My Rof Settings For Sid, Friar, Painless And Anyone Else Who's Just Got The Game

[DD_Arthur]

Been promising Sid I'd go through my RoF settings for him for a couple of weeks now, so here goes;

My system is running a dual-core E8400 @ 3ghz with 8gigs of DDR3 and an Nvidia 4600gtx 756vram so as you can see it was state-of-the-art about four years ago. It is more than adequate to run RoF with pretty high settings, with a bit of fiddling and I am a bit of a tart for the eye-candy in which RoF excels. There are some caveats but I'll come to them. Luckily the RoF engine has been fairly well optimised since it's launch so it always runs very smoooothly even though, in some situations, you can get the game down to 20fps or so!

The biggest hits for me are creating a quick mission with more than twelve 'planes in the air. Because of the way the RoF engine works and controls A.I. 'planes this can give my dual-core CPU the stutters. This has never been a problem online however even with up to seventy players.

Before starting the game I always restart my pc, put a large Post-It note on my desk for the kids saying LEAVE IT! and go off and have a cigarette, empty my bladder, etc. whilst my system settles down for a few minutes. I then bring up task manager and turn off lots of unwanted processes to free up as much resources as possible. I'm not completely sure if this makes any difference but it makes me feel better. Fire up TrackIr and hit the game launcher.

As you can see, everything is on fairly high with the exception of Landscape and video memory usuage is a comfortable 34%. I do NOT use post effects here. This means I don't get the raindrops on the goggles effect when flying through cloud but in multiplayer I do get 30-35fps in cockpit on the ground and 45-60 in the air depending on height. Also, the image is sharp and clear with absolutely no shimmering or jagged lines anywhere. As you can see, I also tick the multi-gpu/sli box even though I have none of this but it does improve frame-rates! Also, I have shadows set to "common-medium" as opposed to "special". This was a setting specifically introduced for Nvidia 4-series cards and above when they came on the market.

For my system the big hitters are post-effects and landscape settings. Putting landscape on "high" puts my video memory useage up to 78%. If I combine this with post-effects it goes up to 117%. It will run like this but neither me nor my system like it! Enabling post-effects in this configuration with 8x AA introduces CLoD like jaggies into my graphics. No need!

In the near future I'm planning on buying an Nvidia 660ti with 3gigs of vram . Toad is running one of these at the moment and lately I have made a copy of my game in preparation for this and have been experimenting with some of the settings he has been using. This is my alternate set-up;

In this I've enabled post-effects and am using super-sampling. Super-sampling when first introduced could bring most systems to their knees but technology is catching up. I also use this in combination with something called SweetFX. You can learn more about this in this thread;

http://dangerdogz.co...ted-rocketsyes/

Post # 17 onwards. Notice how I've reduced AA to just x2. No point in going any higher as super-sampling does the job instead. With this set-up, which I don't use online, at the moment I get 15-20fps on the ground and around 30 fps in the air. However, the game looks absolutely fantastic! and as stated, the general smoothness of RoF kinda' makes up for the lower fps. I'm hoping a new card will work wonders here.

I've stopped fiddling with Nvidia control panel or Nvidia Inspector settings for now as the range of adjustment seems infinite and for the moment I'm happy with what I've got.

Caveats? Well, a couple of things. The latest update which brought us the channel map also brought a "haze" effect to the sky which I'm not too keen on. Seems to me a case of "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" and I'm hoping this might be made a player-selectable feature in the near future so I can turn it off. Also, the Channel map itself.

This attempt at rendering the English countryside has made more demands on my system than the original western front map. I think it's a combination of the channel itself and that they've put much more detail into this map but it's a sign of the times. The RoF team have always been very conscious of trying to produce a commercially viable game which will work on laptops and lower-end systems but they know they have to push the boundaries too especially as BoS is on the horizon and will use this engine.

We shall see!

[DD_Arthur]

Oh yeah, if you haven't got it I really urge everyone with RoF to download this really neat community made map. It's got a self-installer too.

http://riseofflight.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34283

Once installed, find it in your qmb, up on the top right with the rest of the maps. It's a gem!