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Author Topic: Video settings - what do they all do?  (Read 6177 times)

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Offline Guy

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Video settings - what do they all do?
« on: February 01, 2009, 10:33:17 pm »
When I launch Aquaria I can set a few video options: resolution, fullscreen, vsync and frame buffer effects. However, the Aquaria preferences file has a few more video settings than that. Here's what mine looks like:
Code: [Select]
<Video>
    <Shader num="0" />
    <Blur on="0" />
    <NoteEffects on="0" />
    <FpsSmoothing v="30" />
    <Parallax on="1 1 1" />
    <NumParticles v="2048" />
    <ScreenMode resx="1344" resy="840" bits="32" fbuffer="1" full="0" vsync="1" darkfbuffer="1" darkbuffersize="256" />
    <SaveSlotScreens on="1" />
</Video>

Shader num
What does this do? What are the possible values?

Blur
Enable some sort of blur, I guess, but what is it exactly and where would I see it?

NoteEffects
This one is easy: enable the wavy effects when singing.

FpsSmoothing
Quote from Alec: "Basically the FPS gets averaged over N frames to fix a slight skipping effect which happens on some computers". It can result in slight speed ups and slows downs now and then. Only applicable when vsync is on?

Parallax
Turn parallax on and off, obviously, but why three values? I'd guess one for each layer but there are 6 layers.

ScreenMode
resx and resy are obvious, bits I assume is colour depth, fbuffer does the wavy effects when swimming, full means fullscreen, vsync prevents tearing, darkfbuffer is some sort of frame buffer effect related to the dark layer but I'm not sure exactly what, darkbuffersize I have no idea.

SaveSlotScreens
Enable thumbnails in the save screen (without it you see a weird blue gradient). Turning this off does not make the save screen load any faster (which can be quite slow, at least on a Mac).