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With Season 13, A Shiny Character and Uniform, how do I turn it off?
gerwalk0769
Member Posts: 1,095 Arc User
With the update my toon and uniform are textured and very shiny leading to lagging video performance. How do I turn the new visual effects off?
Thanks
Thanks
Joined STO in September 2010.
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None of them worked.
In prior releases, I set the graphical options governing shininess to off.
I have set Reflective to off, but it changed nothing this time.
It was even the same on Tribble prior to the live release, I couldn't disable it there either.
I am finding this irksome because everything looks like it was dipped in high gloss varnish.
I preferred the matt textures, it was more natural looking to me.
People don't have dermal layers like polished marble!
I'm hoping they address this issue soon, to give me back the non-glossy matt textures I had before.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I completely agree. The finish makes my toon look like a doll (not a good thing), and the performance is slower. Please provide a fix!
Issue is also being discussed over on reddit with dev feedback here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/67q2wh/bizarre_texturing_glitches_at_starfleet_academy/dgt8hyu/?context=3
If I understand correctly (and as reddit user/u/frtoaster suggested), the reason for this "new look" is that the "lighting quality" option has been removed and automatically set to a higher level than some of us had before. I really hope there will be some way for lighting 1.0 users who were running with low lighting quality to restore the same matte look we had before.
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
Reflection Off, Check.
Lighting 2.0 Off, Check.
Everything still dipped in varnish, Check.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Yes, none of my settings were changed at all. Most were off and set to minimum.
Thanks for posting. If it is being discussed on Reddit and not the official STO forums that is too bad.
@tilarta @salvation4
For posterity sake I just tried turning Postprocessing and Cimematic Focus (Depth of Field) both on. That seemed to improve some play performance for me. Although I do not like the veneer look as it makes my toon look old. I'd like the mate look back.
Here is the pasted Reddit suggestion by /u/froaster:
[–]frtoaster 2 points 27 days ago*
You could try changing the lighting quality setting in your gameprefs.pref file, but I don't know if the client still obeys that setting.
Try changing
PrefEntry GfxSettings.LightingQuality 10
to
PrefEntry GfxSettings.LightingQuality 0
You don't have to turn on SSAO to get rid of the transparency issue. Another workaround is to turn on both "Postprocessing" and "Cinematic focus (depth of field)".
I seriously doubt they will reverse the Season 13 graphics changes. They didn't even mention them in the patch notes; I don't think we were supposed to notice. My guess is that this was supposed to be a silent, behind-the-scenes code simplification. They're trying to simplify the graphics code by eliminating differences between how the game works with Lighting 2.0 turned on and how it works with Lighting 2.0 turned off. I noticed that they removed some options which didn't seem to do anything when Lighting 2.0 was turned on.
I couldn't find that line in the file to edit.
I had to reinstall my client from scratch recently in a failed attempt to fix an unrelated bug.
So I am wondering if that line of code was only present in the older version of the file.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
I'm not sure at the moment but that could be the case. I seem to remember tweaking that file for a dx 9/ dx 10 graphics issue. I made the following tweak and my performance improved:
"You don't have to turn on SSAO to get rid of the transparency issue. Another workaround is to turn on both "Postprocessing" and "Cinematic focus (depth of field)".
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
You could always add that line to your gameprefs.pref file if it's not already there. Please note that the correct file for Holodeck is "Live\localdata\gameprefs.pref". Of course, there's no guarantee that the line will actually do anything; the client might ignore it now.
I think it worked, at least ingame:
Thanks for the tip.
I am puzzled as to why it doesn't have an effect on the character loadscreen.
I assume there are different settings controlling that.
To be honest, I am disappointed Cryptic took the matte option away from us and I had to go to gamepref editing to get it back.
Why would they assume someone would want to use this setting manditorily?
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
I don't think there's another setting. If you don't see a difference on the character selection screen, then it's likely hard-coded to use "High" lighting quality.
The devs consider the current appearance to be how the game is supposed to look. The "Low" lighting quality setting was provided for people with low-end computers. They never considered that some people might prefer it for aesthetic reasons. I used to run the game on "Low" lighting quality years ago, before I got a new computer, but that was for performance reasons.
As for why they would make this change now, I can only speculate:
Frankly, I find it surprising that GfxSettings.LightingQuality still works (at least outside the character selection screen). When they removed the "Low" shadows setting from the UI, the corresponding gameprefs.pref file setting (GfxSettings.DisableSplatShadows) stopped working as well.
EDIT: For reference, here are two posts that explain the unannounced graphics changes that came with Season 13. I had been tracking these changes since they first appeared on Tribble on March 15th.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/60kkxl/pc_alarming_gfx_ingame_control_settings/df7oz48/
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/comment/13197449/#Comment_13197449
@frtoaster
I opened the gameprefs file to change PrefEntry GfxSettings.LightingQuality 10 to PrefEntry GfxSettings.LightingQuality 0.
I had turned on both "Postprocessing" and "Cinematic focus (depth of field)" earlier, which helped with performance, and they remain on now.
However, PrefEntry GfxSettings.LightingQuality is set at 0. The shiny finish has remained since I turned Postp and Cinematic focus on. Is there any way to get the matte finish back? Thanks.
That's really weird. Turning on "Postprocessing" and "Cinematic focus (depth of field)" should decrease performance.
I'm not sure. Do you have "Lighting 2.0" turned on? Other than that, I can't really think of anything else that might be affecting it.
I was surprise that performance increased, as in it was smoother and less stuttering. Lighting 2.0 remains turned off.
I'm not sure what else it could be then. Sorry, I couldn't help you further.
I have both of those disabled, so it could be possible they are linked to overriding the text value in the file to bring shiny back.
And now I am thinking of this Decepticon.
Read the only word in her vocabulary and you will understand why.
I hope whoever implemented the graphical changes wasn't having the same thought processes........
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
@frtoaster You have been very helpful, thank you again.