is 1080p). Replace 1280 with 1600 and 1024 with 1200 if your screen is 4k.
The main issue with this is that you may want to manually change your resolution to the one you selected before you start the game, because its window will only take up part of the screen - which works, but is ugly and distracting when you can still see the browser window, or the Galaxy window, or whatever.
HTH.
