Bcof Performance Guide

This is a guide aimed at helping people improve the game performance of bcof.

Welcome

Welcome to my guide. This is a write up of pretty much everything I could think of when doing random testing to make my own game perform better. I have split the guide into things to check and do, easiest to hardest.

Bcof is a CPU bound game. If you have an AMD processor and built your own computer pay special attention to the ram settings section.

Full disclaimer: Some of the stuff in this guide can and will break your computer if you are not careful. There are no "exact" steps and your process may be different so proceed at your own discretion.

If you still have issues, refer to Aztir's guide of running bcof on a potato

Starting Off

Join the official FSE discord to get proper troubleshooting help from the devs. The channel is #bug-reports.

https://discord.gg/battlecryoffreedom

Just like it says in the pinned message in the bug reports channel, you are going to want to find your player logs.

1. Open the file explorer.
   
   
2. Enter this line into the top bar as seen in this image and press enter on your keyboard
   

   %AppData%\..\LocalLow\Flying Squirrel Entertainment\BCOF

   
   It should open up a folder that looks like this.
   
   
3. You will need to upload these two files to the discord channel with a message explaining some of your problems. One of the devs will attempt to assist you when they get to it. Otherwise expect some community members to chime in.
   
   
4. Open task manager and go to the "Performance" tab. We want to know three things: what cpu do you have, how much memory do you have, and what GPU do you have? All of these can be found by selecting the respective objects in task manager.
   
   As an example, you can see that I have a 3700x cpu, 16 gb of memory, and a 3070 ti as my gpu.
   

My specs yield me anywhere from 80-60 fps with drops down to 30 fps when looking at several hundred bots on the commander battle servers. Your numbers will vary.

With this information, you can proceed to asking for help in the channel. In the next sections I will cover a variety of trouble shooting steps to try.

Easy

This is a bunch of random easy stuff to try to make the game run better. Spoiler: bcof doesn't run great on NVIDIA 30xx series GPUs. Idk why. You also need a decent CPU if you want to play at any decent player/bot count of 500+

Hardware

It is highly recommended that the game be installed on a solid state drive (SSD) if possible. I have also seen a slight performance increase by having the game installed to my c drive as opposed to other drives.

Game Settings

Play with the settings. Start with the medium preset and mess with them. Shadows, grass, and ragdolls seem to be the greatest performance hit. Keep occlusion culling on! I've also seen slightly better fps with v-sync off. You'll have to test this stuff yourself to see what you like best though. Exclusive full screen is also slightly better performance wise.

Background processes

Bcof is a RAM hog. It takes up like 8.5 gb minimum. If you have random stuff open on your computer, try closing out of it.

Windows Updates

Type "update" in the bar in the bottom left and open the check for updates selection. It will bring you to a screen with a button that says check for updates. Click it, use it, and do what it tells you. If there is anything that says "optional updates" that you can click, do it and see what it says. If they look important, you probably want those too. Make sure you reboot after you're done.

Driver Updates

This one is also pretty easy to do. Go download/update the drivers of whatever components you have.

AMD Driver Link[www.amd.com]
Nvidia Geforce drivers[www.nvidia.com]
If you have a nvidia quadro card go find those instead.
Intel Drivers[www.intel.com]

If you have a laptop or a prebuilt desktop, you might want to google whatever brand you have plus drivers to find specifics for your system. "x drivers".

If you have an NVIDIA GPU, you'll probably want to install geforce experience to get the update.

Windows Power Plan

This is a very random issue I ran into so I'm including it here. For some reason my computer was defaulted to power saving mode which caps your cpu clock speed. So check this and make sure it's set to balanced as it should be. Open control panel, go to hardware and sound, then select power options. It should be on balanced. If it's not, change it. If it doesn't stay selected, look up how to reset the default power plan with power shell or something. If you can't figure that out, beg in the discord.

If you have a Ryzen 3000 series CPU like I do, you'll want to use the AMD Ryzen balanced power plan instead. It changes some secret stuff for the cores to make it more efficient for this particular series.

If you also had this issue, yell about it in the discord so it can be investigated to see if it's a related game issue.

Medium

This section assumes you know how to use a computer or can at least figure one out. Instructions will be brief. Google/YouTube it if you don't know what it is.

Driver control panel settings

Alright I have an NVIDIA GPU so I'm going to run through the options of that. There might be similar options for AMD's driver platform idk.

Open the panel, look for manage 3D settings on the side. Open it and go to the program settings tab. Find and add the bcof.exe to the list. The default settings should be fine but the one you want to check is openGL rendering GPU. Make sure that is set to whatever your GPU is.

Make sure the vsync option is set to let 3d application decide.

It might be placebo but I think setting the low latency mode to ultra has helped. It doesn't fix the frame drops but it has made the fps count more consistent when it isn't dropping for me.

As long as you didn't really mess with anything in here previously it should be fine.

BIOS Options

If you have a laptop you are probably out of luck on this section.

To all my desktop bros, you'll need to get into your motherboard bios. Assuming you have never messed with any of this before, there are a couple of things to do while you're in there.

RAM settings

Make sure your RAM is compatible with this or you could end up in a boot loop and that's not fun. Look for something that says D.O.C.P or XMP. It'll probably be a drop down that you can select profile 1 or something on. Congrats you just unlocked a ton of performance if everything went smoothly. Ryzen processors especially love this.

Resizable BAR

Only a few games have this 100% implemented but it's good to have on. Basically it lets the parts talk to each other in bigger chunks of data. Find it and turn it on.

CPU settings

Depending on your board, there might be some overclocking settings. Read/watch about how to make sure that's on and running.

Hard

Please don't mess with stuff this unless you are confident that you won't screw it up.

Bios updates

If you have a laptop or prebuilt desktop, google whatever brand whatever model bios update. If you have a custom desktop and know what motherboard you have, google that motherboard bios update.

Depending on what you have will dictate the upgrade process since they are all different. Some BIOS versions can't be upgraded straight to the latest and need to be done in steps starting with the version after the one you currently have and so on until you reach the current version.

Performance Monitoring

Get MSI Afterburner and the RivaTuner Statistics server and start monitoring your CPU and GPU clock speeds, RAM and VRAM usage, etc. and play the game to see if you can identify whatever is causing issues. Test stuff idk I'm trying to figure this out same as you.