Tweaks? My FPS suck!

I'm trying to run WCSaga on my crappy old laptop. It's the only computer I have. It runs relatively well in normal space and in dogfights, but it completely tanks whenever there is a capital ship on screen. (Taking off is a pain LOL) Even the corvette in the first prologue mission makes it chunk a bit. I didn't have this problem with the Demo prologue.

I've already got Details in Options set to Low. Is there anything else I can do? Is it possible to lower the resolution? Render in D3D instead of OpenGL? Are there debugging models? I don't care if it looks like crap. I want the story!

Thanks!

Some of the answer to your question will have to come from the developers; however, a couple of things that might be worth trying:

1. Free up as much memory as you can, shut down all non critical software running in the background.

2. Use a good antispyware program to get rid of any adware/spyware, etc that may be running in the background.

Ensuring you have as much free memory available as possible will aid your computer as it tries to process the graphics in the game.

These may help some, but for the technical aspects, that I'll leave to the developers to comment on.

Thanks for the tips.I did try running an antispyware program, but I am still having the same results.

Is there a config file somewhere?

I dont know your video card used, but my old Inspiron/Latitude from 10 years ago I started with on Prologue and found that I had to go from 1024x768 to 800x600 to make the FPS work better. Details on the video setting will also change the speed. I know, you want all the beauty of what the developers have created, but else you upgrade or use a different computer, thats all I can help with for now. I have not seen a Config file that doesnt destroy the game when I poked around.

Have you tried deactivating the Vertical Sync option in the launcher (and sometimes in the grahpic card settings as well)? I have similar issues with my ATI/AMD GPU, and that one is not a slow and small one. It's an engine-specific problem with the AMD drivers.

How do you lower the resolution? The lowest option I have at the Config menu before I run the program is 1024. I tried turning off V Sync, but any performance gain with capital ships was minimal. Is there some way to turn off shadows or lighting effects? I'm sure that'd be the best way to boost performance.

Thanks for the help so far!

You need to lower the resolution on your PC as a whole, you can usually get to a screen to do this either through the Control Panel or by right clicking on your desktop.

Go to the Options Screen (by pressing F2), and lower the settings there. The default seetings on the top right should be enough to play around with. If you want to try out specific settigns, try lowering !"model detail" and "lighting". Possibly also "3D Hardware Textures"

Tell us if it helps.

Thanks Thor, but I don't think lowering my Desktop resolution had any effect on the rendered game.

And thanks Tolwyn and Keldor. Unfortunately, like I said above, I already have the ingame Detail Settings set to Low. It's very smooth and fluid in space, or with small objects like Fighter craft in my crosshair. But if I put a large craft in crosshairs, like the Wellington or even the corvette in the first mission, my FPS drop to nothing and it's like flying through mud. For example, taking off and landing is nearly impossible.

I think it's all the Emissive Lighting and Shadows that are rendered on larger capships that are chunking my low end GPU.

I found this website with Freespace 2 Command Line References: www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.ph ... _Reference Do these References work? I've tried playing with some different References in the cmdline_fso.cfg file, but I haven't noticed any appreciable difference in either lighting or performance. In particular, I tried adding -Res 800x600 and -No_Emissive_Light and neither seemed to have any effect.

I really appreciate how hard you guys have worked on this and I understand that because of all this hard work, you don't want your game looking like crap. But, right now, for me, it doesn't look like anything. I haven't played computer games in years. I don't have a a gaming rig. But I'm really excited about WCSaga and I hope you guys can tell me some way to disable the shadows/ambient lighting.

Thanks again!