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Thread for custom KFSystemSettings.ini tweaks because of the game's current state

flashn00b

Grizzled Veteran
  • Feb 1, 2011
    912
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    Because Killing Floor 2 pushed the absolute hard limits of Unreal Engine 3* with its 2016 release only to gobble up 5 years worth of content bloat, I think it might be worth it for us to share whatever INI tweaks we have so as to help people get better performance out of what i'd describe as a broken machine held together by duct tape and happy thoughts.

    To start the thread off, I think i'll post a pastebin link to what I put together


    Effects Quality is pretty much on the Low setting with Distortion enabled to allow players to still see stalker shimmers (Stalkers are completely invisible on the default low effects quality without the help of a commando). The max size of
    TEXTUREGROUP_CreatureNormalMap and TEXTUREGROUP_Creature are put at 512 since that seems to be the absolute minimum resolution required for said shimmers to even show. Any lower and the stalker's normal maps will be too low res to have an effect with the distortion shaders.

    Shadows were a pretty tricky one for me to get. Since the default low quality disables shadows entirely, I had to set it to low, quit the game and snatch whatever numbers were modified by this setting before setting the shadow quality back to Medium to re-enable them, with the INI override being the numbers i grabbed from the low setting. I haven't actually noticed a difference in shadow quality.

    And finally, the textures. Pretty much, i lowered them wherever possible in such a way where the maximum texture fidelity is more or less comparable to a 2007 Source Engine game. I would've opted for 256x256 specimen textures but see my previous issue for stalker shimmers.

    Pretty much, the settings I tweaked are based on my assumption on how low the low settings can be without putting the player at a gameplay disadvantage. What this tweak doesn't change are the screen space reflections, SSAO and FLEX settings. Those need to be adjusted manually. I'd recommend playing with the ScreenPercentage setting based on your hardware configuration, and if you're on a 1080p display and playing borderless mode, perhaps these numbers could give a meaningful guideline.

    83.84 = 900p
    66.67 = 720p
    55.55 = 600p
    50.00 = 540p
    44.45 = 480p

    I'm sure people have their own tweaks in their own quest to make this game playable, so if you're confident with your INI settings, feel free to share because they're probably better than mine.
    *an engine that released in 2006 to coincide with Gears of War's debut on the Xbox 360
     
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    What videocards are you running this config with and how many FPS are you getting while walking down the road back and forth on Burning Paris riverside plaza?

    For each texture group the ini specifies three flavors. E.g.:

    TEXTUREGROUP_World=
    TEXTUREGROUP_WorldNormalMap=
    TEXTUREGROUP_WorldSpecular=

    Do you know the difference between the three? Why do you put different values for them?
     
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    What videocards are you running this config with and how many FPS are you getting while walking down the road back and forth on Burning Paris riverside plaza?

    For each texture group the ini specifies three flavors. E.g.:

    TEXTUREGROUP_World=
    TEXTUREGROUP_WorldNormalMap=
    TEXTUREGROUP_WorldSpecular=

    Do you know the difference between the three? Why do you put different values for them?
    I am aware that normal maps give textures the illusion of depth. Speculars, I reckon are a visual detail that can DEFINITELY be cheaped out on. If my knowledge in computer graphics is correct, speculars control the visual detail on glossier objects. Personally, having the normal maps on certain objects be half the resolution of the color map actually doesn't look too bad. In fact, here's what Tom Banner Looks like with a colormap resolution of 4096 and a normal map of 2048. The chainmail is still recognizable as chainmail, though if i reduced the colormap resolution, it'd instead look like a mess of pixels put through bilinear filtering
    1622937771471.png

    As for why I've set WorldNormalMap so low, I figured that you won't be spending too much time looking at the dirt on the ground, so the normal mapping on the environment really doesn't need to be as detailed as the colormap textures
     
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