comprehensive variables.txt thread

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Forum Index > StarCraft 2

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Xapti Canada. August 07 2010 15:51. Posts 2183

Profile #

Okay Hopefully this will be a source of even more variables.txt information, although at this point I have a pretty fair collection.

Feel free to contribute things you've learned. In fact it'd be be even better if you did experimentation yourself to help figure things out for everyone else. I will probably edit-in any contributions into this original post.
UPDATE: I did experimenting on my own and noticed that my computer will CRASH if I run SC2 with invalid variable.txt settings. It also may be the culprit (although I find it hard to believe) of my computer now being unable to boot with two video cards, even though they both work individually.

must-have setting
Everyone probably knows about this, but if your video card is fast, you should definitely enable this, since SC2 has no FPS limit by default, and will overheat video cards.
These values only REALLY matter if you don't have Vertical Synchronization (VSync) enabled, since Vsync will cap your FPS anyway.

Values can be changed to taste - a bit higher or lower than you desire, such as 60 for the GUI, and 80 for the game
Add the lines:

frameratecap=60 (In-game FPS limit)
frameratecapGlue=30 (FPS limit for the battle.net user interface)

Run Starcraft 2 at a custom resolution
This one is pretty simple, but some of you may not have realized it.

Add (or edit?) the following lines:

Width=X (X being the screen width you want in pixels)
Height= Y (Y being the screen height you want in pixels)

Disable all creep effects:
Creep becomes a texture. No more animations. Some competitive gamers may like this.

creepnormalmap=0
creepQuality=0
creeptrans=0

Ultra-high (extreme) graphics settings.
SOURCE
Extreme settings not available through GUI. Note, this runs EXTREMELY SLOW from what I heard, even on newer cards. The visual difference is almost ZERO in many cases, too.The major difference this does I think it make the shadows super-detailed. There's some other differences, but you don't notice them as much. I do not recommend this change to put in your variables.txt due to the performance cost compared to graphics boost.
Add the following lines:

GraphicsOptionOverallQualityVer7 [5] = 4
SSAO=1
SSAOBlockerLookup=0
SSAOOptimizedSampleDelta=1
SSAONoiseBits=1
SSAOEncodedDepth=0
SSAODepthDownSample=1
SSAOSmartBlur=1
SSAOBlurPasses=2
SSAOSampleCount=8
shadowmapsize=4096
TerrainTextureSize=4096

Performance AND good quality - tweak
SOURCEThis will maintain most of your current ultra settings,
but lower a few settings for a major performance boost. Note, this is designed to improve performance from ultra (highest) settings, in case you either want it to look different, or perform more smoothly.

hdr = 0 (Seems to lower color de-saturation of units, but also removes most of the glowing on most units. Also reduces but not completely eliminates the glossy/shiny look on models)
parallaxshadow=0
shadowmapsize=512 (shadow detail. You can also try 256 or 128.
softshadows=0
softshadowTaps=6
transparentshadows=0 (Major change for ATI Radeon cards I hear. cloaked units get normal shadows instead of transparent.)

Remove shadows
Completely removes shadows as far as I know. This is another competitive gamer performance change, but I think can just be done in the GUI?

shadows = 0

Untested, but obviously water effects:
This could be another useful improvement on some maps for competitive gamers. I have not tested these, and do not yet know what they do for certain, but here are what my values happen to be.

watercaustics=1
waterflipbook=0
waterreflection=1 (water reflections effect)
waterrendertargetformat=3
waterrendertargetsize=1024 (water quality I'm guessing)
watershadow=1 (shadows in the water? possibly shadows FOR the water waves?)

Show low-ground/pits/canyons/hide-fog
This makes the screen/gameplay-area SLIGHTLY "darker", since there is a small amount of fog on normal level ground, but the main thing you'll notice is all low ground (pits,canyons,etc.) that is normally unpathable (unless you specially edit it in the editor) will be visible, as the fog that normally covers it will disappear. Not sure if this increases or decreases performance, but it looks pretty cool IMO.
Add line:

fog= 0

Remove the glossy/shiny/slimy look on all models
If one sets hdr to 0 it will diminish the shiny/slimy/glossy appearance on all models, but models will also loose all glow effects. However, if one keeps hdr at 1, but sets spec to 0 you will loose the glossy look completey, but keep the HDR glow effects. Note that spec=0 considerably reduces the perceived detail level of many units (especially zerg).
Change lines:

spec = 0

Remove bumpy textures
This will remove normal map (bump map) effects on all models, including the terrain. It makes the terrain flat looking, but also removes the 3d look on all other textures that use it (pretty much every zerg unit, and not much else AFAIK). This affects the quality of zerg units' detail a lot, but makes the terrain a bit more clean looking.
modify the line:

normalmap=0

Unknown effects
Test these if you want. I have not tried them, so be careful.

halo=1
lowQualityMovies=0
preBlendedCreep=0
useLowqualitymodels=0

Requests
I am personally requesting if anyone knows how to remove all lighting in the game. This is an option in the editor (view>lighting), but I don't know it's variables.txt variable, if it even exists. Note it is NOT "lighting" or at least "lighting = 0" because I tried that and it crashed my computer.

Unrelated to variables.txt, but very useful if you want a visual boost:
This information is only relevant if you have an ATI Radeon card.

ATI has released updated drivers to enable Anti-Aliasing in Starcraft 2. Previously even forcing application to use AA would not work for Starcraft 2, but with the new driver, it can now be done. This will slow down your FPS considerably, so watch out.
It also improves performance in certain crossfire setups.

Here is the link to AMD's (ATI'S) download page or the new driver.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICat107aBetaDriver.aspx

nVidia cards could/can already force AA.

Last edit: 2010-08-07 17:30:59

"Then he told me to tell you that he wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire" — "Well, you tell him that I said that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on Jeopardy!"

wendellreport United States. August 15 2010 06:50. Posts 7

Profile #

I used Diffmerge to compare my \Documents\StarCraft II\Variables.txt file before and after switching the shader values from high to low. I've pasted below only the values that changed:

==============================================
Shaders=High, Lighting=High, Shadows=High

alphadepthWrite=1
aolight=1
deff=1
gamehdr8bit=0
GraphicsOptionLightingQuality=2
GraphicsOptionOverallQualityVer7[5]=2
GraphicsOptionShaderDetail=2
GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=2
hdr=1
lightingLevel=2
lightmap=0
lightmapcastshadows=1
localight=1
localShadows=1
normalmap=1
pixellight=1
shadowmapsize=2048
shadows=1
simplifiedCloaking=0
simplifiedShaders=0
soft=1
softshadows=1
spec=1
textureBasedFOW=1
waterflipbook=0
watershadow=1

==============================================
Shaders=Low, Lighting=Low, Shadows=Low

alphadepthWrite=0
aolight=0
deff=0
gamehdr8bit=1
GraphicsOptionLightingQuality=0
GraphicsOptionOverallQualityVer7[5]=4
GraphicsOptionShaderDetail=0
GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=0
hdr=0
lightingLevel=0
lightmap=1
lightmapcastshadows=0
localight=0
localShadows=0
normalmap=0
pixellight=0
shadowmapsize=512
shadows=0
simplifiedCloaking=1
simplifiedShaders=1
soft=0
softshadows=0
spec=0
textureBasedFOW=0
waterflipbook=1
watershadow=0

==============================================

What I'd like to do is make as few changes as possible to the high settings in order to make the game brighter and more colorful without losing graphical quality

-

its a miracle and nobody cares

mrkent United States. August 15 2010 08:55. Posts 160

Profile #

Oh excellent thread!

Is everything in the OP stuff you can just add to the .txt or do you need to change certain ones?

Predateur Canada. August 15 2010 09:22. Posts 79

Profile #

I have an ATI HD4850 and E8400 4ghz CPU and noticed the game put the graphics on Ultra by default.

It is okay on certain maps but on maps like " Twilight Fortress" the texture on the ground makes my game slow, some texture are different on the minerals and makes the game lag also in other maps.

Any idea what settings to lower to get a smooth experience with an HD4850, I'd like to have a mix on high and ultra settings, right now playing on all high settings.

Waiting for drivers 10.8 hopefully those will improve ATI performance in SC2 cause right now it is lacking comparing to Nvidia...

Thanks !

0tso Sweden. August 19 2010 21:25. Posts 66

Profile #

^
I have a E8400 @ 3,8 and if I remove post-proccessing the game runs much smoother without looking ugly.

driftme United States. August 19 2010 23:57. Posts 359

Profile #

On August 07 2010 15:51 Xapti wrote:

Unknown effects
Test these if you want. I have not tried them, so be careful.

halo=1
lowQualityMovies=0
preBlendedCreep=0
useLowqualitymodels=0

halo is the ring effect when you have a unit selected. There are two levels of this i believe. I will test when I get home, but if I am correct, you should be able to set them to: off, low (just the ring), high (ring+overlay). kinda nice to be able to set this separately from the other settings its tied to.

lowQualityMovies just makes your movies not HD. you can actually set that on the game settings screen.

not sure what preblendedcreep is.

useLowqualitymodels is kinda self explanatory. Its the setting that gets rid of unique models for units (take dark templars for example), and reduces the number of polys.

Xapti Canada. August 21 2010 17:25. Posts 2183

Profile #

On August 15 2010 06:50 wendellreport wrote:+ Show Spoiler +
-

Yeah I was too lazy to do something like that, so thanks for the useful comparison.

I think everyone (well, a lot of people) would want the game brighter and more colorful, but I don't know of a way to do this really without sacrificing things as-of now. (bad implementation of their graphics settings and/or variables.txt)

I'm trying to figure out how to "disable lighting" (which doesn't seem to completely disable all lighting). This is a feature that you can do in the map editor, but I don't know if it works in game (or how to do it if it can be done in-game). The only download to removing lighting is that the bottom of most units become rather dark, and some other anomalies (texture on sign doodads turn dark red, almost black).

Unfortunately, I have virtually no knowledge of how to analyze programs sch as the editor, and figure out how to implement that into SC2. I also have not heard word from Blizzard support (from my reply to their answer). I emailed tech support, and I got the most hilarious reply - he recommended THIS THREAD to me... yeah the one I made...
I also messaged a map-editor on youtube that did something funky with the game display, but not only did I not yet get a reply, but I don't know how much this would help, since it's only a custom map.

"Then he told me to tell you that he wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire" — "Well, you tell him that I said that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on Jeopardy!"

bellyfrog New Zealand. August 21 2010 18:45. Posts 71

Profile #

Run Starcraft 2 at a custom resolution
This one is pretty simple, but some of you may not have realized it.

Add (or edit?) the following lines:

Width=X (X being the screen width you want in pixels)
Height= Y (Y being the screen height you want in pixels)

Does this actually work for other people? I'm on a laptop running 1366x768, for some reason that resolution is not supported by Starcraft 2 in game options. So I tried changing the variables.txt to these values and saved it, it still runs at the 1260 resolution.

I have the latest version of my graphics drivers too. ATi Radeon Mobility graphics.

Liquid`Jinro Sweden. August 22 2010 05:27. Posts 32587

Profile Blog #

Does every patch reset the variables txt file? A while ago I added the
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60

lines to it, but now when I go look it isn't there anymore o_O (and I've looked at both variables.txt files)

tell the guy that interplanatar interaction is pivotal to terrans variety of optionitudals in the pre-midgame preperatories as well as the protosstinal deterriggation of elite zergling strikes - Stimey n Formerly FrozenArbiter

DrakanSilva Chile. August 22 2010 06:41. Posts 791

Profile Blog #

sorry for being a newbie, but shuouldn't the op put the adress line for the file ?
I know i will find it as soon as i start looking for it, but it would help a lot to have it right there at the front page :D

thanks for the info!

with my radeon 4850 i have som lag issues, it puts it all into ultra but its far from being playable at utltra...
for single player i go in high settings but for multiplayer i go medium, textures low... and my video card is burning :'(!

Last edit: 2010-08-22 06:51:59

e-Sport is about competition, but even more important, it's also about community.

javy_ United States. August 22 2010 06:47. Posts 1291

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On August 22 2010 05:27 Liquid`Jinro wrote:
Does every patch reset the variables txt file? A while ago I added the
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60

lines to it, but now when I go look it isn't there anymore o_O (and I've looked at both variables.txt files)

Mine is still there

♪～(￣。￣)

DeckOneBell United States. August 22 2010 07:00. Posts 526

Profile Blog #

Look around, it doesn't stay at the bottom necessarily, it might be pushed up in alphabetic order.

Last edit: 2010-08-22 07:01:09

Yaotzin South Africa. August 22 2010 07:40. Posts 4280

Profile #

On August 07 2010 15:51 Xapti wrote:
Everyone probably knows about this, but if your video card is fast, you should definitely enable this, since SC2 has no FPS limit by default, and will overheat video cards.

If your video card overheats it has inadequate cooling, period. Other than saving a bit of power there is no reason to turn on a frame cap with a properly cooled PC. Not that there's any harm either.

If SC2 is overheating your video card you should sort out your cooling.

mrkent United States. August 24 2010 05:06. Posts 160

Profile #

can you test variables.txt changes without restarting the game each time?

Also, anyone remember one of the first variable.txt threads from phase 1 of beta? I recall that one had a lot of useful info. Can't find it in search.

On August 22 2010 06:41 Drakan wrote:
for single player i go in high settings but for multiplayer i go medium, textures low... and my video card is burning :'(!

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=123488

Last edit: 2010-08-24 05:19:35

lololol August 24 2010 05:16. Posts 5197

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You may have done that during beta, and that would explain why it's not in the retail version of the txt.

I'll call Nada.

JavaBasher Canada. September 01 2010 08:18. Posts 1

Profile #

I'm having some issues with StarCraft 2 and im wondering if anyone could help me out. I'm wanting to have shaders on medium, but lighting and shadows on low. (Even though im unable to set shadows on low for some odd reason, the option wont show up).

So I would like to know what variables to change to make this work, thanks.

Last edit: 2010-09-01 08:18:35

Honk for brownies!!!

EonShiKeno United States. September 04 2010 07:48. Posts 104

Profile #

I just tested this one
"
Remove shadows
Completely removes shadows as far as I know. This is another competitive gamer performance change, but I think can just be done in the GUI?

shadows = 0
"

Didn't work for me.

Gunman_csz United Arab Emirates. September 04 2010 11:38. Posts 492

Profile Blog #

On September 04 2010 07:48 EonShiKeno wrote:
I just tested this one
"
Remove shadows
Completely removes shadows as far as I know. This is another competitive gamer performance change, but I think can just be done in the GUI?

shadows = 0
"

Didn't work for me.

It will only work if you have your shadowquality set to 1 and have shadows = 0

Began Starcraft journey on 5th May 2009

EonShiKeno United States. September 04 2010 14:10. Posts 104

Profile #

I added shadowquality = 1 along with shadows = 0 and it still isn't working. I copied all the text in the spoiler. Thanks for the help btw.

+ Show Spoiler +

Gunman_csz United Arab Emirates. September 04 2010 14:22. Posts 492

Profile Blog #

Sorry for not being clear before. Below are the settings which remove shadows for me.
GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=1
shadows=0

Make sure there is no space in between the command and the corresponding value.
example:
Shadows=0, not Shadows = 0

If you like to try out my setting(BTW we play on the same resolution so you are good to go):

1)Please make sure you backup your variable text before using mine.
2)My config is funky (textures don't load, so don't panic if the map is in plain 2tone color

+ Show Spoiler +

32bitshadow=0
alphadepthWrite=0
aolight=0
creepnormalmap=0
creepQuality=0
creepreflection=0
creepselfshadow=0
creeptrans=0
deff=0
deffspec=0
depthDisp=0
displaymode=1
displayunitstatus=Selected
dof=0
dragscrollspeed=1
fog=1
fogvolume=0
foliagedensity=0.000000
foliagequality=0
frameratecap=60
frameratecapGlue=30
gamehdr8bit=1
GraphicsOptionEffectsDetail=0
GraphicsOptionLightingQuality=0
GraphicsOptionModelQuality=0
GraphicsOptionMovies=0
GraphicsOptionOverallQualityVer7[5]=4
GraphicsOptionPhysicsQuality=0
GraphicsOptionPortraits=1
GraphicsOptionPostProcessing=0
GraphicsOptionReflections=0
GraphicsOptionShaderDetail=0
GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=1
GraphicsOptionTerrainQuality=0
GraphicsOptionTextureQuality[2]=0
halo=0
hdr=0
hdr8bit=1
height=1080
keyboardscrollspeed=1
lastDeviceId=1515
lightingLevel=0
lightmap=1
lightmapcastshadows=0
littrans=0
localao=0
localeidassets=enGB
localeiddata=enGB
localight=0
localShadows=0
lowqualitymodels=1
lowQualityMovies=1
mastervolume=0.500000
menubarclickable=0
motionBlur=0
mousescrollenabled=1
mousescrollspeed=82
mousewheelzoomenabled=0
MoviesSeen=1
music=0
MusicHeard=1
musicvolume=0.000000
normalmap=0
parallax=0
parallaxshadow=0
particlelod=0
particleobjects=0.000000
particleterrain=0.000000
physicsdensity=0
pixellight=0
portraits3d=0
preBlendedCreep=0
profanityfilter=0
reducemouselagenabled=1
refreshrate=120
reverb=1
ribbonlod=0
sampleFOW=0
shadowmapsize=512
shadows=0
showalerts=1
simplifiedCloaking=0
simplifiedShaders=0
soft=0
softshadows=0
softshadowTaps=0
sound=0
soundambience=0
soundambiencevolume=0.000000
SoundAutoDetectCPUCoreCount=4
soundchannels=64
soundeffectsvolume=0.450000
soundglobal=1
soundoutput=Speakers (Creative SB X-Fi)
SoundQuality=2
SoundResampler=NOINTERP
soundresponses=0
SoundSampleRate=44100
speakermode=Mono
spec=0
splatlod=0
targettexeldensity=0.000000
Teen=1
TerrainTextureHiResCacheSize=1024
TerrainTextureLowResCacheSize=1024
TerrainTextureSize=1
texQualityLevel=0
texSpace[2]=512
textureBasedFOW=0
toasts=0
transparentshadows=0
treadlod=0
unitcolorstyle=2
useLowqualitymodels=1
voicechat=0
voicechatsoftwaremute=1
vsync=0
watercaustics=0
waterflipbook=0
waterreflection=0
waterrendertargetformat=0
waterrendertargetsize=512
watershadow=0
width=1920
winkeydisabled=1
worldobjecttooltips=0

Last edit: 2010-09-04 14:31:37

Began Starcraft journey on 5th May 2009

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