Guide: Horizons Tweaking.

Thanks to Billen, here's the Tweak guide as found on tazoon.com, data is most likly a little old. and I cleaned up the thread a little. BUt there's still bound to be errors. But it's something to play with.

Again I must state:
I am not responsible if any of the steps above make your system inoperable, you do this at your own risk. BACK UP your INI's before makeing any changes so that you can get back into the game if you mess something up.
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The things I did to make Horizons run more smoothly was the following. Before doing any of the following, start Horizons and check out your framerate with the command /window fpswindow. This to make sure that the changes made really does something for you. The steps have been numbered, as too make it easy for you to comment on them.

1. WINDOWS SYSTEM SETTINGS

1 a) If possible, let the Windows swap file reside on a disk that is not on the same IDE channel as your gamedisk.

1 b) Defrag. Use the tool of your choice, but do it, and do it often. Set it to defrag while you are sleeping, at work or whatever. Horizons really crunches away on your HD, and this is really needed for optimal performance[/b]. Personally I use Norton Speedisk, which is a very good application.

1 c) Shut down Virus scanners, mail clients, messenger applications and so on while playing Horizons. Let Horizons be the only active application. An advice is to start horizons via command line, not via the web login (this after having logged into the web interface, having read the EULA). Note: Don't disable your software firewall for gaming optimization. Never disable your firewall.

1 d) Don´t do this step if you feel uncertain, as it might screw your system up severely. If you know your Windows operating system, try disabling uneeded services. This helps quite a lot in most applications.

1 e) Don´t do this step if you feel uncertain, as it might screw your system up severely. If you know your Windows operating system, check your startup applications in HKLM and HKCU Run. Turn off uneeded applications. Most systems have an extreme amount of autostarted applications that really aren´t important. Go through every single value and browse the web to see what it is. This one step, and step 1b, is usually the explanation too why Windows works so much better when newly installed.

1 f) Download and install the Omega Drivers. Read the installation instructions for your card before you install the drivers.

1 g)

when wishing to edit your startup list....start/run>>MSCONFIG click on ok, then in the system utility configuration window that comes up, click on the index tab that says startup....you may wonder what some of those entries are referring to

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

That is the most comprehensive list I have found.
Hope it helps.

PS..if you are running Win2k, this command it not available until you download it from the net.

2. GRAPHICS DRIVER SETTINGS
a) Set desktop to 16 bit. Improves framerate quite a bit on most systems.
b) Set AF (Antisorpic Filtering) to something other than autoselect.
c) Set AA (Anti-aliasing) to something other than autoselect.

3. HORIZONS GAME SETTINGS

3 a) Optional. For some reason this improves framerate on some systems. Also note that after running this, you will have to go through step 3b and so on, since your changes there will be reset.
Start Horizons, and choose DEFAULT settings. Note that you might want to save your keysettings before doing this, since they will be reset. After changing this setting, set your view distance etc back to your preference. Close Horizons afterwards, and get ready for step 3b.

3 b) Check through your HORIZONSDIR\ClientPrefs_Graphic.def file and set float maxFrameRate to 150 instead of the value set there. This gives a very good boost on most low to mid spec systems.

3 c) Disable ALL logging in HORIZONSDIR\PREFS\SHARDNAME_CHARACTERNAME\ClientPr efs_Main.def. Horizons, by default, logs quite alot, and with all the other disk access caused by streaming data to your client putting it in your swap etc this is really not needed. Disable the login via ClientPrefs_Main.def, not via the in game GUI. do this by setting the following values to FALSE:
bool logsEnabled
bool logXML
bool logPositionMessages
bool logPingMessages
bool debugLogsEnabled
bool detailedServerLogsEnabled

3 E) The biggest performance[/b] increase I got was from these two settings.
nt terrainLODTextureRes = 64
float terrainLodSwitchDist = 80.59613

You should note any changes that will go on the expense of image quality.

The above will make long-distance terrain look not as detailed, but the close terrain will still look as
good as before.

3F)

One can edit ClientPrefs.def, and set
bool requireCommandLineParams = true
to
bool requireCommandLineParams = false

This enables you to login with your latest played character by changing
string userName = ""
string password = ""
to your username and password.

NOTE: You have to login to the webpage before you access the game, of course, to read the EULA.

3G)

In the Horizons dir, there is a file called transport_client_config_local.

In that file, there is a variable HighSpeedClient which is set to false.

I set mine to true, since I have broadband. It sure seems to make a difference.

Also, it will change back to false when you must dl a new patch so I suggest making the file read only.

Use of course at your own risk.

3H)

From the Horses' mouth
"Outside of dragons I would like to highlight a Preference that can assist those users having trouble during the Crystal raids and general invasions. Sometimes the client side animation queue can back up when there is a large volume of actions going on. The command can be preformed within the client in the chat command line, just type:

/setpref simplecombatqueue true

In order to change this back to the default setting, type:

/setpref simplecombatqueue false

This won't address all of the issues that can occur during these large raids but it should help with the game play somewhat. "

3I)

turn off 3d sound in the options menu. when i was playing with this on i could only run the game in low graphics, but when i switched it off i can now run them in high! it really made quite a bit of difference to me.

3J)

i need to say just a few quick things. 1. turn off clutter. man it looks good but it will kill a lower end system. 2. this game loves high end machines. in cities i average 15-20 and in the open 30-40. but i have the settings up pretty high.

I will update the information later, since this is what I remember at the moment. Anything I have left out? Post it here. After doing the changes mentioned here, check your FPS to see if there has been any improvements. any questions? Feel free to ask. I am not responsible if any of the steps above make your system inoperable, you do this at your own risk.