Steam Aftermath: Beyond Good and Evil

When Ubisoft originally released Beyond Good and Evil (BG&E) for the PC the most recent Windows OS available was Windows XP, and the game could even run under Windows 98SE (yes that old DOS based relic). Oddly enough the game recommended Windows 2000, which most people see as a business OS.

Anyway, I digress. Many people recently bought BG&E for the PC recently through Steam, and I'm sure many of them are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 and have noticed some severe graphical flaws. In my game when I first started the main protagonist Jade had her eyes floating a foot in front of her face, the menus were filled with flickering and buggy text, and a large variety of textures would be flickering and glitchy.

So how do we fix these issues? Normally these could be solved by changing the Compatability setting, but as most people bought this on Steam this is not an option.

First, navigate to your game folder, it will be in Program Files\Steam\Steamapps\Common\Beyond Good and Evil)

Second, run SettingsApplication.exe. Click the Advanced Tab.

Now, on the Advanced Tab are many settings to play around with. On my desktop I was able to keep all the sliders to the right side of their respective lines with no graphical problems, but my less powerful laptop glitched severely in any location with a lot of water. Depending on your in game experience you may want to turn this down.

The thing we are more interested in to fix the texture glitches are the checkboxes to the right. HW Vertex Processing, Tripple Buffering, and Fastflip were all in some way responsible for the texture flicker issues and weird effects I saw in game. I'd recommend turning them off as everything else seems to run fine.

There will still be some issues, the moon will still flicker slightly, but now the game should be completely playable. If not your individual hardware configuration may require some more tinkering with the settings, but the ones I mentioned above are the ones that seem to be the most troublesome for most hardware configurations.

Now there is one other issue to attend to, and it may or may not be worth it for you to fix. The audio in game (cut-scenes mainly) can become desynchronized, sometimes laughably so. This is caused by the audio timing being tied to your CPU clock speed. Most CPUs these days have multiple cores, which is one of the reason the audio gets de-synched.

To make BG&E use only one core start the game and then start Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL). In the Processes Tab in Task Manager look for BGE.exe. Right-click it and select Set Affinity. This setting tells windows which CPU cores BGE.exe can use. Remove the checkmark for all of the Cores except CPU0. This will force BG&E to only use one core of your CPU.

While using only one core will help with the audio de-sync a little another safety feature of your CPU is possibly at fault as well. To help control it's temperature your CPU will slow down or speedup depending on how much work it's currently doing. Since the audio in the game is tied to your CPUs speed this will also cause it to de-sync. I wouldn't recommend changing this setting, but if you feel you need to in order to enjoy the game please consult your motherboard manual to find out how to access your BIOS settings and see how to change this setting (for AMD Processors this is called "Cool 'n' Quiet" or "PowerNow", for Intel this setting is called "Speedstep".)

You are now all set to enjoy Beyond Good and Evil on your new OS.