Make Splinter Cell: Double Agent playable on PC

tl;dr: I tweaked SC:DA to fix lighting and other gameplay issues. See my recommended configuration below.

Recently, I took on the task of completing the Splinter Cell games in order, in an effort to work my way up to Conviction. I manage to successfully play the first three games rather quickly but ran into a brick wall with Double Agent. Specifically, the in-game lighting effects are almost completely missing, rendering the shadow-dependent game useless. And thanks to the game’s broken video configuration menu, the overall experience is up there with Skype (read: miserable). Other issues include horrifically long start up time (intro video hell) and widescreen monitor issues.

Long start up times/intro videos/flashing screen hell

You probably noticed right off the bat the game runs poorly with the newer monitors of today and takes ages to dump you at the main menu. This is because the game is trying to switch to a horrendously low (possibly even unsupported) mode for playing the Ubisoft and “menu” introduction videos, sending the game into a frenzy. Fix for this? Ditch the videos. Replacement “null” Bink-based videos can be found on GameCopyWorld. (Hell, get the crack too. It’ll fix some DRM issues too.)

But this won’t solve the issue 100%. You need to combine a tweak your configuration file for widescreen resolutions. (See the next section.)

Widescreen support

Thankfully, the Widescreen Gaming Forum folks sussed out widescreen support. (They rate the fix a D, due to some stretching issues. This complements my overall game grade of double F quite nicely.)

Let’s start playing now… wait, WTF is up with the lighting? Yep. Keep reading.

Shadows/Lighting

Oh, finally. Lights.You probably caught on the lack of in-game lighting effects. All the “fixes” I’ve come across for this issue focused on two configuration variables in the game’s configuration file (SplinterCell4.ini): ShadowTurnOffDegree and ShadowResolutionDegree. Some folks correctly surmised that setting these values as low as possible yield the best results. That’s because, upon investigation, these values control an enumeration within the game, that probably looks like this:

enum Quality {

  Decent = 0,
  Shit,
  Shittier,
  EvenShittier,
  Ahahaha

}

So, setting these values to 0 is ideal. But if you make these changes and reload the game – nothing happens. Huh? This is where everyone gave up. Hell, even I almost gave up. But as a joke to myself, I threw the game into the debugger and noticed some values drove whether or not the shadow degree settings were used. SimpleShader and SimpleEffect.

By default, these values are set to True. Setting the game’s graphics configuration to “next generation” keeps these values at True. You want these values to read False. Setting these values to False tells the game, hey, let’s go ahead and show some advanced stuff on the screen.

Magic. You have lights and shadows now.

Other issues

I haven’t run into any other major issues but I haven’t finished the game either. Here are what I feel are important variables you need to set in the configuration file. Make sure your values match these for a better experience, period.

  • [General]
    • SimpleShader = False
    • SimpleEffect = False
  • [Graphics]
    • bEnableHDR = True
    • bTrilinearFiltering = True
    • bSpecularLighting = True
    • bHighQualityVisualFX = True
  • [Engine.GameEngine]
    • CacheSizeMegs = 128
  • [WinDrv.WindowsClient]
    • TextureDetail = High
    • SkinDetail = High
    • MinDesiredFrameRate = 0.1
    • NoDynamicLights = False
    • SkinDetail = High
    • TextureDetail = High
    • NoFractalAnim = False
  • [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
    • Translucency=True
    • UsePrecaching=True
    • UseMipmapping=True
    • UseTrilinear=True
    • UseMultitexture=True
    • UseTripleBuffering=True
    • Use32BitTextures=True
    • UseTripleBuffering=True
    • UseHWShadowMapping=True
    • ShadowResolutionDegree=0
    • ShadowTurnOffDegree=0
    • bUseSmoothShadow=True
    • FSAADegree=0
    • AnisotropyDegree=0