Guide:Viewer Tweaks

Ok, so you have MCM, and you configured the meter and your mechs. There are, however, a number of tweaks you can do to your viewer to improve your gameplay and performance. Outlined here are some that will help you.

A lot of these tweaks require a viewer that has more advanced features then the default viewer, such as Firestorm. Get one. You'll also need debug settings enabled for a lot of these which is found in the Advanced Menu. Click Ctrl+alt+d to enable it.

Disabling Hard Falls

Second life by default causes an avatar to go splat upon falling a far distance. You fall to far, you land on your face and pick yourself up and your avatar can not move during that period of time. Also there's a pause before you jump. This can be disabled. In some combat sims this illegal. In MCM it's a necessity to stay competitive.

In Firestorm or Phoenix you can go to Avatar > Movement > Quick Jump. Or search for IgnoreFinishAnimation in debug settings and set that to true.

In Singularity, it's an option called nimble.

In exodus it's not an option because they feel it's cheating.

With this enabled you'll be able to land from any height from jump jetting or strife jetting without your mech freezing on the ground for a few seconds. Must have.

Improved Sound Range

In debug settings in any viewer look for AudioLevelRolloff. 1 is default. Values above one decrease the range you can ear thing at. You want this low. You want this somewhere around .15. Just be aware you'll be hearing things up to 100 meters away with it set to that. Might be odd in other sims.

Radar

Ctrl+Shift+M opens a minimap. Have it open and on the screen somewhere visible at all times. This lets you gauge incoming threats. Easiest to parse if you have Rotate map and Auto Center enabled.

Chat distance ring should also be checked as it's a very useful range gauge. Red ring is shout distance, yellow is chat distance. Now you know not only direction, but range to target.

Because of the effective range of most MCM weapons, anyone inside the red ring is definitely inside your danger zone, if they get inside the yellow ring and you're not dealing with them, you are going to die.

Careful, some combat sims consider radar use to be cheating. MCM considers it a reasonable assumption that a high tech state of the art war-machine has some form of integrated radar.

Particle Control

Particles killing your framerate? Go to the graphics section of your preferences. There's a slider labeled "Max. Particle count" on the upper right hand side. Set that to a level where they don't murder your framerate. Be aware that this may obfuscate some MCM particle effects.

May be worth checking the debug setting RenderShaderParticleThreshold. It sets the fraction of the drawdistance at which shaders are applied to particles. In plain English, setting this lower will decrease particle quality but increase speed and perhaps allow more particles on screen. Tweak this to flavor.

View Distance

In the same settings as above, go to Draw Distance. A sim is 256 meters wide. Therefore, based on A^2+B^2=C^2, you need the view distance set to 362 meters to see from corner to corner. You may wish to set this a little longer to cover elevation and whatnot.

Hotkeys

Why fumble with slash commands and HUD buttons when you can activate meter features at a key-press. Some well placed gestures can hotkey the arming and disarming of weapons to various buttons on the keyboard. Please note, you need a viewer other then the default one to access anything but the Fkeys for gesture hotkeys. Rivet has made a rather nice set of hotkeys. Try asking her or me (Bellimora) for them.

Sound Management

Set your sound levels. You want your ambient set real high, keep any music levels at about 25%. If you are playing with a team using voice chat, it goes without saying you want that high as well. This prevents other audio from drowning out important details.

Rendering Tweaks

RenderVolumeLODFactor: Controls level of detail of primitives. It's a multiplier for current screen area when calculated level of detail. Increase it to see more detail at distance, decrease to see less detail. This can also help by causing some distant particle generators to drop out of visibility, keeping more particles near to you where they may matter more.

If you don't mind not seeing it, in open sky arenas, you can disable rendering of the sky and clouds for a performance boost. Where this lives depends on the viewer. Advanced > Rendering Types > Sky and .... > Clouds. Hot toggle keys ctrl+alt+shift+6 and ctrl+alt+shift+-

Hiding Crosshair Data

Your viewer can display where people are aiming their camera, which can be used to tell who's aiming at you and from where they're striking from possibly. Developer>Avatar>Show Point at. Now, this data can be blocked from being displayed. Under preferences, go to privacy>LookAt>Don't send actual camera target hints to others. Enable that and you can keep people from snooping on your camera data.

This sort of thing will render any attempt at stealth rather pointless since your crosshair data will give your location away rather precisely. Policing this darn near impossible, better to disable crosshair data being broadcast and remove the edge.