Stupidly low graphics settings

[Posts]

I'm not talking about the usual small performance gains, i'm talking about a level that most of you couldn't stand that would enormously boost performance.

using unit sprites all the time, don't even load models/textures, no animations

a option to not render projectiles at all

this isn't just about increasing FPS(so that i don't have 0.3 FPS), its about decreasing RAM + CPU usage as well.

Mr geforce 9000 might be scratching his head, but i'm just a spectator on a old laptop, who likes to alt tab. even when your on a fast machine you may want to use your system resources for other things

[Hoi]

put everything as low as possible, that includes unit icon distance.

[Posts]

i'm aware of this, i want to go lower, touching things that usually never get touched, so low that it wouldn't be a gui option because developers wouldn't want to confuse users, it would a something like a command line parameter

this isn't just about lowering things, or even lowering them to 0, but total removal, for example not loading textures.

[Argh]

You can pretty much do what you want, as long as you don't have unrealistic expectations. Reading your post, I have a feeling that you're expecting to turn everything down to minimal levels... and have it be pretty. It won't be, but it will work.

Set all of the sliders to their lowest levels, in Expert Mode in SpringSettings on the Render Details tab. On the Render Quality tab, turn every checkbox OFF except for "Use PixelBuffer Objects"(if you have a 7-series nVidia GPU or up, that gives a big performance jump) and "Compress textures"(all GPUs should support that). Lastly, set the number of sounds on the Audio tab to zero, and then turn sound OFF in Spring while playing. Sounds eat quite a lot of CPU.

Lastly... you can lower the texture values, to use lower mips.

Change value HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/SJ/Spring/TextureLODBias to something less than 0. Be warned, this will probably cause Bad Things to Happen.

At any rate, that's what you can do, if you want to go to a completely minimal level of CPU/GPU use.

However, you may not alter the RAM footprint much at all.

Spring uses a lazy-load system for most resources. Maps are, by and large, the largest use of RAM IIRC, because they have to have a large amount of data constantly loaded into memory and ready to go.

Then you have sounds, music, unit skins, Lua GUI elements, etc., which have a static RAM footprint- you can't dynamically change their quality, etc., and I don't believe any of them get dropped from RAM even if you turn sounds off.

So, you can make things look really "minimalistic Icon Wars", but very low on CPU/GPU, but you will not be able to mess with RAM much. Sorry, the engine just doesn't work that way.

[FLOZi]

Reading your post, I have a feeling that you're expecting to turn everything down to minimal levels... and have it be pretty.

I really don't see how you can get that from his posts, he even suggests not rendering textures, it's pretty clear that visual impact is not the priority here.

[Cremuss]

Yep, It could be cool to do something like the r_picmic setting in quake3. No textures, just colors, low detailed model etc...
Actually I can't play spring on my laptop (GMA X3100 huhu) even with all settings set to low ^^

[AF]

No reason why we cant have fast and pretty, you dont need gpu horsepower to make something look pretty, just a little human ingenuity and aesthetic taste.

If someone could look into making the map loading have an option not to bother with textures or detail textures then that would be a help. This has bene done before though. Once someone made a patch that turned the map into a wireframe but the patch was rejected sadly because the feature was deemed 'unnecessary'

[Tobi]

Also the patch was crap. (reversed patch and what not)

[REVENGE]

You basically want Sup Com's (outline? topography?) view or whatever it's called. And yes, the game can still look decent and stylish without models or textures.