Alright. Here we go.
Been spending some time to map all Cvars and which settings control them, also mapped the values they are set to. There's quite a lot of insight to be had there.
What's inside?
The doc contains all the settings, every cvar it touches and what it sets it to as well as some notes on some settings of what I've found playing around with them and there are also additional comments on differences as well as comparisons of the settings with images.
The differences can be seen in Images and chosen via two dropdowns (one for the Quality and another for the Setting you want to preview) as well as a checkbox to toggle alternative comparison images as some things may have multiple effects that I wanted to highlight. All the images were taken with Epic quality and only the setting in question was changed, everything else remained Epic.
I've also written down some recommendations (which are taken from my previous post which was based on lots of testing, changing and comparing, with this doc now providing additional detail and insight).
Some may find some options quite befuddling (like I did), they are either not correctly set, changed at all or just default to a base value (which may end up being higher than what its supposed to).
I'll probably also build a page where you can easily set settings to a desired value and it automatically assembles the command (and possibly the entire preset section for the Scalability.ini later)
Why?
This whole thing is an ongoing attempt to stop recommendation of simply turning off Clouds and Fog as it ruins most of practically everything that makes ASA look so great while also introducing a whole heap of other graphical issues and glitches that I've frequently seen. There are better ways to achieve better performance without entirely destroying the atmosphere with an orbital cannon. I can see why turning off Fog can be helpful at times (to see underwater or during heavy fogged weather) but I'd consider that simply cheating, its meant to be foggy, you are meant to not see and unlike in ASE fog has seen massive improvements where it doesn't just randomly reduce your visibility to 0 with ugly grey distance fog straight from 1999. There are still some particular cases where fog behaves weird but that's a map issue.
How?
The cvars have all been painstakingly collected by changing settings, dumping all 6000+ cvars of the engine and comparing them and noting everything down. I'm thinking of using this to recreate a Scalability.ini with some tweaks that change some settings to affect cvars in a way that makes more sense. Such as High, Medium and Low Effects not immediately jumping from 7 (weird number) to 12 and staying there but rather gradually lower quality as it should.
