Planeshift Setup Program

[provisionist1]

Hello, I was hoping one of the very tech-savvy people could explain a few of the advanced options in the pssetup program. I searched for a guide to all of this but couldn't find anything.



Ok, could someone explain the Advanced Options and Quality / Speed Options sections to me? Some of the things I think I know what they do, but am not 100% sure about.

Cheers,

Xirius

Edit: Anybody? I'm just trying to up the fps that I get, I figure tinkering with these will help

[Karyuu]

I had to hunt down the answers :]

Vertex buffering is an OpenGL feature that stores mesh data internally rather than requiring the program to send it across the gl pipeline each time it is drawn.

Stencil Threshold may correspond to the gl stencil buffer range. It's probally used for shadow projection, and higher values may mean more accurate shadows over complex geometry or several overlapping shadows. Not 100% sure.

Hopefully someone else will come in and fill in the rest of the blanks and/or make corrections.

[Fafire]

It would be helpful if the program had pre-sets built in, as many games do ('High Quality', 'High Speed' etc.)

The advantage to keeping all maps loaded is that it saves having to wait every time you pass from one map to another, of course, but it will mean a performance hit since all the maps need to be stored in memory. Keep it off.

Multisampling (Antialising) refers to the graphics card rounding off jagged images by rendering polygons more than once or something like that. It is a big deal for lower end cards, and really old ones can't  handle it at all. If you want to raise fps, keep it at 0 or a low number. (The higher the number, the more passes the graphics card has to make). Don't check 'multisample for quality'.

I am not quite sure what texture downsampling is, but from the name it suggests to me that a texture of say, 160x160, is reduced to half, quarter or whatever. This means that the textures (the 'paint' on the polygons, like bricks, faces of characters) etc. will look worse - less detailed, more blurry. But, you will save a lot of memory in both loading them, and it will require less of your system to render them thus resulting, I think (someone will correct me if I'm hideously wrong) in a performance boost.

If fps is a real problem, there's nothing quite like reducing screen resolution and color depth, but please check other forum posts (possibly in the problems in game list) because I understand that the CS engine is particularly bad: this from the sticky on there ('known fixes'):

Here are a few things you can do to help your system handle problems on your side:

    * Update the game and your graphics card drivers.
    * Don't use 16-bit color depth.  CS just doesn't work well with it.
    * Try enabling the adaptive distance feature in the options menu. It'll try and maintain a framerate by not rendering farther away objects.
    * Try lowering the graphics settings in lower right of the setup application.
    * You can always try lowering the game's resolution in the setup.  If you can't play with 800x600 or even (the horrid) 640x480, and you've tried everything else, ask for help.

See here: http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=21503.0

Good luck!

[provisionist1]

Many many thanks for looking those up Karyuu and many thanks to you Fafire as well. I will try a few of those things. I did for a while play at 16-bit thinking it would be faster (fewer colours, seems to make sense), then realised that my graphics card was designed to run at 32 and it was taking extra processing steps to run at 16. I try to run at no less than 1024x768, it's the last thing I would sacrifice, and I always turn on adaptive distance in Hydlaa plaza. The thing is though, although at adaptive distance it runs more smoothly, it jerks every time it loads a new graphics chunk, so I am not sure adaptive distance really helps that much. Also really depends on how many people are in Hydlaa plaza at the time... sometimes (well, very occasionally) it runs almost perfect.

Still don't know what Anisotropy filtering is, the definition is unequal relating to direction, but I have no idea what that could mean in terms of graphics rendering. Hmmm,

Well thanks for your help, I will try experimenting. Maybe once all these options are fully defined, a sticky thread guide to the setup program should be made on the technical help forum?

Cheers,

Xirius

[sesmi]

YAy a fellow mac user. and i've had mulisample for quality checked since i first downloaded the game what does it do?