This is really annoying and has happened to several games I've gotten, but this one I actually paid a lot for, so I really want it to work!

When I run the game, it says there's a scan rate error so the monitor can't even display anything (the message is in the monitor itself). Usually it's a resolution problem, but in this case it's the refresh rate. It says something like 192.7 / 170 (implying the larger number is the fps it's trying to do and the smaller number is the maximum allowed by the monitor).

Anyway, I usually look for a settings file, and failing that, go into the Windows registry to change variables. For this game though, I can't find any settings file, and I can't find it in the registry either.

I do hear sound while it's running though so I know the game is working.

How do I fix this? And why does GOG insist on giving the games default settings that are so far beyond what a monitor can support that they don't run? It should be something like 800x600x60fps by default, then a user could change it manually, but I can't even get to the point where it will let me change it!!!

(Also, see my post about The Fall - I'm having a similar problem with that one as well, but no one's told me anything useful :-/ ).

You can find game.cfg inside
C:\Users\[your profile]\Saved Games\Lichdom Battlemage

still i see no problem with non std resolutions.


ps. If you are having problems like that, you might have improper values in your reg/driver... that are faulting into those.

You're telling me that they actually keep the resolution/refresh rate setting inside the saved games folder?! That's very strange.

Regardless, I don't even have a Lichdom Battlemage folder inside my SavedGames folder (I just checked). This is not surprising, since I haven't saved any games, because I haven't even been able to play it once!

Isn't there anywhere else that a setting is stored for refresh rate?

what gpu do you have? What kind of monitor (if monitor i guess its a tv)
You need to set what are your available working resolutions.

(*you may be able to do it from your drivers)

and also you can create folder Lichdom Battlemage and create a cfg file inside with content.

game.cfg

r_Fullscreen=0
r_FullscreenWindow=1

This will run game in windowed mode, and will allow you to set whatever etc and create rest.

(don't forget this is cryengine game, you can put anything in config that is standard with cryengine.)

I also recommend adding

g_skipIntro=1
r_FullscreenPreemption=1

btw.
You should be able to create custom resolution in your driver control panel.

I have a Sony LCD 17 inch (I think) monitor with max res 1280x1024, 9 years old but it should work fine.

I don't think the problem is resolution (horizontal/vertical granularity) but rather refresh rate (number of frames per second the monitor can display).

I've set up a "game.cfg" file in a "Lichdom Battlemage" folder in the saved games folder you specified. I put 3 lines in it (all but the skip intro one, because I want to see the intro), and I get the same error.

It says "192. 7kHz / 170hz". Note the space between "." and "7". I don't know why that's there. Also note the "kHz" after the first number and "hz" after the second. This implies that it's trying to run at several kilohertz!!!

How could I create a custom resolution anyway, since the monitor only supports specific ones? Not that I think it would do any good.

I screwed with this some more and it finally works!

You do realize that GOG is not the developer or publisher of this game right? This is a bug in the game, not something GOG has done, they just sell the game not program it. Nonetheless, unlike most retail game distributors online, you can actually contact GOG technical support and they will try to help you with the problem even though it's very highly unlikely anything they've done is the cause because... they are not the developer of this game.

So what did you do? Might be helpful to others with the same problem, if you share the solution. Well, looks like it was actually a problem with the user's hardware/drivers, since it affected other games as well.

That said, it's perfectly valid to post technical problems and questions to these game sub-forums; that's one of the reasons these forums exist in first place. ( Sometimes, including for this game, the devs will even show up here and directly offer help. )

I realize GOG isn't the developer, but since I never had this problem with any games I bought anywhere else and it happens to many GOGs, I thought maybe they were customizing the files.

What I did was go into the user folder, and into /Saved Games/Lichdom Battlemage/ and edit the game.cfg file in a way that was discussed already on the forum. The first time I tried it though, the file didn't appear and when I made it, it didn't work. The second time there were a lot of files automatically created for some reason.

Those files that were generated are the shader cache and the default profile information. The step immediately before the generation of these files is setting the frame latency and creates the default game.cfg file. If that step fails it tends to lead to issues.

Try the following (these instructions are for Windows 8.1 - your steps may vary):

Right-click on your desktop and select "Screen Resolution". This will open up a window with your monitor information. Click on "Advanced settings". Select the "Monitor" tab. Here you should see a subsection called "Monitor Settings" with a dropdown box titled "Screen refresh rate:". Ensure the "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display" checkbox is ticked.

What value is set there, and what other values are you allowed to select?

I can't really check now because it's on a different computer than I'm using. But I know for a fact that on that computer I'm not able to select resolutions in Windows that my monitor doesn't support. The highest one selectable is supported.

In any case, it actually works now, but thanks for the advice.

However, I would say as a general rule of thumb, all games should have a low default resolution (like 800x600 or at most 1024x768), just so that anyone using a monitor without high-res capabilities will always be able to at least get into the game and run it, to set the res however they want.

Also, it's nice when they require a confirmation of resolution change, because that way if it times out, it switches back to the previous one, and the user doesn't get stuck in some incompatible resolution with no easy way back out.

We'll keep this in mind. Thanks for the advice!

In general, the default resolution that games use nowadays will either be the native resolution of the display as detected by the operating system via DDC, or in some cases a game may do some tests to determine the relative performance of the system and lower the resolution and 3D settings if it thinks the system is underpowered to run that way. This is a very sensible default as all video hardware has supported autodetection for over 15 years and any games coming out nowadays either wont run on hardware older than that anyway, or it is unlikely they were intended to and such cases would be a rare corner case. When the operating system hands the list of supported resolutions to the application on a silver platter it's the only sensible default. That should never ever cause anyone a problem unless the video driver has a bug, the monitor has bad EDID information (very very rare), or the software itself has a bug in which case it should default to the sane defaults and not have a bug. Bugs happen and the solution is to fix them. :)

For older games such as DOSBox titles and games that do not support the native resolution of a panel, in general it is best to choose the highest resolution that the display does support if possible. Some games come with a launcher/config tool that is used for that on first run, and DOSBox has such a tool also IIRC although I'm not sure of its capabilities. There will always be the odd old title that has problems with a particular setup due to a bug though.

It's highly unlikely that game publishers will ignore hardware autodetection and choose a fixed resolution at random on install though as there are reasons that can fail also. The hardware autodetection built into the OS is the most rock solid mechanism there is, even if occasionally a driver has a bug or a game sets something up wrong. The solution to bugs is bugfixes, not reversion to prehistoric times. :)

What's EDID?

Anyway, you may be right in general, but since it's so easy for a user to change the resolution once in the game, and it only needs to be set up initially, I don't think there's anything wrong with setting it to one that will definitely work, so then the user can set it manually. Also, a window before the game launches to set it can be convenient, and a way for it to automatically time out and revert after setting it is also good.

EDID stands for Extended Display Identification Data. Think of it like a package that the monitor sends to the video card to let it know it exists as well as what refresh rates and resolution it supports (among other things). If that information is faulty it will report incorrect or incomplete information.