Introduction | User.con | Game.con

You can lower the stress put on your processor and Game by lowering the "stress" areas in the .CON files.

It is possible to speed Duke up using the .CON files. Though this process is quite limited, it will work on internal game issues dealing with speed of processing scripts and game effects.

This document is primarily for lower end machines such as 486. However these basic CON techniques will help balance a mod your working on and its demands on the CPU and Game Engine. Many Mod Creators pack so much goodness into there conversions, The game can't handle it.

Ensure that you Read all the  R.T.C.M.  BUILD Game tweaking guides first, after you have done that and duke still isn't fast enough...Read on.

The following recommend changes are found in your user.con file. Default Settings for Duke3D are indicated on the left.

v1.3

SWEARFREQUENCY 42 //  Lower 100 to about 10.
NUMFREEZEBOUNCES 3 //  Lower 3 to 1.

1.5

SWEARFREQUENCY 100 //  Lower 100 to about 10.
QSIZE 64 //  Lower 64 to about 5. (Atomic Only)
NUMFREEZEBOUNCES 3 //  Lower 3 to 1.

 

You can also lower the blast radius' of weapons slightly to speed up the game slightly.

SWEARFREQUENCY is how much duke swears. The sound played back is usually recorded in high quality. However any sound slows down the game quite a bit.

QSIZE  (Atomic Only) is how many total number of active bullet holes, blood, footprints, money, etc... that are allowed to stick around. By lowering this, the game doesn't have to "remember" so many sprites all over the level.

NUMFREEZEBOUNCES is how many times the freeze bullets will bounce, the weapon already shoots quite fast, so if you use this weapon it can really slow the game down when there are 1000 bullets bouncing around.

What I suggest, is opening GAME.CON with a text editor, and doing a search for "debris", "guts", "lotsofglass", "hitradius", "spawn", and "actor". Then manually changing each value you desire.

debris SCRAP1 ##
debris SCRAP2 ##
debris SCRAP3 ##
debris SCRAP4 ##
debris SCRAP5 ##

The third value (##) tells the game how many scraps of that type to create, I suggest cutting the number (##) you find next to each one in half.

guts JIBS1 ##
guts JIBS2 ##
guts JIBS3 ##
guts JIBS4 ##
guts JIBS5 ##
guts JIBS6 ##

The third value (##) tells the game how much guts of that type to create, I suggest cutting the number (##) you find next to each one in half.

lotsofglass ##

(##) Tells the game how much glass shards to create, I suggest cutting the number (##) you find next to each one in half.

hitradius #### .. .. .. ..

This creates the damage area of an explosion, lower the value (####). Take off around 10-20% to each one you find.

spawn RAT

Removing values such as these requires that you have some .CON editing knowledge. These settings are touchy and paticular and and cause unplayable errors in the game.  Here i can only suggest lowering  ifrnd ### values when spawning something. A more extreme situation you can removing  ifrnd ###  and the "spawn" part completely.

actor FEM2 TOUGH FEMANIMATE

Some of the actors you may consider "useless" like the ones that only sit there waiting to get shot at and do not have any frames at all. These type of actors put their own amount of strain of the game. Removing values such as these requires that you have some .CON editing knowledge about actors.  Do not remove them completely,  just insert  killit break  right after the "actor...." line. This will appear buggy but does the job. Note that the chicks aren't useless(shown above), don't remove them unless you really want to, but why would you want to do that?

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