Default Terrain Quality, Without [most of] The Lag!

[DVGamesInc]

For most players, when confronted with lag, seem to immediately bump down all the graphics settings, one of which is labeled "Terrain Quality". While this does decrease the lag for the most part, it also causes glitching through the ground for kerbals and landers sometimes, on Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe. But there is a way to have both better FPS and terrain!

Simply go into your KSP folder, and open settings, preferably with notepad.

Scroll down untill you find these lines:

}

PRESET

{

name = Default

PLANET

{

name = Kerbin

minDistance = 6

minSubdivision = 1

maxSubdivision = 9

}

PLANET

{

name = KerbinOcean

minDistance = 6

minSubdivision = 1

maxSubdivision = 7

All you have to do is make these changes:

}

PLANET

{

name = KerbinOcean

minDistance = 3

minSubdivision = 1

maxSubdivision = 6

Do the same for Eve and Laythe as well and most of the lag caused by the oceans rendering should be decreased.

Hope this helps! Feel free to comment, and report any problems.

Edited July 29, 2013 by DVGamesInc

[mythbusters844]

THIS....THIS....increased my FPS SO MUCH! It was taken from a meager 2-4 FPS when flying a spaceplane to 10! Just one question: What happens if you decrease the minDistance even more? Seems like it will decrease lag even more.

EDIT: Yes...but if you decrease the settings (min distance to 2, max subdivision to 3 I think...)enough this will happen:

Edited July 30, 2013 by mythbusters844

[astropapi1]

What does this do? how does it look after it?

[painking]

^.

What is specifically happen when I do this? If I were to wager a guess I'd say it's reducing the draw distance for the surface/ocean tiles and increasing the size of each individual tile or something? I do play at a fairly low res so the surface textures are all rendered as repeating tiles with slight coloration differences.

[DMagic]

This is great, and helps a lot with relatively weak GPUs. But it should be noted that the settings file has three sections for terrain. Each preset (low, default, and high) has it's own section in the settings file. So if you want to keep terrain on high, you have to scroll down a bit more to get to the "High" preset values.

The simplest way is just to change all of the them.

Just open the settings.cfg file, push Ctrl+F, and search for ocean. This should bring you to the first ocean terrain setting value, for "kerbinOcean" under the "name = low" list. Just go down the list and change all nine ocean values as described above. Then you should be good regardless of what terrain preset you choose in the KSP, in-game, settings menu.

[localSol]

Thanks, this does help. My point of reference was starting a new sandbox game and looking at KSC without moving, with normal shadow settings, best rendering quality and high textures at 1280x800 on a Radeon 6850 1GB Barts Pro. Doing this increased my frame rate from 30, to 34 or 35 in default (increase of about 15%). Regular low detail is higher at about 39 fps in the same reference point, but default land terrain definitely looks better than low, and I couldn't tell a difference with whatever ocean terrain might be because I guess this only changes what's underwater. I use a lot of mods though also, which has me confused as to why this helps me since my GPU is newer and faster technology-wise than my CPU. In any case I'm very glad to know about the settings file.

[Adam Novagen]

Possibly one of the most useful things I've ever seen, thanks a mil! This ought to be sticky.

[Captain Sierra]

To answer people asking what it does, the mindistance parameter changes the ever-pesky 160km loading distance on Kerbin's oceans to something smaller and more reasonable (at least if I understand it correctly). now, subdivisions, IIRC, changes how the oceans are drawn and tweaking this too much may cause Bad Things^TM.

[Persa]

I just figured out you can create more presets under TERRAIN{} other than the low, default and high presets.

EDIT:

What I did was copy the default and high presets and pasted them after the end of the high preset. Then I renamed them to testdef and testhigh so I could tweak them separately without touching the original settings.

Here is a pic:

(this was before I renamed to testdef)

Edited May 15, 2014 by Persa
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