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Calling all tweaks!

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Private_Joker

Grizzled Veteran
Jun 20, 2009
107
40
#1
First, SUPER PRAISES to the Unreal game engine. It's pretty, and fast enough to render hoards of zeds and gore, yet variable enough to run KF on....get this...
MOBILITY RADEON 7500
with a grand total of
32 MB VIDEO RAM
at an average of 24 FPS!
..and this means I can play KF on my crappy old IBM ThinkPad. Amazing.

Anyway, I'd like to make this effort not only a way for me to waste more time at work, but a project to bring KF to all those poor in graphics hardware, with no place to put their tiny e-peens!

I spent ages trying to tweak the Source engine down so that my processor-power-deprived friends could play HL2DM with me, but no luck. The Unreal engine seems to be much more cooperative, but I've only just started by cranking down all the in-game settings.

So here's what I'd like from the community: tips and tweaks to lower graphics quality to their bare minimum low, way beyond the point of any kind of visual aesthetic good, just to where there is only the functionality necessary to play and enjoy popping the heads off clots. These usually come in the form of console commands or .ini edits, so, let me hear them please!

-Joker
 
#3
Oh geeze...you're asking for graphical DOWNGRADES in the game? I used to know a ton (Had to for lan'ing with buddies that had crap PCs in Unreal Tourney 2k4!), but it's been a few years.

Most of what you'll find will be .ini tweaks, but I don't remember any at the moment. I'd say that if anyone is looking to up performance, just setting everything to LOW will get it to run at a solid framerate on any computer with more than 32 mb of ram and a halfway-decent graphics card...
 
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#4
Nanostrike said:
just setting everything to LOW will get it to run at a solid framerate on any computer with more than 32 mb of ram and a halfway-decent graphics card...
Click to expand...
No. Not much more to say to that other than No.:p

There really isn't much more you can tweak in the .ini to squeeze out more performance. You can disable pre-caching to decrease load-times but that doesn't really help performance. The only thing that might be worth trying is setting the resolution below the minimum the menu allows.
Or switching to an older renderer if the gpu has a problem with certain D3D9 functionality. Other than that the display options in the game's menu encompass pretty much everything useful.

If you are playing offline and you don't care for graphics AT ALL you can use the rmode # commands to switch to different views of the level. E.g. rmode 1 enables wireframe view which gives a huge framerate boost if you don't have enough VRa;, rmode 6 is the unlit view and rmode 5 returns to the regular view. Unless you are a mapper and you are checking something out I really don't recommend doing this, but for experimental reasons it might be worth trying for you.
 
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#5
Murphy said:
If you are playing offline and you don't care for graphics AT ALL you can use the rmode # commands to switch to different views of the level. E.g. rmode 1 enables wireframe view which gives a huge framerate boost if you don't have enough VRa;, rmode 6 is the unlit view and rmode 5 returns to the regular view. Unless you are a mapper and you are checking something out I really don't recommend doing this, but for experimental reasons it might be worth trying for you.
Click to expand...

That sounds like it might help...where can I read up on these more? What do modes 2-4 do? Do I need to play offline? Is that because it'll count me as cheating with tweaks that heavy?

Besides that, I'm thinking of other ways to reduce the vid memory load--can I reduce gore level client-side? There's a command something like "bLowGore" but is that only for servers? Also, what's the variable to define how long ragdoll corpses stay?

-Joker
 
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#6
The modes are parallel to their order of appearance from left to right over a viewport in UnrealEd. And yes, they count as cheats online.

I don't know if you can reduce gore. It has to be set up to reducable (what is going to be disabled when it's set to reduced?) and since there is currently only one version of KF and it lacks that option the setting in the .ini might be a left-over from KF-mod or RO. I haven't tried it though so just try and see if it does anything.

You can try deleting the Karma folder. I don't know if KF automatically downloads it again when you start it up (since it's steam and all) but in UT2004 you could delete the folder and then bodies would just dissapear at the moment of death. Might help a weak cpu out a bit.

Disabling sounds and music could give a minimal performance boost too.
 
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#7
Start a botmatch, open the console, and type "preferences", now you will be greeted with a pop-up screen where you can tweak rendering and audio settings to your hearts content.

For laptop use, you may wish to lower the mixing rate of the audio a bit (most laptops lack RAM for the audio, which can cause micro stutters when loading new sounds), but for the real perfomrance gain, you will want to tweak the settings of the Render you are using (this will most likely be D3D Render), basically, just play around with stuff and see what happens, but if you google around a bit, you can find tweak guides that tell you more about the options (thease would be written for UT2004, but should apply to KF just as well as it is the same engine).


Technically, you could do this from the .ini files aswell, but having it in a nice GUI where everything is sorted, and you can see the effects on the game emediately (just exit the "preferences" menu and you should be back ingame with your tweaks activated), is very nice indeed, so the "preferences" command is the way to go ;)
 
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#10
Ohhhh boy. Grobut, that Preferences menu is the kind of technical stuff that shows up in my dirty dreams some nights....thanks much for that.

I love tweaking! Fact is, I don't mean to lower my graphics settings to absoloute lowest, but I just want to know every way they can be changed so that I can find the perfect compromise for any grade computer hardware--that way all my friends can play with all the graphical quality they want!

Like with me, I care about two things in graphics--high framerates, and detailed textures. I don't care much for shiny things, fancy lights, or anything else. I like a solid, minimalist world in which to kill ****. I optimize all my games just for that, and I like to be able to do it for my friends and their crappy comps, too.

-Joker
 
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#11
Grobut said:
"HighDetailActors", "SuperHighDetailActors"
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That's nothing else than the World Detail setting in the game's regular menu. Low World Detail means High and SuperHighDetailActors are hidden, Medium World Detail means HighDetailActors are shown but the SuperHigh ones are hidden and High World Detail shows both, of course.
Mappers can decide what an actor counts as. E.g. you can make your huge rain emitter HighDetail so players who set World Detail to Low because they are struggling for frames can disable it with that.

Grobut said:
"LowQualityTerrain"
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What's this?

The rest is in the regular menu too or can be forced in the driver options.

Private_Joker said:
I care about two things in graphics--high framerates, and detailed textures. I don't care much for shiny things, fancy lights, or anything else.
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Your loss and all, but this strikes me as an odd attitude. You are basically saying, I like Picasso but I disable the blue things.
I mean, I can see how you would want to disable things to get better framerates. But why do you care for detailed textures but not for the rest of the painting the artist painted, so to speak? Seems a bit arbitrary to me.
E.g. BioticsLab! The stairway with the flickering green light shining through the fence and casting fine shadows on the opposite walls. That's some serious eye-candy. Why would you want the wall and fence to look sharp but not care for the fancy shadows, the flickering light effect and the electro-effect? It's all part of the atmosphere.

I can understand how you would disable special-effects you just don't agree with. E.g. if a game has seriously overdone bloom I turn it down or off. I can also understand how you would disable things if you are struggling for frames and you prioritize, of course (e.g. you start with turning down player shadows because they are a resource-hog in most semi-older games) but why do you want your textures and disable everything else?

Not to bash you (at all). Everyone should configure the game as he likes to play it (within reasonable limits that cannot be considered cheating). As a self-proclaimed artist I'm just interested in why you feel that way.
 
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#13
Murphy said:
Not to bash you (at all). Everyone should configure the game as he likes to play it (within reasonable limits that cannot be considered cheating). As a self-proclaimed artist I'm just interested in why you feel that way.
Click to expand...

I'd hate anyone to think I don't appreciate art, but try this attitude on:

Art takes many forms, of which visual aesthetic is only one. If Killing Floor were a rendering program that created a 3D world I could move around and look at, I would allow all the sppecial rending and love it. I do sometimes, even--In CS: Source I spent some time running around de_inferno alone in a listenserver just to look at the flowers.

HOWEVER, First-Person Shooters are a type of art that is separate from, and has no necessary connection to visual aesthetic. To me, the art of FPS is in the gameplay, the action, the challenge, and all that. Concordantly, I configure everything about my gaming experience to support the apprecietion of the art in this sense--this includes the sound, the graphics, and the people I play with.

This is why I love having the freedom to configure a game how I need. So many games now are all about pretty details that are just wasted because I'm too busy moving so fast that everything's a blur. Great graphics only work really well in slow-paced games like RPG and RTS, neither of which I play.

-Joker
 
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#14
Zetsumei said:
Things that can help you.

Disable precaching (in the red orchestra section look for a sticky how to decrease loading times follow that)
Click to expand...

This is a good one in general if you don't have a huge amount of RAM and a lightning fast processor. Without disabling precaching, I'd have an almost 30-second load time between levels, minimum. With precaching off, it's down to around 4-5 seconds, with a slight 2-3 second pause once the level starts as it loads everything 'on the fly'.
 
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#15
I have a specific request. I want to know how to disable teh shiny, shown here on Offices rooftop:

shot00000myu.jpg




Seems like disabling such reflective renderings might save some GPU time. Anyone know which setting changes this?

-Joker
 
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