I've tried turning graphics from maxed to everything minimal and with "auto mipmapping" off but noticed anything above minimal and settings would change themselves back-n-forth in-game. Is this framerate controlled?
Also in MP play, screen resolution would default to my card's maximum setting, not the lower setting I set for SP.
System Specs: WinXP, 650MHZ Pent. III, 512 RAM, GeForce FX 5200 w/ 128MB RAM, SB Audigy Gamer, playing on DSL connection
1.3pb1 on fresh install.
MP framerates have been mostly in the 30fps range on my machine if that info helps.
Is self-adjusting graphics a new feature or bug? If it's a feature can it be turned off or tamed a bit? Now you see it, now you don't can be distracting.
Thanks 1.3 Beta Team!
Yes, those are framerate-controlled and is a new feature. Its purpose, as you have guessed, is to adjust graphics so that the game stays at a decent framerate range. Most of that is tweakable. Find the file GamePrefs.ini in the \addon\config subdirectory. Read up on it. The multiplayer fps tweaks is found under "video system stuff." I'm sure someone else from the team will add a reply.
Yes it is a very intelligent feature designed to minimise
graphics in order to improve FPS during online play.
If one comp in a game gets very low FPS it will lagg
the other players in the same game, a bad thing.
Unfortunately it get very confused with the user's normal
chosen settings and fails to reset to those settings when
FPS are good again.
If it worked well it would be genius, just needs fixing that's all.
My advice is to bear with it until the next 1.3 beta.
Maybe then it will be a less aggressive feature which also
remembers and resets to the user's preferences when not
needed.
Thanks for the heads up on this new feature. I'm sure with some tweaking, like remember my default settings, I could get used to it for the sake of a better running strat.
Thanks 1.3 Beta Team
You can only turn this feature on and off with regard to single player; for multiplayer, it will always be enabled. As was said, the idea was to keep someone from going into single digit framerates, which is a sure way to get a multitude of resynchs and eventually bring a multiplayer game to its knees.
If you already set your graphics options to lower settings, you'll see less activity from the autoadjusting when playing online. You can also experiment with the gameprefs settings so this can be optimized. This is something I'm interested in spending some more time with myself. I'd like to look at two criteria: which settings make the most difference to the framerate and which settings contribute the most to the visual quality of the game. Hopefully, these can be balanced in some sort of best compromise.
Oh, and you can enable the game giving you information about what features it is turning on and off, as it is doing so.
Lights are a BIG FPS issue near a base, as is Object Detail. I haven't noticed much difference in sky, reflections, fog, or texture size, but a packed ISDF Base full of lights and spinning PS's drags me down bigtime.
After that I'd say particles combining are the next big killer. Some of the weapons stutter me bigtime when they overlap and fill the screen...
-Av-
Shadows use to kill my old comp in IA. Imagine it would really kill MP.
QuoteLights are a BIG FPS issue near a base, as is Object Detail
Lights do lower my framerates, but object detail doesn't have an effect on my framerates. The only thing lower object detail accomplishes for me is making treaded units harder to kill. This is because you can't see where the turret is aiming. Object detail and particle detail don't seem to have much of an effect on my fps, if any.
For my machine, athlon1800 at 155mhz and cheapo Gforce2 ;
Particles, while not lowering FPS overall, absolutely murder them
for short periods while things are exploding, flameing, etc.
This causes periodic lagg which might affect multiplayer.
Lights are heavy on the cpu and really lower FPS a lot.
The MAIN culprit for low FPS is resolution.
Anything above 800x gives hassle in multiplayer. Now that FPS are
visiable to the other players nobody has an excuse for high
graphics to make themselves warp more.
Sky doesn't seem to have any effect on FPS, shame the auto
feature messes with that!! Grrr. I like my Sky high so I know
what's going on when I am pointing upwards in a fight.
I have got to try Object detail in0base, see if it gives FPS
hassle when high, spinning powers etc. Good point Avatar.
Shadows are rubbish in Bz2 and murder framerates, switch them
to low or off.
Yes, auto-adjusting graphics settings are a new feature, and a good one. As BZ2 uses the CPU for its graphics output, low FPS could indictate a CPU struggling to perform its network requirements and hence the onset of lag.
Checked the gameprefs.ini this arvo, seem pretty easy to tweak to suit your particular preferences/system. If you want to keep the sky on all the time, just lower the FPS values accordingly, looks pretty self explanatory and losing some of this stuff mid game would be frustrating and jarring even though it does potentially help a lot.
I spent a little more time playing around with these settings, so in case anybody would like to try something different, here is what I'm currently using. You can delete the autoadjusting graphics section from your gameprefs.ini file and copy the following revision of it in its place.
Basically, I've made object details the last thing to go, and I've made things like reflections, fog, and weather the first things to go. I've also put the particle settings fairly high in the order of things to get dropped, but they also should be relatively fast to recover. My thinking is that this might be something that needs to come and go, fairly often, depending on the circumstances. Weather, fog, reflections, and All Lights will have a much harder time coming back on once they've been turned down. This made sense to me when I thought of how a MPI game, with its increasing number of building and units, progresses. This rationale, and these settings, should be helpful for a strat game, too, I'd think.
By the way, I tried using fractional framerates as the targets, such as 33.4, for example, but the game didn't like that at all. Though there is a .0 after each of these targets, changing that to anything other than .0 needs to be done cautiously, as I don't know if the game will accept anything but .0.
One thing that was a little confusing to me was getting a grasp of how those target framerates function. With a feature that has three settings, the framerate associated with the highest graphic setting is the framerate above which the feature can be enabled. The number associated with the lowest setting is the point at which this setting will be enabled, when the framerate drops below this target number. The target framerate associated with the middle level settings can trigger this graphic setting to be enabled when the actual framerate is either higher or lower than this target, depending on whether the current setting for this graphics feature is the lowest or the highest for this graphics feature.
For graphics features with only two settings, the higher number is the point above which framerates lead to this setting being enabled, and the lower target number is the point at which this setting is enabled, when the framerate dips below this target.
I know, clear as mud, right?. :?
__________
// Sort order for which graphical features are dropped. These numbers
// must be between 1 and 100. The values in a sequence (e.g. SkyOff ->
// SkyLow -> SkyHigh) must be in increasing order. Entries in
// different sequences may have the same value. Lowest priority items
// (whose FPS matches) will be disabled. If nothing is disabled for a
// period, then it checks for things to enable, highest priority to
// lowest priority (whose FPS matches)
ObjsLow = 27
ObjsMed = 26
ObjsHigh = 25
LightsNone = 24
TerrainLow = 23
SkyNone = 22
PropsNone = 21
ShadowOff = 20
LightsOne = 19
TerrainMed = 18
SkyLow = 17
ShadowMed = 16
PropsMed = 15
SkyHigh = 14
TerrainHigh = 13
PropsHigh = 12
ParticleLow = 11
ParticleMed = 10
ParticleHigh = 9
ReflectionsOff = 8
LocalFogOff = 7
WeatherOff = 6
LightsAll = 5
ReflectionsOn = 4
LocalFogOn = 3
WeatherOn = 2
ShadowHigh = 1
// Framerate target for the above functions. These values must be
// between 15 and 999. There must be a spacing of at least 6 between
// sequenced values, e.g. SkyOff -> SkyLow -> SkyHigh. If the
// framerate is below than the value, it'll be applied. If above the
// value, and this is the top entry in the sequence, the feature will
// be applied.
LightsNoneFPS = 22.0
LightsOneFPS = 28.0
LightsAllFPS = 70.0
LocalFogOffFPS = 42.0
LocalFogOnFPS = 73.0
ObjsLowFPS = 15.0
ObjsMedFPS = 21.0
ObjsHighFPS = 27.0 // People like this, so make it show back up first
ParticleLowFPS = 34.0
ParticleMedFPS = 40.0
ParticleHighFPS = 46.0
PropsNoneFPS = 25.0
PropsMedFPS = 33.0
PropsHighFPS = 39.0
ReflectionsOffFPS = 41.0
ReflectionsOnFPS = 72.0
ShadowOffFPS = 26.0
ShadowMedFPS = 32.0
ShadowHighFPS = 260.0 // buggy for most, so never enable (unless you want it to)
SkyNoneFPS = 24.0
SkyLowFPS = 30.0
SkyHighFPS = 36.0
TerrainLowFPS = 23.0
TerrainMedFPS = 29.0
TerrainHighFPS = 37.0
WeatherOffFPS = 65.0
WeatherOnFPS = 74.0