WARNING: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
Please read the entire post before downloading!
Please read the entire post before downloading!
These "manual updates" are essentially the fast track to getting updates for your demo; you could consider them to be similar to "nightlies" in open source projects, though we can't promise daily/nightly updates. They won't break your mod, but they can be unstable. Usually they introduce new features or fix known bugs. Most often, these will not include launcher updates, so they will require some manual tweaking.
The MU1 is mainly a performance update aimed at significantly lowering lag caused by dynamic lights within deferred rendering.
Changelog:
-Shadow maps are now only created if shadows are enabled.
-Textures created with D3DFMT_R32F and D3DFMT_R16F now fall back to D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8 if unsupported by graphics driver.
-New shortcuts such as the tactical overview or video mode do not trigger if the chat box is open.
-Added two new settings: "light_ratio" and "light_min_range".
How to use: Navigate to your demo folder, then EXE. Paste the three given files inside, overwriting the earlier copies (I suggest making a backup prior to that, just in case). Now open fw_tow_settings.ini and change light_ratio and light_min_range according to these suggested values:
light_ratio: 25 (extremely low), 75 (low), 150 (medium), 500 (high) 2500 (extremely high)
light_min_range: 80 (disable fighter laser lights), 160 (disable small capital laser lights), 100000 (disable all lights)
These values are not fixed, so you are free to play with them. Use the suggestions as guidelines and tweak to your liking. Once you have decided upon a value, you can still use the launcher to run the demo and it should not revert the changes you have done to these two values.
If you want to see the impact of these fixes, I highly suggest running at debuglevel of at least 1 (low). debuglevel of 2 (high) will also let you see the actual numbers: the line "Active Lights:" tells you how many lights are currently active within the scene, whereas "Culled Lights:" tells you how many lights your computer actually has to render.
Now that you have read through everything, here is the download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?pdw163ooonh52m8
Please remember that should you encounter crashes or issues while using a MU, it is *required* that you give us which version you are currently using. Good luck and have fun!
