Pixel light count and shadow cascades.

[Raingnome Noir]

Hey guys, i just re-installed Kerbal as i managed to corrupt the files and i can't remember what these things do, first time round i read the forums to help me choose my settings but sadly they are still down, do you guys touch these settings at all? What's better to have max or minimum on these?

[bpivk]

I left all the sliders alone and just changed graphics and anti aliasing.

[Raingnome Noir]

Ah good idea mate, i have a very bad habit of twiddling with settings till i break everything lol, i'm going to follow your lead and leave them as they were.

[Col.Neville]

ive set those all the way one way or the other doesnt seem to matter. texture quality to half or less seems to have the biggest impact.

[Personal Finest Shawn]

Pixel light count is the amount of total lights drawn. If you find some lights on your ship not displaying then turn this guy up.

Shadow cascades seems to be the amount of passes used when drawing shadows. First will be a hard shadow, then out a little further with a blur filter, then further and more blur, etc. There seems to be a cutoff point where the shadows don't get smoother edges but start to double up and get darker on the edges, so don't go too far with this. You can change it while looking at your shadow on the launchpad to get an idea.

Rendering quality overrides shadow cascade setting, so if that is too low then the cascade setting will have no effect. Render quality also seems to effect the distance at which shadows pop out of existence.

Yes, it's all very confusing as these type of terms are made up on the fly. I had to test a lot to figure out what they did.

[Raingnome Noir]

What i find odd is that i had all to max without much problem, i isntalled ISS map-sat mod which gave my game a nasty stutter, i re-installed the game fresh without any mods again and now the performance is worse than it used to be, i hate PC's sometimes hehe.

[Gez Hendrix]

Remeber to set your physics time warp to 0.3

[bpivk]

Originally posted by Custard Donut (with Sprinkles):

i isntalled ISS map-sat mod which gave my game a nasty stutter

ISA does that. Just disable it while you're launching your ship and enable while in space and you're set.

[Caribear]

Or to be more specific about ISA MapSat, when your ship is on the launchpad, make sure "Map Drawing" is OFF in the Mapsat options. You can turn it back on when your satellite is in orbit.

[Raingnome Noir]

Thanks guys i appreciate it :)

[Nats]

Originally posted by Gez Hendrix:

Remeber to set your physics time warp to 0.3

...bearing in mind that this is effectively a sim accuracy setting. If you set it too low it wont calculate the physics very accurately. The higher you set it the better the sim will simulate at the expense of processing power.

I am getting quite slow down now when launching ships and approaching my space station - must be due to parts numbers. I really hope this game gets some optimisation shortly.