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Ok, so after much frustration, learning a lot more than I wanted to know, and a lot of time tweaking, deleting, cache-clearing, saving, loading, reloading, searching forums, and rebooting, I think this is widely concerning the FPSC user community to warrant an official in-depth instruction for solving problems in the setup.ini.

It seems like people's most common issue is editing screen resolution.
The standard recommendation seems to be to make sure to close FPSC when making change to setup.ini.
But, the problem will reoccur because the change gets overwritten even if FPSC is closed.

Well, in my situation, there is a correct combination of lightmapping and advanced shading that looks perfect for the game(s) that I would like to create. I have created this appearance and recreated this appearance flawlessly a few times. But, when something happens that the settings gets changed, and I do not know what caused this, but it is nearly impossible to find a combination of events to correct the issue or get the right settings.

For me, I want to light and shade entities with nice ambient lighting and 3d shading without the extra post-process blur/shade/haze thing. Fog, shading, lighting, and reflective special effects were all working cohesively.

But, the preferences seem to overwrite the correct combination. There are more light map and shade options than there are preference combinations, and the combinations overwrite setup.ini even if the program is closed. In fact, deleting temp, using FPSCCleaner, rebooting, trying to save setup.init quickly during the process, etc. Somewhere in there, along with memorizing the right combination of control options, something works... it isn't a graphic card or drawing routine issue- or I would never have seen all the right options take place.

Just to rule out any other debugging stuff, I've tried with absolutely nothing booted, with lots of sound and graphic-type programs running in the background (I usually have wavelab and photoshop running in the background to edit the scene I am rendering, and this has been fine for the most part other than getting all visualizations at once- which is elusive until all prefs are tickable inside the program, save, and render.

Now, one person mentioned that perhaps the right combo only gets rendered in the build game, and then that is editable. Well, maybe that is the case- if that answers things that is awesome! Except, I have seen it work right in test mode. In fact, for hours on 3 separate occasions it was right in test mode. So, hmmm... again a little official support thread for getting settings that work- would save a few dozen people a lot of time I think.

Whatever the resolution is, it makes for a beautiful looking game!

If you don't want any of the post processing stuff to run, just find the postprocessing entry in your final build's setup.ini and set it to zero. I do this in all of my games because the postprocessing slows everything down and (in my opinion at least) doesn't look as good as it does when it's not running those things. I know all I have to do is futz with the parameters in the fx files, but meh... I'd rather have the performance than the eye candy.

As for test games, I keep lightmapping and shaders completely off so it builds and runs faster. When testing the level, I'm not interested in looks, I'm interested in finding and fixing any bugs quickly. This is done in the preferences menu and affects only the test game, not your final builds. Once I have the level geometry and entities/AI to my liking, then I turn lightmapping on (best for performance setting) and add the lights. Once I'm happy with the lightmapping I do a test build with full lightmaps and shaders, set postprocessing to zero and see how it behaves as a standalone game. Once I have the level where I want it using that method, then it's done and I'm off to build the next level. It's a tedious and time consuming process but it gets the job done.

It would be nice if someone could chime in and let us know if there's a way to keep postprocessing set to zero so we don't have to keep fiddling with it manually. It might be as simple as fiddling with one of the settings in the build game dialog somewhere, but it's not readily apparent to me where to specify that if so.

If nothing else, next time you happen to find the right combination in your final build that gives you the look you want, simply copy that setup.ini to another location and then you'll have a template that you can use to manually tweak future builds more easily. I've done that before as well as there's a few other settings I've tinkered with that I have already forgotten about but may want to use in the future.

You may find this application useful. The source code has been released and is available in the thread.

Ohh, very nice JRH! I missed that one - thanks!