Help with .DEF files

[Archaic]

Wasn't quite sure where to put this post, but anyways I remember we used to be able to change our graphics settings via the .DEF files. I have tried to change them, since my PC is way over spec for the game...but alas, as soon as I log into Istaria the changes I made are overwritten (by the patcher?).

Why would I want to adjust these properties, you might ask? Because they give me a very diverse set of tools to work with to customize my game. The biggest things are the LOD for the character models/textures. I am positive my PC can run with the higher LOD on all characters, without the textures and model swapping as I get closer, etc. In fact, this process doesn't actually help my newer hardware at all...it actually causes it to run slower. I know this to be true, because years ago when I adjusted said settings and they didn't reset on game launch the game would run so great! Without the constant load/reload of textures as I moved my gameplay was very smooth. I was just wondering if there was a way I could adjust these at my liesure without having them overwritten when I launch Istaria?

Aside from that, I can say that I have Istaria running fairly well as it is on a Vista 64 bit operating system. Good job with that devs, I understand it was giving people problems. Here are my PC specs, if it helps anyone:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
ASUS P5B Motherboard
4 GB DDR2
Vista Ultimate 64
ATI RadeonHD3870 512 DDR3
250 GB SATA HD

Vista's pagefile is set to 'system managed' and I run no other programs in the background while running Istaria.

[Raptress]

Have you tried placing the modified .def files in the resource_override folder?

[Archaic]

I have not! Thanks for the reply, I'll go try it now and get back with ya

[Fridlekh]

rather than trying to modify lod levels, you want to disable LOD altogether.

While the game is not running, you can modify these values in prefs\clientprefs_graphic.def

bool terrainLodEnabled = true
bool lodEnabled = true
bool charLODEnabled = false
bool charFrameSkipEnabled = false
bool charTextureLODenabled = false

or while the game is running, you can use /setpref <option> <value> to get similar results. Either way, modifying your quality settings in-game will overwrite these values.

The values for the quality sliders are defined in GameConst.def [which can't be overridden, and shouldn't be edited]... looking into it there's disagreement between the various texture and graphic quality sliders, in that they both mess with terrainLOD, but the highest quality texture slider leaves LOD enabled, while the highest quality graphic slider turns it off. These controls should probably be revisited, and better-explained in the interface.

[Archaic]

The clientprefs_graphic.DEF file was resetting itself after launching the game, but there is a valid fix I found here:

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=17713

There is a different file that Istaria won't overwrite, skim through this post if interested