Ultimate Guide to TWEAK and OPTIMIZE your Firefall FPS

Ultimate guide to get the most FPS playing firefall on your machine. This guide is split to 3 levels of tweaking, depending on how much time you have and effort to sacrifice.

Preface

Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to tweak your firefall's gameplay experience.

Before we start, I will be clearing some assumptions to make this guide work fully

• You are using a STEAM VERSION of Firefall (Seeing that you are viewing this in Steam Guides)
  
• You have administrator access to the computer
  
• You know how to follow step by step instructions properly

Now that is cleared up, I will be splitting this guide to 3 parts(4th part if you want to continue tweaking firefall in the future) on how much time you can devote on tweaking and optimizing firefall. But if you want to get the most of this guide, I STRONGLY SUGGEST to follow all the steps.

Quickest Tweak

This tweak should take you approximately about 10 minutes to do at most including the time to read it.

Editing Firefall's .ini file

1) Navigate to your [Steam Installation Folder]\SteamApps\common\Firefall

You should be seeing these


2) Open Notepad
3) Drag "firefall.ini" on Notepad
4) Ctrl+A then delete
5) Copy these:

;
; NOTE: Add [Section] key = value stuff here.
;       For a list of ini file keys, see knowledge base or forums.
;
[FilePaths]
WritePath= "%LOCALAPPDATA%/Red 5 Studios/Firefall"

[UI]
PlayIntroMovie= 0; 0=off, 1=on

[VOIP]
Enabled = false

6) Paste it on Notepad
7) Save it.
8) Right click on the firefall.ini, then click properties
9) Click on the Read-Only Checkbox making sure it has a check mark on the box
10) Press Apply, then ok

Brief Explanation:

The VOIP fix benefits a lot of people in the forums including me. The voip is inducing massive freezes that last from 3sec up to 30sec. We are setting firefall.ini to read-only because the patch will always modify that thing, we don't want that.

Disabling Graphic options that kills most of your FPS without sacrificing some of the eye candy

1) Open up firefall
2) Click options in the lower left
Follow these changes:
Shadow Quality >> Off
Particle Quality >> Low
Vegetation Quality >> Off
Animation Quality >> Low
Motion Blur >> Untick
Radial Blur >> Untick
UI Glow >> Untick (suggested by /u/astrobe)
Sun Shafts >> Untick
Screen Space Emissive Lighting >> Untick
Anisotropic >> 8
View Distance >> 1300
Dynamic Resolution >> 50%

Set the quality for other settings at your own discretion (know your hardware limit, decide how you want to balance performance to graphics quality)

Brief explanation:
Shadow is the heaviest fps killer, followed by blurs and particles, Sun shafts and Screen Space Emissive Lighting are eye candy that I recommend to disable. If you played Assassins creed IV, Sun shafts are called "God Rays" which is really pretty but heavy on your GPU. Screen Space Emissive Lighting is pretty much ambient oclusion, really good indoors, which firefall is not played a lot.

We're getting Serious!

This tweak should take you approximately about 30 minutes to do at most including the time to read it.

Downloading Melder (The addon manager for Firefall) and the addon files to tweak and optimize Firefall

1) Open this link: http://forums.firefall.com/community/threads/tool-addon-manager-melder.52327/
2) Login the forums using your Firefall account credential
3) Now download Melder: http://forums.firefall.com/community/attachments/melder-v1-0-2-zip.1500421/
4) Extract it to somewhere you will remember
5) DO NOT EXECUTE MELDER YET
6) Navigate to [Steam Installation Folder]\SteamApps\common\Firefall\system\bin
7) Open Launcher.exe and click Patch
8) After Patching, open up Melder.exe (click yes if it's asking to patch)
9) Click the folder Icon on the left side of melder (Below "Open Library")
10) A folder should open, don't close it
11) Download these 3 .zip Files

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwCLsYTA7k1UWVR5SUJ5ZWdCb0E/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwCLsYTA7k1UQkdUYTY3cGNBRTg/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwCLsYTA7k1URUtCU1d2MXRYSE0/view?usp=sharing

DO NOT UNZIP THEM
[Credits to: CookieDuster for these addons]

12) Copy those 3 zip files in the folder that melder opened (Normally It should be C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Melder\addons)
13) Go back to melder again, and you should see 3 entries
14) Click the 3 tickboxes, click yes if it say something about not compatible on firefall's latest version. (Ignore that warning)

Brief Explanation:
AutoExec executes some console commands that will optimize firefall rendering system and as well removing dead bodies/corpses immediately. It is also modifying how particles fade out and limit the amount of particles in screen.
FriendsListFix will prevent mini lag spikes if someone in your friends list change status (change battleframe, change shard, change map). Lag spikes are noticeable if you have a large list of friendslist.
GimmeBackMyFadelessCursorMode is just a fix that I included so the screen won't fade to black if you are on mouse mode or typing in chat

Turning off CPU Parking

1) Press Windows Key + R
2) Type "regedit" without quotes and press enter
3) ctrl+F and paste this without quotes "0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583" press enter
3a) If you see a value on the right side called "ValueMax" and "ValueMin", modify those 2 entries by rightclicking them and click modify
3b) Change the value to 0 (normally it is on 64), make sure that you modify both ValueMax and ValueMin
4) else, press f3
5) Repeat step 3a until the dialog box "Finished search through the registry" appears
6) Restart your computer

First time Visitors: HARDCORE TWEAKING !!1!!one!11!

This tweak will vary greatly in time to everyone depending on your internet download speed. So you should only do these if you have enough bandwidth limit left and are really hardcoredly devoted on tweaking and optimizing Firefall.

Disclaimer before I start:

• I will be asking you to download 13.7GB of files, but ONLY ONCE
  
• You will Only download sequential patches (~300MB) after succeeding patches

The 12GB of files will be the HD texture files of Firefall, we are downloading it locally so we don't have to rely on texture streaming which is a cause for lag spikes.

NOTE: THIS PART IS FOR FIRST TIME HARCORE TWEAKERS, IF YOU ALREADY DOWNLOADED THE 3 TEXTURE FILES, HEAD ON THE NEXT SECTION

1) Download these 3 humongous files

• http://dl-production.firefallthegame.com/vtex/beta-1858/static.vtex0
  
• http://dl-production.firefallthegame.com/vtex/beta-1858/static.vtex1
  
• http://dl-production.firefallthegame.com/vtex/beta-1858/static.vtex2

2) Copy and Paste the 3 downloaded files to [Steam Installation Folder]\SteamApps\common\Firefall\system\vt
3) Select the 3 downloaded files and press right click >> properties on them
4) click read-only checkbox once or twice until the checkbox shows a check mark (not square and empty), click apply
5) Run the game, click options in log-in screen in lower left of screen
6) Network >> Advanced, and select "disable" option in Texture streaming quality.

After you finish these, you can crank your graphics settings to higher settings since we already done all the fixes possible to prevent lag spikes and major fps hogs. (Note that I STILL HIGHLY RECOMMEND shadows to still be disabled, particles at low, Sun shafts and Screen Space untick.)

R9 270x-R9 280x and equivalent users would be able to achieve smooth gameplay @ medium-high texture, shader, terrain, model and lighting quality settings.
R9 290 and equivalent users would be able to achieve smooth gameplay @ high to very high texture, shader, terrain, model and lighting quality settings.
R9 290x Crossfired or higher equivalent would be able to achieve smooth gameplay @ very high-ultra high texture, shader, terrain, model and lighting quality settings.

Now if you want to be updated on the HD texture files, check back on this guide and refer to the last section on how to patch them. Texture files are usually updated every major patch (usually every 3 weeks), not on hotfix patches.

Returning Readers: HARDCORE TWEAKING !!1!!one!11!

This tweak will vary in time but should take you approximately about 4 hours at most to do including the time to read it.

This part of the guide is for returning readers who wants to patch the 13.7+GB texture files.

Patch 1843/1846/1847/1851/1853 → 1858

Updated: 2/14/2015

What you need to download:

- Patcher[sourceforge.net]
- vtex0Patch.jdf (380 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (117 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (37 Mb)[drive.google.com]

Steps to do:

1) Navigate to your [Steam Installation Folder]\SteamApps\common\Firefall\system\vt and Put the 3 .jdf files and Unzip the patcher there. Do not close the folder
2) Press Shift + right click to a white space in the folder explorer and click "Open Command windows here"
3) Copy

jptch static.vtex0 vtex0Patch.jdf static.vtex0.new

and right click on the command prompt and press paste. Press Enter.
4) Copy

jptch static.vtex1 vtex1Patch.jdf static.vtex1.new

and right click on the command prompt and press paste. Press Enter.
5) Copy

jptch static.vtex2 vtex2Patch.jdf static.vtex2.new

and right click on the command prompt and press paste. Press Enter.
6) Delete these 3 files in the vt folder
- static.vtex0
- static.vtex1
- static.vtex2
7) Rename these 3 files by removing the ".new"
- static.vtex0.new → static.vtex0
- static.vtex1.new → static.vtex1
- static.vtex2.new → static.vtex2
8) Select the 3 newly patched files and press right click >> properties on them
9) click read-only checkbox once or twice until the checkbox shows a check mark (not square and empty), click apply


If you want to verify, these should be the md5 hashes for the new files
- static.vtex0: 670f8fbe499dd5371636caba4d967bb2
- static.vtex1: 44eebe80075559c692af2e3a43055c80
- static.vtex2: 8a71db6b0d57fa6cc2e548a7f091c7c4

OLD PATCHES

Refer only to these portion if you missed previous patches. Just make sure you know your current version of .vtex files (the only way to check for sure is by using the md5 check)

Patch 1836/1838/1842 → 1843/1846/1847/1851/1853

Updated: 12/9/2014

- Patcher[sourceforge.net]
- vtex0Patch.jdf (187 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (62 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (20 Mb)[drive.google.com]

md5 hashes:
- static.vtex0: e4f0c6d0ba3d51b3a0a054032476058e
- static.vtex1: 298d295232cc28383c476189cab47410
- static.vtex2: f95113e46d4a066e84de78a102753de4

Patch 1832/1833 → 1836/1838/1842

Updated: 11/18/2014

- vtex0Patch.jdf (283 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (94 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (31 Mb)[drive.google.com]

md5 hashes
- static.vtex0: 69505caa84ca5a2e7821a4ae4bc2ac7a
- static.vtex1: f6e7928b2c0c9992385d7f4fd0de3608
- static.vtex2: 241d7f0a5d12928d59c3835ab678c6fc

Patch 1829 → 1832/1833

Updated: 10/28/2014

- vtex0Patch.jdf (104 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (35 Mb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (12 Mb)[drive.google.com]

md5 hashes
- static.vtex0: 4490775638c83998f669ff5aa770c8e0
- static.vtex1: 673123544059f5cd111b5d6a0b9e9864
- static.vtex2: ef961f3f6e70e4f7b3687a94523648cb

Patch 1824 → 1829

Updated: 10/21/2014

- vtex0Patch.jdf (454Kb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (128Kb)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (73Kb)[drive.google.com]

md5 hashes
- static.vtex0: bd050353e8f097e8bcbc850608e338b9
- static.vtex1: 624d1c1164f2e552352b0ab49f8616bc
- static.vtex2: cd96e9aa8e022119f9fce63ff0d229a5

Patch 1808/1809/1813/1817 → 1824

Updated: 10/10/2014

- vtex0Patch.jdf (198MB)[drive.google.com]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (60.6MB)[drive.google.com]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (19.8MB)[drive.google.com]

md5 hashes
- static.vtex0: 984963b2c0fe2af794dbec73d7be3911
- static.vtex1: b2746019a38b5937febc9fbdf3c8db7c
- static.vtex2: d05aa4106c08582fa513c1b08f546ce1

Patch 1797 → 1808/1809/1813/1817

Updated: 09/20/2014

- vtex0Patch.jdf (65.5MB)[puu.sh]
- vtex1Patch.jdf (21.4MB)[puu.sh]
- vtex2Patch.jdf (7.4MB)[puu.sh]

md5 hashes
- static.vtex0: 87e16d866ee8333c723c6caa9dc0d5a6
- static.vtex1: 048b7007693a97a885f12f92c7769ee3
- static.vtex2: 8672704f47c4934e6b3efa01e2e289c9

[luvo]

does this still work

[Israel Loves Hitlerrrr]

can you update this for 2022? thanks

[Rocy]

F

[Count Asscrackula]

F

[MDuh]

to all u haters out there, TOLD U DIS GAEM IS FUKKEN DEAD BITCHES

[CtrlAltCuteness]

I hate to say it @MDuh but the first tweak you provided does still work, yet I don't want to try any others.
The game isn't official dead, although if you cannot edit the title yourself, flag the guide and tell them to add "[OUTDATED]" at the start of the title.

[MDuh]

dead gaem. This is not updated anymre. Don't use

[CtrlAltCuteness]

I don't know if I'm Necro-posting, but Meldii replaced Melder some time ago. Also, as I post this, some attachments on the Firefall Forums are not working. (Plus, why are the files not uploaded on the Firefall Forums? This is the main reason I'm refraining from using the Melder files you provided.)

[YEYO and Stitch]

Do you have a Melder version for windows 10 compatibility? I tried running melder Version v1.0.2 but it doesnt even launch :( Please Help!

[Sparzy]

http://forums.firefall.com/community/threads/guide-compilation-by-earth_soldier-hd-texture-files-how-to.5438421/ This is the latest