...aaaand, I still can't play it after 0.5.1.1.
LENGHTY EDIT: Since I, like any other red-blooded Serbian person, am relentless and furious and can't take a hint even when I've taken a beating, I fiddled with config file a bit in order to get you and me some god damned test results. Here's what happened after fiddling with these values (bolded):
PerfIndex = 3.02
Volume = 100
Supersample = 1
ShadingQuality = 1
TextureDetail = 3
TextureQuality = 5
ShadowDetail = 1
ShadowQuality = 1
HWMultisample = 0
Fullscreen = 1
Music = 1
ShowFPS = 0
ShowGameTips = 0
Checkpoints = 0
CamFollow = 0
VerticalSync = 0
FirstRun = 0
Since I'm suspecting my old video card is to blame, I've tried to lower shading and shadows to 0, and then to 1.
Lowering everything to 0 produces this:
http://i.imgur.com/RhcyVgi.png
- no shadows at all, but it's completely unplayable. No user interface error messages on startup screen, either. Didn't try to leave the room, since I wanted to pick up the torch and walk with it.
Raising ShadowDetail to 1 and leaving ShadowQuality and ShadingQuality at 0 produced this:
http://i.imgur.com/PeCLemP.png
http://i.imgur.com/RXj4fOa.png
- rectangular shadows. I tried to leave the room via the dreaded door and immediately the screen went black, with no error messages, which forced me to Alt+F4 it. When I reloaded the game, however, I found myself in the hallway crossroad, and I observed the square shadows with pleasure for several seconds... until this:
http://i.imgur.com/g74YHwW.png
Yep, the party pooping error message. In a last attempt to try something else, I even disabled the ShowGameTips (default value is 1, I took it to 0), while raising all shadow/shading values to 1 to see if that produced anything significant but on game relaunch once again error messages appeared after several seconds.
Config file default values (for me, atleast) are:
PerfIndex = 3.02
Volume = 100
Supersample = 1
ShadingQuality = 5
TextureDetail = 3
TextureQuality = 5
ShadowDetail = 5
ShadowQuality = 4
HWMultisample = 0
Fullscreen = 1
Music = 1
ShowFPS = 0
ShowGameTips = 1
Checkpoints = 0
CamFollow = 0
VerticalSync = 0
FirstRun = 0
Note that with these, the error message window(s) (plural, as soon as I close one, another pops up and so on, and so on...) would appear MUCH faster, right after the starting screen appears after Bare Mettle logo. This time, with lowered values, I haven't had them that early, but the starts creen still ended up looking like this:
http://i.imgur.com/MwdIZBy.png
At this point, I'm resigned and not expecting to either be able to play Exanima or SG, but at least this may provide some insight to devs about performance on low-end systems with ATI/AMD videocards.
And then I fired up Arena... well, it's elementary school all over again! Thanks man!
