How to speed up the game

[Neotyguy40]

Ok, I used this to fix up a glitch on my comp where the terrain stretched and disappeared. But when I tried this on my other comp, my fps went up by 30! It is really effective...

Well, what I did was added this to my main.cs file:

$pref::OpenGL::disableEXTCompiledVertexArray = "1";
$pref::TS::UseTriangles = "1";

I am asking the developers to compile this into the main.cs.dso file, it will speed up the game fairly well, and I believe many will be happy with it.

[elecjester]

when you write something like this - you really should be abit more responsible and write it out a little more clearly for people, with things such as:

a) what to open the main.cs file with
b) where the main.cs file is
c) where in the main.cs file to insert this string
d) reminded to make backups before doing anything


things of this nature - else it causes problems with people that have no idea what they are doing.

Other than that, it's always nice to see tips for increased FPS

Cheers

[Pat2]

I would like to know the specific steps involved, since I'm not a programmer. In fact, I have serious problems making a four line macro.

Pat

[Neotyguy40]

Woops, sorry about that. I was just going to ask the developers if they could add it to the compiled file.

Anyway, here are the steps involved to put it in main.cs:

1. Open the folder where the launcher, the game, and the main.cs file is.
2. Open main.cs with any text editor:

Good text editors:

TextEdit
Notepad

Bad text editors:

Wordpad
MS word

3. Now you should see a window that opened the file's contents, and inside it should look a bit something like this at the beginning:

$defaultGame = "main";
$displayHelp = false;

4. Now under that, put this in:

$pref::OpenGL::disableEXTCompiledVertexArray = "1";
$pref::TS::UseTriangles = "1";

5. Restart your game. And make sure there are NO TYPOS, otherwise you will get an error.

NOTE: I am not sure how this will act on other computers, so don't blame me if anything happens.

What does this do? Well the first line would take a while to explain, but the second one is easy. Crowns of Power uses Torque Game Engine from GarageGames, and they have a terrain system that uses polygons. As a default, it sets random terrain as triangles, and some as other shapes. This makes ALL the terrain use triangles, which speed up the game when loading the terrain.

EDIT: I found another way to speed up the game.

For some reason, that code sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't (I'm looking into the bugs now, but I know it would work if it was compiled).

Anyway, if you open the console (~ key) and then type:

$pref::OpenGL::disableEXTCompiledVertexArray = "1"; $pref::TS::UseTriangles = "1";

It will work no matter what. Pretty useful if you ask me, my fps went up 30 frames now.

[tripp]

anyone know where i can find this main.cs file in windows vista. the only main.cs file ive found does not have $defaultGame = "main";
$displayHelp = false; anywhere in the file :( ive looked in all the folders in the cop folder and nothing :/

sai

[Dunsany]

Ok, I used this to fix up a glitch on my comp where the terrain stretched and disappeared. But when I tried this on my other comp, my fps went up by 30! It is really effective...

Well, what I did was added this to my main.cs file:

$pref::OpenGL::disableEXTCompiledVertexArray = "1";
$pref::TS::UseTriangles = "1";

I am asking the developers to compile this into the main.cs.dso file, it will speed up the game fairly well, and I believe many will be happy with it.

I posted the following suggestion about changing user client preferences like the above and others in the CoP General Discussion forum. Seems like a good idea repost it here in the Contributions forum.

...

It's a bit simpler and possibly safer to edit the client preferences file directly. On my computer running Windows XP Pro the file is located at:

C:\Program Files\Crowns of Power\main\client\prefs.cs

Most client and user preferences will end up there anyway. If you mess it up too badly you can delete the file and the game engine will write a new one as if you were playing the game for the first time. If you mess up a single preference you can comment it out with a double forward slash, //, in front of the $pref, or delete the entire line, and the game engine will rewrite the line with some default value if it has one.

I doubt Rampid would consider changing a few user preferences with a text editor to be hacking their client but they might consider it to be a support nightmare if people start making uninformed changes that seem to work on one user's system but perform poorly on another user's system.

With all that said, looking at my client\prefs.cs file some things that come to mind are:

$pref::Audio::driver = "OpenAL";
Try changing "OpenAL" to "none" to turn off sound if you're tired of hearing the rickrollers.

$pref::OpenGL::gammaCorrection = "0.5";
Try changing "0.5" up or down a bit to change the brightness in game if areas are too dark or light.

$pref::Video::resolution = "800 600 32";
Try changing this if you like to play in windowed mode but the default window size is a lot smaller than your desktop. For example, my desktop is 1024 x 768 but the largest window CoP will let me set is 800 x 600. Changing "800 600 32" to "900 675 32" seems to work fine but I'm going to make it a bit bigger so the window fills almost the entire screen.

P.S. I was going to add some more preferences to experiment with that might directly affect video performance but I'll leave that to the brave and/or foolhardy.

P.P.S. You can use Ctrl N in game to open a network graph window that has some useful info about your client's connection to Rampid's game server. Might help to identify what causes some of the lag so many seem to experience.

[Neotyguy40]

Ohh thanks!