FAO FRONTIER: List of Graphical Changes / Issues for since Patch 1.3

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Yodafone

Yodafone
Granite said:
Sure I can share it. :) I've attached it to this post...here's a video that explains what it is all about:

NOTE:

1) Backup your GraphicsConfiguration.xml before you put this file in your game directory.
2) File can be found in these locations:

Default Game Installation Locations:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1001 - The number at the end will vary from game to game.

C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\Frontier\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1001​

3) This file changes the texture resolution for planets and the galaxy background. On Ultra it sets Planets to 8k textures, on High it sets planets to 4k textures. In both cases the galaxy background is set to 4k textures. All of these are a lot higher than the default settings.

4) You may get some lag / stuttering on the loading screens and in hyperspace. Inside the game itself it is smooth for me as you can see from my video - however it may vary for other people as not all PC's are the same.

5) If you break something on your PC or game, I take no responsibility. :) As with all these things we try them at our own risk; that said, I have never had a problem with this.

6) It is possible to make these changes with the Graphics Override file but I haven't done it that way. Someone else maybe able to advise how to do that. Benefit of using the override is that the changes will remain after a patch. Otherwise everything gets set back to default.

7) Have fun! :)

View attachment 57520
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing you Graph Config Ant although it's pretty much the same as mine as I changed it a while back after watching your guide the first time round when you posted it, but was wondering why you had changed both the <high> and <ultra> texture amounts in <planets> textures? Does this make any difference to each option when running just one of the options? Surely not no, perhaps you've set it like this so when downgrading to high from ultra you've still got high (ish) planet textures? When experimenting?
I've also raised the <fog> setting right at the bottom to "3" to bring it in line with the other ultra values but doesn't seem to make any difference (maybe?, so hard to tell quite frankly but nothing paricularly noticeable)
 

_Agamemnon_

A
Yodafone said:
I've also raised the <fog> setting right at the bottom to "3" to bring it in line with the other ultra values but doesn't seem to make any difference (maybe?, so hard to tell quite frankly but nothing paricularly noticeable)
Click to expand...

I tried that too. Before edit :

Screenshot_0024.jpg

Both values at 3 (just to make sure) :

Screenshot_0025.jpg

And then I simply deleted(!) the whole <fog> part from the .xml :

Screenshot_0026.jpg

Since it's impossible to save inside a ring none of the screens are at the exact same place.
Nor is it in the same heading compared to the planet, but to me there is no diffrence at all.
The fact that it looks the same even without the lines in the file would suggest fog is quite broken.

Edit/
This whole thing took me about ten minutes to check.
If that is to much work for FDEV to put into it, I strongly suggest they take a look at what is important in the future.
 
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_Agamemnon_

A
Granite said:
Very nice screenshot!

There are a few issues, the rocks are missing self-shadows. Also checkout the rocks in the distance they are grey/white and do not match the colour of the rocks in the foreground. In both cases this is something that has changed since release. I suspect at some point it will be improved again.

Some people may not mind too much. Others may not really notice. However it is really noticeable in VR, and doesn't look all that good at all.
Click to expand...

There is no shadows since the light is coming from directly behind the ship. Otherwise the planet would not be fully lit.
 

Bacalao

Bacalao
mordin86 said:
I still do. Its the best explanation for me. Kid wants to buy Elite and asks - what version to choose - PC or Xbox? - obviously he will choose the one that looks better - the PC. So they need to make them look similar.
Click to expand...

I suppose if the kid has the money to pay for a GPU that costs as much as his Xbox, sure. Of course then there is the rest of the PC to build.
 

Kristov

K
Got the graphicsconfig to work finally, seems I was in the wrong FD folder all along, as unbeknownst to me, I have TWO Frontier Developments folders that both contain identical files, and I was naturally enough editing files in the wrong one...still trying to figure out why there's 2 of those in the first place as everything is identical in them..

Anywho, I played around with Fog setting and saw no apparent changes, although my FPS went UP by 10 when I set Fog to 3 instead of the 1 is was set at, which makes no sense at all. I'll muck about with some of the other settings in the xml and see if I can find anything useful.

I DID notice that fog inside stations is thicker and more prevalent after upping the setting from 1 to 3, at least I THINK that's the case, can anyone else who's done this check and see if that really is the case and not just me thinking it's so?

Oh, you CAN save in a Ring, I did it without any issue last night. I simply got close to a Ring without any RES's in it, slowed down and 'hit it' so that I dropped out of SC. Took some screens and hit Save and Exit to Main Menu, then Exited the game totally. Made my edits to the xml, restarted the game, and I was right where I'd left, inside the Ring.

One little thing for anyone who copies the xlm that Granite posted, do NOT copy the entire thing and paste it over your own settings! The first sections of the xlm are graphic system specific, and they'll keep your game from running unless you have the exact same system and setup Granite does. I did that without thinking(I should know better, I do this for a living after all right?) and my game started up and....crashed! I'd created a backup of my original xml, double checked it with the version Granite posted and realized the problem rather quickly, replaced everything from my original, edited the bits I wanted, saved it, and everything worked fine again, with some much improved visuals and no loss of FPS(oddly enough, should have seen SOME drop but none at all, the only time I see FPS drops are when I up Supersampling from 1 to 1.5/2, which causes a massive drop but oh my god does it look good, gives me a serious incentive to actually get a GTX 980ti to replace my GTX 750).

I'm THINKING that the Fog changes were more deeply imbedded in the actual engine so that changes to the settings won't really have any effect, which would make sense, otherwise people who'd already edited their graphics options wouldn't have seen any changes.
 

Kristov

K
possessed said:
So we have proven that FD holds back graphical quality from PC users...
Click to expand...

Not so sure I would call it that, especially not in the way you seem to be implying.

Cranking down settings isn't uncommon, it allows more users to play the game at better FPS, and seeing how many posts there are of people complaining about how badly the game runs...

I've seen this in many other games, editing config files allows you to open up higher res textures that aren't otherwise accessible via the ingame settings options, specifically done to keep people with PoS systems from setting things so high the game runs at FramesPerMinute instead of FramesPerSecond. People with higher end systems are typically more likely to know how to edit said files, while people with low end systems usually don't know how to do that, so it's a safe way to allow those in the know to unlock the goodies. Nothing sneaky, dark or sinister about it, it's just a good way to protect the average idiot from mucking things up so badly the game won't run, which prompts them to post repeatedly all over the internet about how bad the game is, how the devs suck, etc. It's a simple CYA(cover your ) tactic, been used by devs since the days of Doom.
 

_Agamemnon_

A
Kristov said:
Got the graphicsconfig to work finally, seems I was in the wrong FD folder all along, as unbeknownst to me, I have TWO Frontier Developments folders that both contain identical files, and I was naturally enough editing files in the wrong one...still trying to figure out why there's 2 of those in the first place as everything is identical in them..

Anywho, I played around with Fog setting and saw no apparent changes, although my FPS went UP by 10 when I set Fog to 3 instead of the 1 is was set at, which makes no sense at all. I'll muck about with some of the other settings in the xml and see if I can find anything useful.

I DID notice that fog inside stations is thicker and more prevalent after upping the setting from 1 to 3, at least I THINK that's the case, can anyone else who's done this check and see if that really is the case and not just me thinking it's so?

Oh, you CAN save in a Ring, I did it without any issue last night. I simply got close to a Ring without any RES's in it, slowed down and 'hit it' so that I dropped out of SC. Took some screens and hit Save and Exit to Main Menu, then Exited the game totally. Made my edits to the xml, restarted the game, and I was right where I'd left, inside the Ring.

One little thing for anyone who copies the xlm that Granite posted, do NOT copy the entire thing and paste it over your own settings! The first sections of the xlm are graphic system specific, and they'll keep your game from running unless you have the exact same system and setup Granite does. I did that without thinking(I should know better, I do this for a living after all right?) and my game started up and....crashed! I'd created a backup of my original xml, double checked it with the version Granite posted and realized the problem rather quickly, replaced everything from my original, edited the bits I wanted, saved it, and everything worked fine again, with some much improved visuals and no loss of FPS(oddly enough, should have seen SOME drop but none at all, the only time I see FPS drops are when I up Supersampling from 1 to 1.5/2, which causes a massive drop but oh my god does it look good, gives me a serious incentive to actually get a GTX 980ti to replace my GTX 750).

I'm THINKING that the Fog changes were more deeply imbedded in the actual engine so that changes to the settings won't really have any effect, which would make sense, otherwise people who'd already edited their graphics options wouldn't have seen any changes.
Click to expand...

I had two diffrent folders too. The age of them kind of gave away which one was current...

I cant see how fog inside stations would be affected by a change to a specific value like <RingFogQuality>. I'm nowhere near a station right now and cannot check it out.

When I saved INSIDE the ring I was INSIDE the ring, right in the middle of it, not just out of SC and still OUTSIDE of the ring.

"I do this for a living after all right?" Really? How are you still alive then? ;)

Not to be too much of an ass, but I have no formal education in IT whatsoever and yet I understand that if I remove the settings for <fog> altogether from a config file and the game asks for the settings in <fog> it will crash.
Or at least stop and say it cannot find the setting.
Since ED does not do that, something within the hard code of the game is broken and no changes to the values of <fog> ---> <RingFogQuality> will make any diffrence.
 
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Yodafone

Yodafone
Yodafone said:
I've also raised the <fog> setting right at the bottom to "3" to bring it in line with the other ultra values but doesn't seem to make any difference (maybe?, so hard to tell quite frankly but nothing paricularly noticeable)
Click to expand...

_Agamemnon_ said:
I tried that too. Before edit :

View attachment 57833

Both values at 3 (just to make sure) :

View attachment 57834

And then I simply deleted(!) the whole <fog> part from the .xml :

View attachment 57835

Since it's impossible to save inside a ring none of the screens are at the exact same place.
Nor is it in the same heading compared to the planet, but to me there is no diffrence at all.
The fact that it looks the same even without the lines in the file would suggest fog is quite broken.

Edit/
This whole thing took me about ten minutes to check.
If that is to much work for FDEV to put into it, I strongly suggest they take a look at what is important in the future.
Click to expand...

Yeah it seems the fog, at least was broken in the first place which led Greg Ryder to post his statement "Dust / Fog: This was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw (which looked very broken in a number of cases)", and since then leaving this reduced fog we have now as a consequence hardly noticeable. One can get to see the fog in certain ring systems at one particular angle, facing the system star with the fog illuminated inbetween, looks really good when you do manage to catch this particular direction, shame any fog/dust is very hard to see in most other instances/directions, leaving the obvious transition between the background skybox roids behind the 3d ones sticking out like a sore thumb.

Perhaps our fiddling with this <fog> setting and it having no effect suggests the fog is still broken even in its remaining limited form. Roll on 1.4 with a fix hopefully, fingers' crossed!! :)
 
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Kristov

K
Yodafone, I believe you are correct about the Fog being broken as far as settings being able to change it.

I went through the xml last night in great detail and found every single instance of fog being referenced and changed them, along with other settings pertaining to trails, effects and particles, dropped into the same Ring I used the other night and..nothing, nada, zilch. No apparent change in the Ring's fog at all, so whatever was done to the Fog was done in-engine and it's not something we can alter via settings at this time.

Personally, not a big deal to me, that fog I've seen in so many of the screenshots and videos made in older versions of the game always struck me as being wrong. Any collection of dust so thick as to show up as fog would be too thick for a ship to be moving through in the first place, as solid objects, even of microscopic size, hitting your ship and/or shields as thick as that would quickly deplete your shields and rapidly destroy the ship itself. It may look cool, but it kills the immersion factor for me.

However, the rule of cool does apply, and I do regret not seeing that fog myself personally ingame, it really is cool as hell in the screens/videos that captured it, immersion be damned, right :)
 

Flip

Flip
The problem is not that screenshots looked cooler with fog. It's that fog used to hide distant asteroids refreshing in batches. Without the fog, you see whole groups of them update at the same time, every 10 seconds or so, and this is immersion breaking!
 

Obsidian Ant

Obsidian Ant
Kristov said:
Yodafone, I believe you are correct about the Fog being broken as far as settings being able to change it.

I went through the xml last night in great detail and found every single instance of fog being referenced and changed them, along with other settings pertaining to trails, effects and particles, dropped into the same Ring I used the other night and..nothing, nada, zilch. No apparent change in the Ring's fog at all, so whatever was done to the Fog was done in-engine and it's not something we can alter via settings at this time.

Personally, not a big deal to me, that fog I've seen in so many of the screenshots and videos made in older versions of the game always struck me as being wrong. Any collection of dust so thick as to show up as fog would be too thick for a ship to be moving through in the first place, as solid objects, even of microscopic size, hitting your ship and/or shields as thick as that would quickly deplete your shields and rapidly destroy the ship itself. It may look cool, but it kills the immersion factor for me.

However, the rule of cool does apply, and I do regret not seeing that fog myself personally ingame, it really is cool as hell in the screens/videos that captured it, immersion be damned, right :)
Click to expand...



Flip said:
The problem is not that screenshots looked cooler with fog. It's that fog used to hide distant asteroids refreshing in batches. Without the fog, you see whole groups of them update at the same time, every 10 seconds or so, and this is immersion breaking!
Click to expand...

Exactly this.

What is more 'immersion' breaking for me, is:

1) Asteroids in the distance being a different colour to the ones in the foreground.
2) Asteroids in the distance popping in and out of existance.
3) A large empty 'mid-ground' between the front asteroids and the back asteroids.
4) A mid-ground that appears out of nowhere.

All of this is far more 'unrealistic' than the effect fog may or may not have on a ship. But Kristov, I do understand where you are coming from. Hopefully when Frontier fix this, they will have a solution that deals with both situations.
 

Obsidian Ant

Obsidian Ant
Barking_Mad said:
Have we had any confirmation fog is actually 'broken'?
Click to expand...

Yes, in this very thread. Check out the dev replies here...

There are two issues with the fog. First, it has been changed, to make it less resource intensive. Second, it's now no longer displaying correctly in all locations.
 
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cpbtrading

cpbtrading
I think you would have to wait for the usual people to come in and tell you they are exactly as they were. :rolleyes:
.
But of course as you rightly point out, they're not as they were.
I would ask them directly via a ticket, you'll get your answer I'm sure. In-fact asking there is far better than speculating here, just imo.
 

Insomnia

Insomnia
cpbtrading said:
I think you would have to wait for the usual people to come in and tell you they are exactly as they were. :rolleyes:
.
But of course as you rightly point out, they're not as they were.
I would ask them directly via a ticket, you'll get your answer I'm sure. In-fact asking there is far better than speculating here, just imo.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure we're speculating. Read the dev post in this thread.
His explanation is pretty spot on for what's been changed.

All we can do is pray they will revert the changes to bring back the immersion.
I reported it as a bug, but not as a ticket. Might as well do...
 
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