Removing dust trails permanently and increasing FPS drastically

[wookdaddy]

If you want to get rid of dust trails on horses permanently - pretty much the only thing that slows down modern pc's, go to your particle systems file in the main PoP (or any module) folder. Find the three groups, which are very near the top:

psys_game_hoof_dust 78336 prt_mesh_dust_1  5 2.000000 10.000000 0.050000 10.000000 39.000000
0.200000 0.500000  1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.000000 0.900000  1.000000 0.900000
0.000000 0.780000  1.000000 0.780000
0.000000 2.000000  1.000000 3.500000
0.200000 0.300000 0.200000  0.000000 0.000000 3.900000  0.500000
130.000000 0.500000
psys_game_hoof_dust_snow 8704 prt_mesh_snow_dust_1  6 2.000000 3.500000 1.000000 10.000000 0.000000
0.200000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.500000 4.000000  1.000000 5.700000
0.200000 1.000000 0.100000  0.000000 0.000000 1.000000  2.000000
0.000000 0.000000
psys_game_hoof_dust_mud 78080 prt_mesh_mud_1  5 0.700000 10.000000 3.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000  1.000000 1.000000
0.000000 0.700000  1.000000 0.700000
0.000000 0.600000  1.000000 0.600000
0.000000 0.400000  1.000000 0.400000
0.000000 0.200000  1.000000 0.220000
0.150000 0.500000 0.100000  0.000000 0.000000 15.000000  6.000000
200.000000 0.500000


I did not discover this fix, some random guy on one tiny thread did. All the other "fixes" still employed the native trails, which unfortunately still slow down your pc massively. The areas in bold you simply need to change to 0. But keep all the other zeros in their place (worked for me). That's all you have to do. This was pretty much the only thing slowing down my game, as I'm constantly making my own "mini mod" to improve PoP's graphics. I wish I could share it, but unfortunately this will have to do. Make sure you back up your file in case anything goes wrong.

 

[Mad Vader]

Have you tried ticking off Particle Systems in the game graphics options?

 

[wookdaddy]

If you do that it removes the blood, fire, and smoke as well. I like all that on. For me, this was the biggest drain on performance outside of number of units/bodies. Just try it...it works wonders.

 

[Mad Vader]

*If you have performance problems and a low-end graphics card.

 

[wookdaddy]

Lulz, GTX 760 isn't low end. It's mid tier at worst and it runs every game I've thrown at it on high/ultra except this old game. Gee, I wonder why. Warband just has a terribly outdated and inefficient engine. That's just a fact. And by the way I still had around 80 to 90 FPS with the trails on, I just prefer keeping it at a smooth 120. If that's "bad" I must need to buy a 1,000 dollar graphics card. Common sense says it's the old, outdated, and inefficient engine. Not my computer running every new game without a hitch. If you don't want this fix don't use it, for everyone else who doesn't have a 5,000 dollar computer it's worth a try.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Actually it's more to do with big particles taking up a lot of screen-space. Every particle on the screen means the game has to render another layer on top of the previous one. With hundreds or even thousands of dust particles in a normal battle, it will make rendering slower no matter how good your computer is, or how modern the game engine is.

This usually isn't an issue because particles don't take up much of the screen in most mods, either because the actual billboards are smaller or they don't last as long. This means you have to get pretty close to them before the GPU has to render hundreds of them overlapping huge portion of the screen (renderng is done per-pixel, this is why smaller resolutions are so much faster and also why zooming out from smoke or dust causes less lag, as it takes up fewer pixels).

Most modders don't know this, so they make particles bigger and add fewer of them. This makes lag far worse in almost every scenario.

Can't tell if the PoP modders have done that, but the dust effects aren't anything special anyway so removing them is probably a good idea.

 

[wookdaddy]

Thanks for explaining that Jacob...honestly I couldn't figure it out. I have a 2500k processor and 8 gigs, so I wasn't sure why the dust had such a big slow down factor. So the hardware/game engine don't matter, it's just a matter of having more to render. That makes sense. Kind of like Civ 5 albeit in a slightly different way.