[Jeff Vader]

I've been raging with this at the IRC today. After a year-long fight, I finally found out why normal maps didn't show up on my rig: the goddamn mother****ing "Lighting" setting in the in-game detail settings was at 3/5 (I probably thought at some point that it changed the intensity of lighting and not the quality), and by accident noticed that setting it to 5/5 brought those wonderful normal maps into life. Would it be possible in any way to make the game engine just use those settings at max so that the end-user can't change them? I mean really, if your rig can't handle the retail max detail settings, you probably should consider upgrading your hardware already.

Or if there's a significant minority that still needs to lower the in-game settings, make them so that you can only alter them when a specific command-line flag is active, or something.

Just thinking out loud here.

[MatthTheGeek]

I think you have no idea how much that Lighting setting influences framerate. On my old rig I could increase my framerate about threefold just by lowering it from 5 to 3. I say leave it as it is, we don't need to make stuff more complicated for people who don't have the chance to have the money required to upgrade their hardware.

Or just organize a funding to help HLPers to upgrade their hardware. That'd work too.

[The E]

Yeah, nerfing that setting will not happen as long as people are around who insist on using intel chips.

[MatthTheGeek]

Yeah, nerfing that setting will not happen as long as people are around who are forced to use intel chips.

Fix0red for you.

[Nuke]

my biggest complaint about the options menu is that it only has controls for retail settings. id like to see some of the settings for the scp moved from the launcher to the options menu so that they can be switched on the fly. useful for when the campaign youre playing throws you a boe mission and you need to turn something down to keep your fps playable. this idea goes in the complete opposite direction by making the retail options menu more useless. no i dont like it one bit.

[MatthTheGeek]

The retail menu is already quite useful to turn settings down in order to gain fps in fps-hungry missions. Believe the man who was on an Intelgrated for 2 years and a half.

I remember for example than asteroid missions took a heavy toll on my fps, and simply switching the model detail from 5 to 4 was enough to make my fps go from 5 to 30ish.

Don't underestimate what the retail menu detail settings can do. It's definitely not useless.

[Nuke]

the menu is ok, i just dont like the idea of making one of those settings do nothing. still there is room for some finer control.

[jr2]

Well, even when your presets are set to "Very High", there are about 3 settings that are set at 4/5 instead of 5/5, I have to manually put them all to max every time I install... something you might want to look into.  IDK why it doesn't firewall all settings after scanning my specs, but it never has that I can remember.

[The E]

No, I don't think we will.

[jr2]

OK, however if someone is complaining about not being able to get a certain feature working, mayhaps ask them about their detail settings, who knows, that might fix it.