A brief overview on Warsow’s profiles feature

As ETR has announced earlier, Warsow 0.4 will contain new renderer features ported from the current Qfusion engine which Warsow is built on.

One of the most important principles of Warsow’s development is by gamers – for gamers, and of course there are a lot of different kinds of gamers, even in the current playerbase Warsow has got. This includes, but is not limited to, the hardcore gamer as well as the graphics enthusiast. Furthermore, Warsow does not require a gamer to own the most recent gaming rig and also be played well with a bit older computers.

As one can probably imagine, the announced renderer features are mostly focused on the latter kind of gamers with modern computers and a lot of CPU and GPU cycles to be spent in current Warsow releases.

While the former kind of gamer will most likely dig into forums, wikis and other sources of information in order to get a well performing Warsow on older machines, a casual gamer may not be willing to spend hours to find the right cvar settings to achieve a good gameplay.

Finally, this is where the profiles feature of Warsow 0.4+ gets into the game. All in all it is a set of preset graphic settings geared towards different groups of gamers. While there are only settings for graphics effects at the moment of writing, the system itself shall not be limited to this. Right now, the profiles contain different settings of (simple-)items, texture sizes, antialiasing, shadows and more. They do not affect the player’s video settings like resolution and refreshrate. Even though one might not find the perfect configuration settings for oneself, the profiles provide a good base on which one can fine-tune everything to one’s likings.

After all these – more or less interesting – words, I would like to show you the difference in the current gfx profiles (WIP, click to enlarge):

From Contrast to Extreme: Right to Left