Official Graphics Settings and Troubleshooting Guide

If you have troubles with the game's performance, this guide will try to help. In most cases it comes down to the engine, even a potato can run this game. I would know, I made it work on tons of them.

Intro

So this guide should be able to help you in the case your game is lagging or is unstable.

I'll assume you've tried lowering the graphics and that didn't work, so here are some things you can do to try and fix this:

1. The Solution to your Lag in 99% of cases.

This will be assuming you have a dedicated GPU and are on Windows 10 1903.

9/10 Times someone has asked me about lag or technical issues, the issue was caused by the engine not recognizing their GPU, and attempting to run off the CPU.

Most games these days will do this very easily, however GameGuru is still made with Windows XP and Vista in mind, so I will show you how to do this manually like it's MS-DOS in 1984. Which will take 2 seconds.

These steps will vary between systems. But in this case, I will be using an NVidia GTX 1650 4GB GPU as an example.

Open Task Manager and go to the performance tab:



Scroll to the bottom and take note of the GPU's number, in this case GPU 1:



Taking that number into account, open steam and browse to the local files of the game.
Once there, open setup.ini.



There are a list of available commands you can use in setup.ini definitions.txt to modify and configure the game as needed. But for this section, you'll need two lines to be changed.

Press CTRL+F and look for the following:

adapterordinal=

This tells GameGuru which graphics card to use. In my case, 0 for the CPU, 1 for the GPU, and 99 for auto detection of any non-Intel graphics cards. 1 or 99 will work most times. I have had success with both.

dividetexturesize=

This will enable Texture Filtering. Assume lower values as higher quality textures, and higher values as lower quality textures. 3 being the sweet spot in most cases, but you can set this to any value other than 0, which will break the textures and likely crash the game since division by 0 is 0 textures. So a black hole in this case.

Now, in my case I set:
adapterordinal=1
or
adapterordinal=99
And I set:
dividetexturesize=3

And this fixed lag and instability issues across various systems. Laptops with dual graphics will see the biggest benefits in-game and when on the menus, especially with texture filtering settings enabled.

By default, the game was set adapterordinal=0 and dividetexturesize=1, meaning it was running on the CPU at the highest settings without texture filtering.

This is something that every GameGuru game does by default. Basically since the auto detection systems were disabled on 32-bit GameGuru by default, the engine defaults to the assumption you are on a NASA Desktop PC and lags like crazy running high texture settings on your CPU's graphics for Google Chrome Hardware Acceleration.

If this does not work, move to section 2.

2. The Rest of the Commands

You can use section 1 in conjunction with this if needed, but your mileage will vary.

Now if section 1 was not enough, then I will go through a list of available graphics options. You'd be surprised how in depth thegamecreators went, and shocked at how little you can use normally. Because these options are very good if not for lacking documentation as well.

Despite this, I was able to figure them out and will likely make a launcher to organize them much better.

Assume you can set resolution values in intervals of 128, any lower than 128 will result in issues, such as crashes, instability, and freezing. Also assume distance has a limit of 100 at the closest, and 5000 at the farthest.

Also assume off is 0 and on is 1.

This may not always be the case, but for the sake of your time and mine, we'll go with that so you can get back to playing the game smoothly.

superflatterrain = Set to 1 will force a simplified terrain geometry that is completely flat

occlusionmode = Enables the use of the occlusion system to skip rendering of hidden entities

occlusionsize = Sets the size of the margins around occluders to occlude less of the scene

hidedistantshadows = Causes more distant shadows to be hidden to improve performance

realshadowresolution = Size of the texture plate dimension to render the shadow onto. Default is 2048.

realshadowcascadecount = Set the number of shadow cascades to use. Default is 4, Min is 2 and Max is 8.

realshadowcascade0 thru realshadowcascade7 = Set the distance as a percentage when cascade kicks in

realshadowdistance = Sets the camera depth distance of the shadow render. Default is 5000.

hidememorygauge = Hides the memory gauge that displays in the top left of the editor area

hidelowfpswarning = Prevents the 'low FPS warning' prompt when playing the game

hardwareinfomode = Enables extra information to be displayed when F11 is pressed in game

allowfragmentation = Set to 0 to force game to relaunch at end of game, 1 to never relaunch the game and 2 to relaunch after every level. Default is 1.

reflectionrendersize = Sets the size of the texture plate dimension for rendering the reflections in water. Default is 512.

ignoretitlepage = Forces the title page to be skipped in standalone games

disableweaponjams = Disables the capability of weapons to 'jam' while being repeatedly fired

hideallhuds = Forces all display HUDs to hide when in the game

vsync = Enables the refresh of the render to match the current adapter refresh rate.

fullscreen = Attempts to request a full-screen mode from the DirectX adapter.

dividetexturesize = Divides the size of the loaded textures by this value. Default is 0 for no division.

pbroverride = Activates the PBR rendering system. Set to 0 to disable PBR and revert to the DNS texture system. Default is 1.

underwatermode = Activates the advanced underwater rendering and activity mode.

usegrassbelowwater = Renders grass below the water line.

memskipwatermask = Disables the generation of a water

Most of these should be helpful to improving the game in most aspects. If you still have FPS issues, I think you may want to go the last section.

3. Probably all I can think of unless you're on a DOS PC from 1984.

Keep the last two sections in mind while reading this.

Last thing I can think of is to close out of lots of background apps and such. Despite how modest GameGuru make look at most times, it goes to show I can get good frame rates on potatoes with it when I can have my system fully dedicate itself to the game.

GameGuru is no Unreal Engine, that's for sure. But it does look good when you can adjust it. So if you start getting some frame rate issues with a bunch of background stuff running, that's probably why. Try to minimize the amount of background apps you have open at any time, web browsers, music and video streaming, downloads, you name it.




Given this engine is about on the same technical level as Morrowind or Oblivion to my knowledge, that is to say duct tape from the 90's, sometimes it needs all the help it can get.

So unless you're running a MS-DOS PC from 1984, I think that about covers it.

If you need any further assistance with any technical issues, do not hesitate to contact me.

https://threeofspades.weebly.com/

Take care.