Support

[Blakhart]

Hi there. Copy this and paste it into a new tesxt file, rename it as framskippa.cs, and copy it to your gamedata/base/scripts/autoexec folder. Run t2 and go into the scripts menu, find frameskippa and set it to 2 and see if that gives you any help. You have to have support.vl2 in the gamedata/base folder to run most scripts by the way.

[Blakhart]

Just tried the 301.42 driver from nvid and the fxaa antialiasing mode now works in both t1 and t2 games. What this does is give you almost 4x antialiasing image quality without the performance hit. For cards with performance issues or to decrease latency it might be a good idea to get this driver and use the fxaa mode rather than fsaa or msaa. This is for Nvidia cards only. Works in other games as well. Games looked fine to me and no anomalies noted other than text was a little blurred unlike with fxaa forced in the 275 driver wich was a disaster.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers

[Blakhart]

More on fxaa:

http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2011/03/nvidia-fxaa.html
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/assets/gamedev/files/sdk/11/FXAA_WhitePaper.pdf

"If you have a GeForce card you might want to grab the latest batch of beta drivers from the Nvidia site. Nvidia say they’ll deliver a performance boost in Skyrim of up to 20%, which is nice, but the Nvidia FXAA functionality is perhaps a more interesting addition. That’ll allow us to force a faster form of anti-aliasing across hundreds of games from the Nvidia control panel. The new shader-based antialiasing function should help to smooth out edges at speeds “60% faster than 4xMSAA.”

The new drivers also add Adaptive Vsync. This monitors your framerates and switches vsync off when they start to dip, helping to maintain a consistent framerate with less stuttering."
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/10/nvidia-drivers-boost-skyrim-add-fxaa-shaders-adaptive-vsync-and-other-fancy-bits/

[Blakhart]

A word on dialup play:
If you are on dialup all is not lost. T1 was written to be played and played well at dialup rates. T2 is the descendant of T1 and shares this ability. To go a bit further than just setting the in game networking menu tab to 56k you can go into clientprefs.cs (found in GameData\base\prefs) and edit these lines after saving the original somehere safe in case you fooch things up:

$pref::Net::PacketRateToClient = "32"; //if ping starts to run away set to 20 or 16
$pref::Net::PacketRateToServer = "16"; //if ping starts to run away set to 14
$pref::Net::PacketSize = "200"; //this one is very important, set no higher than 256 when on dialup

The above is for dialup only. The downlink from the server to you offers more bandwidth than the uplink so try to run at 32, if the game still lags or ping increases after a time and stays that way reduce the rate to client to 29 or so. Reduce it a bit at a time till you find the max rate your modem can handle. Do the same for the uplink side, I find that 14 is about all a modem can handle, 16 may cause a ping race condition where it just gets higher and higher. Edit, save, serve, enjoy. You can use notepad to edit .cs files, but I prefer Tribal IDE found here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tribalide/

[rJay]

Dude. This is SO FREAKIN' helpful, that you need to have it penned. Thx so much!
rJay

EDIT: I meant pinned.

[Blakhart]

"I have an intel graphics chipset 128mb in my micro PC sooo...."

In light of the above specs and what they represent to the game we love, just keep in mind that t2 had as best possible target card a nvid gf3 - wich is a dx8 class card, so most onboard grafix devices made in the last few years should have similar or superior performance to the gf3 target card. T2 doesn't take a whole lot of card memory, and only about 60mb system memory use, it's a low spec game compared to what passes for 3d fps games today. The beauty of running t2 on newer video devices is that the raw processing and memory speed of the newer vid devices allows us to enable image quality enhancements that t2 sorely needs. Enhancments such as fsaa/msaa/fxaa and anisotropic filtering as I mentioned in the first posts of this thread. They make what the game devs gave us look the best they can. In the past, enabling these options would make vid cards crawl, but today most video output devices laugh at t2 texturing demands. So if you're not running a tnt2 or rage128, go ahead and enable them, t2 needs all the help it can get.

Specs on gf3 cards for those geeky enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_3_Series

[Blakhart]

A word on t2 and windows 8.


I have it on good authority that t2 does indeed play on 8, so hope is not lost for those with 8 systems. How it gets installed and started up I have no clue, however.

[Heat Killer]

A word on t2 and windows 8.


I have it on good authority that t2 does indeed play on 8, so hope is not lost for those with 8 systems. How it gets installed and started up I have no clue, however.

Who's your authority?

[Blakhart]

Someone who plays t2!

[rJay]

[Blakhart]

A word on nvidia game profiles:
Game profiles are applets commonly found in most any current vid card control panel, at least those cards intended by the maker to have sufficient performance to play games. They provide for the ability to have separate game profiles for each game, and for the desktop as well. The desktop profile is the global setting, so you know. Anyway, these profile thingys are awesome since you no longer have to go and change vid card settings between games (if you did in the past) as the pc will alter them accordingly whenever you fire up the game or app or whatever you have made a game profile for. For instance, I can have the trheaded optimisation enabled in Tribes1, but in tribes2 it results in noticeable game stutter. So T1 can have it enabled and T2 can have it disabled and all I have to do is fire up either game.



Here is my example nvidia t2 profile:
(please keep in mind I am after image quality over fps in the following example)

Anisotropic Filtering; 16
Antialiasing-Gamma Correction; on
Antialiasing Mode; Override
Antialiasing Setting; 2
Antialiasing Transparency; Supersampling
Conformant Texture Clamp; Use Hardware
Error Reporting; Off
Extension Limit; Off
Maximum pre-rendered frames; 2
Multi-display/Mixed-GPU acceleration; Single display performance
Power Management mode; Prefer maximum power
Texture filtering-Anisotropic sample optimisation; Off
Texture filtering-Negative LOD bias; Clamp
Texture filtering-Quality; High quality
Texture filtering-Trilinear optimisation; Off
Threaded optimisation; Off
Triple buffering; Off
Vertical synch; Force on



Now if I was after fps I would set the game profile up thusly:

FXAA; On
Anisotropic Filtering; 16
Antialiasing-Gamma Correction; off
Antialiasing Mode; Off
Antialiasing Setting; 2
Antialiasing Transparency; Off
Conformant Texture Clamp; Use Hardware
Error Reporting; Off
Extension Limit; Off
Maximum pre-rendered frames; 2
Multi-display/Mixed-GPU acceleration; Single display performance
Power Management mode; Prefer maximum power
Texture filtering-Anisotropic sample optimisation; On
Texture filtering-Negative LOD bias; Clamp
Texture filtering-Quality; High performance
Texture filtering-Trilinear optimisation; On
Threaded optimisation; Off
Triple buffering; Off
Vertical synch; Force off

If your game profile does not provide for FXAA simply use the antialiasing settings in my good image quality example at the top there, but use msaa rather than ssaa, and from there down use the options after antialiasing in the high performance example.