Graphic settings problem

[cici001]

When away from home I am trying to run KSP on a low end laptop that suffers horribly from lag even with fairly small ships. To minimise the lag I can turn all the graphic settings down to minimal but I would like to know which slider controls shadows as I find it difficult to judge my landing without a shadow to warn me when I am getting close to the ground.

[KvickFlygarn87]

...shadows are probably on/off, so go ahead and pull the sliders.

Welcome to the forum.

[Dispatcher]

Not exactly the answer you are looking for, but make sure your craft has at least one light (plane landing gear have them built in). You can judge distance from land or liquid using that, regardless of whether or not you have shadows enabled.

[LostElement]

Well, if you don't mind addons then download Mechanicl Jeb. It has a surface information that will tell you exactly how high you are. Mechjeb is great, Its nice to have the orbital information the surface info. it can do more. Go check it out!

[KvickFlygarn87]

Lost: Or it can do the landing for you. And the ascent. And the transfer. And the circularization.

Flight engineer is less cheaty. Or, write a program for kOS.

[Ahmed]

try to off antialiasing, it works for my old machine and rise up FPS dramaticly

[Kasuha]

I have similar problem. I can see shadows, but only from really up close, a few meters above the ground.

On the other hand I am really afraid to overload my graphics card as it crashes my computer if it gets angry - which used to happen a lot with KSP. I really wish there was some more detailed description of what each of the settings does.

[sal_vager]

The "Render Quality" slider controls shadows, test how low you can set it and still get shadows, also you can reduce shadow induced slowdown by reducing the "shadow cascades" value

[SRV Ron]

If an XP laptop, be sure all other programs in the background, such as crapware, is turned off. Disconnect from the internet, disable wireless if you have it, shut down anti virus and other software. The less running in the background, the better.

Since KSP loads everything, the fewer mods, the better when you have limited memory. Otherwise, Windows will use the hard drive to swap data which slows down everything to a crawl.

[Kasuha]

Is this forum compatible with Chrome? When I click on "Reply with Quote" or "Reply" it displays some animated circles over that button and my mouse cursor turns to hourglass and nothing else happens regardless how long I wait.

Anyway.

Thanks for the hint, Render Quality Level indeed affects the distance from which shadows are visible. The minimum setting to have useful shadows is Good (I was using Simple). Unfortunately it also affects whole lot of other things, making my GPU temperature jump up 10 C right away.

I wish the shadow setting was separate. I don't care how nice my shadow is, if it was just a dark blob on the ground I'd be happy if only it was visible.

[Awaras]

Is this forum compatible with Chrome? When I click on "Reply with Quote" or "Reply" it displays some animated circles over that button and my mouse cursor turns to hourglass and nothing else happens regardless how long I wait.

The forum is currently a little bugged. The easiest workaround is to right-click on the reply button and choose 'open in new tab'.

[Gus]

As Dispatcher said, add a light, although it might slow things down too. Also, if you use two or more lights you can point them differently so they converge at 10 meters or whatever, just like the Dambusters.

[Zaeo]

currently Ajax is disabled, which disables the standard reply button. Only the quick reply works atm.