Server, Graphics, and config

[asuviolinist]

Okay, guys, here's the thing:

I just got a new computer, and I want to start playing FFXI. I've been researching everything about this game, and I just have a few question for all players out there.

1. Which server should I join?? I want one that has helpful people, and lots of activity. I've read that some servers are more active than others. Please give your opinions on this.

2. Also, I would appreciate a step-by-step guide on how to set my config for the best possible graphics. I've been trying to find other posts to help, but none actually give suggestions on every setting, and more are unclear. Please be specific.
Enable MIP Mapping?
Texture Compression? Low, High, Uncompressed?
On-Screen Maps?
Enable bump mapping?
Environmental Animation?


3. In the resedit config, is there a higher resolution than 2560x2560?

Thanks all:
Roby

PS - I hope to be on FFXI by tomorrow (Saturday).

[Lunaryn]

Re: Server, Graphics, and config

2. Also, I would appreciate a step-by-step guide on how to set my config for the best possible graphics. I've been trying to find other posts to help, but none actually give suggestions on every setting, and more are unclear. Please be specific.
Enable MIP Mapping?
Texture Compression? Low, High, Uncompressed?
On-Screen Maps?
Enable bump mapping?
Environmental Animation?


3. In the resedit config, is there a higher resolution than 2560x2560?

Enable MIP Mapping is designed to help get a better quality/performance tradeoff on lower-end systems. It causes the texture resolution to decrease the further away from the camera an object is. Technically an integer setting (higher values means faster resolution drop-off), but the only values you can get without editing the registry are 0 and 1. Just the normal 'on' setting of 1 will cause a pretty fast drop-off; if you've got a good video card I would turn this off, and if you do use it set the "background resolution" setting as high as you can afford to; you'll see marked quality degredation on even fairly nearby objects unless your background resolution is much higher than your overlay resolution.

Texture Compression: I can't speak to this in much detail other than that I think compressed textures require less video memory but are lower quality?

Enable bump mapping is designed to improve texture quality on higher-end video cards. Whether or not it does is highly dependent on your card/driver IIRC. You'll need to test this yourself and see if you like the results. You probably won't see much difference unless your "background resolution" setting is fairly high.

Environmental Animation: I think this controls things like weather effects? I wouldn't set this to off since weather effects can be disabled in-game as needed, but I usually don't bother with Smooth.

Resolutions: If you're using FFXI's config, the only permitted settings for Background Resolution are 256x256, 512x512, and 1024x1024; for modern cards and displays even the highest of these is woefully inadequate, so you'll want to regedit this to your liking. Overlay Resolution is limited to display resolutions your display supports, for the sake of fullscreen support; if you only intend to use Windowed mode you may want to set this to something non-standard via regedit.

There are no inherent limits to resolution in regedit, but keep in mind the following caveats:
If you're using fullscreen mode, Overlay Resolution must be a mode your monitor/card/OS can support. Only the values that would normally appear in FFXI config are valid, and for DFPs you'll always want to use the highest available (for CRTs there are some advantages to using lower resolutions, especially if your drivers allow you to force a higher refresh rate on mode changes).
If you're using windowed mode, Overlay Resolution needs to be smaller than your desktop resolution; by how much is a matter of preference. I find that 960x600 is a good tradeoff between image size and window manageability on a 1440x900 DFP (note that you'll need to adjust the aspect ratio in-game if your overlay resolution isn't a 4:3 mode).
Background Resolution should be set equal to or higher than Overlay Resolution unless this causes a performance degradation. Note that different cards may have different needs here; lower-end/finicky cards may only work when the resolution is a perfect square whose length on a side is a power of two (e.g 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, 4096x4096), whereas higher end. more flexible cards can deal with any value here. A decent conservative compromise that will probably work with most cards and is decent enough for most DFPs in fullscreen is 1536x1536 (1536 = 2^9 * 3). I personally recommend a square resolution here rather than for instance using the same as overlay; textures won't always be rendered in the screen's own orientation, and the internal math is probably cleaner for a square buffer.