i wrote a small application to make X4 more playable on my system (GTX 960M, 2GB VRAM).
The new version works by messing with the game's different LOD levels (modifying .cat-files), resulting in lower-poly meshes being used even when the player is directly in front of an object, as well as changing the lowering the resolution of used textures and repacking them (modifying .dat and .cat-files).
This allows me to play the game for hours (instead of at most ~50 minutes).
The app allows you to set quality levels for the different moving parts:
I only suggest using this method if you're desperate to be able to play longer than 1 hour at a time (like me) and have the graphics set quite low anyways.
Some settings might have less impact than others, and there might still be textures / meshes i missed
that could be handled as well, so trying out different settings is encouraged.
- If you want to try different settings, you have to revert/restore your game to "vanilla" first
(e.g. using Steams function), you don't have to remove any mods though - The lower quality settings for textures are more "robust" (should produce no glitches at all) than those of the meshes, so try out lower settings for them
- Doesn't stick to savegames (not a mod), so no in-game progress is lost if you revert back to vanilla
- Modifying textures will set the game to "modified", so no venture mode
Please backup all *.cat-files in the game's folder (where X4.exe is located) before using the program (it will tell you to do that too). If you want to try different settings, you have to restore those backed-up files as well (no auto-restore or auto-backup is implemented, no config files are created)
License: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-3.0/
The app now uses a modified version of DirectXTexNet (.NET wrapper around the DirectXTex library) to handle the (compressed) .dds-textures used by X4. Both utilize the MIT license (included in the archives).
Update (new version 0.6.0):
- processing for textures (resolution reduction)
- calculation of reclaimed memory (not equivalent to VRAM)
- simulation: option to do a dry run (without modifying game files)
- (v0.5.1): fixed a bug (low ship texture quality), added new default settings
- (v0.6): fixed? invisible objects (meshes which were previously removed are now replaced by lowest LOD mesh)
- (v0.6): fixed a bug in the texture settings (wrong settings used for stations)
Source (C#): https://github.com/0albanana/LOWRES_X4
Virustotal scan of Binary archive (v0.6): https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/6d22e ... /detection
Regards,
albanana
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