"Disabled" options in setup

Started by Crimson Wizard, Thu 12/09/2013 13:17:53

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Crimson Wizard

I found that AGS setup can disable certain fields (checkboxes) and filters if their names are written in the cfg file in "disabled" section.
For example:
Code: text

[disabled]
speechvox = 1 // this disables "Use speech" checkbox
16bit = 1 // this disables "Downgrade 32-bit game to 16-bit" checkbox
filters = 1 // this disables filter selection, e.g. only preset filter can be used
StdScale2 = 1 // this removes "nearest neighbour x2" filter from the list


These settings may only be put into cfg by hand; Editor does not provide any means to set them.
What are practical uses for these? Have anyone ever used this opportunity?

dbuske

Do you have a complete list of options that can be disabled, and maybe enabled?
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Crimson Wizard

#2
Quote from: dbuske on Sat 14/09/2013 19:41:03
Do you have a complete list of options that can be disabled, and maybe enabled?
I gave the full options list above. These are really only ones which may be disabled.

Also, the filter names that can be disabled are:
Code: text

// nearest-neighbour filters:
StdScale2
StdScale3
StdScale4
// anti-aliased nearest-neighbour:
AAx2
AAx3
AAx4
// Hq filters:
Hq2x
Hq3x




I am still wondering why would someone want to disable any of those. Why would you?

E: I am asking, actually, because I am rewriting setup for "custom resolutions" build I am making now (the original code is really bad), and I am considering removing unneeded stuff. So I want to know if someone ever used this "disable" feature, and why should anyone need it at all.

Radiant

#3
Actually, now that I've found out about this, we'll definitely be using there.

A low-resolution (320x200) game is supposed to look pixelated in a certain way. With a nearest neighbor filter, it still looks like it should; but with an AA filter, it looks blurred. I'm sure this depends on drawing style, but certain artists (e.g. ours) strongly dislike the blurred look, and hence appreciate an option to disable AAs. I don't see the point in disabling the 2x and 3x ones individually, but disabling all AA filters is appreciated.

(edit) and the HQ filters, too.

Crimson Wizard

There might be a way to define a "filter family" instead of disabling separate filters (besides, the list of supported filters may change in the future) - this is something that could be added later.

I just want to point out, just in case, that "advanced" users may easily re-enable the filters by editing config file.

AGD2

We've used this section to disable filters in several of our games (i.e. remove the option from winsetup.exe completely). The reason is because certain filters resulted in significant slowdown (such as the DirectDraw5/2x filter), to the point that it threw off the timing of some game events which were timed to music.

Another reason was that the blending modes of certain filters destroyed the pixel art of the characters, making them look as if someone applied a Photoshop filter over the game. There's also the fact that many of these filters (3x, 4x etc.) cause "unsupported resolution" error messages upon start-up. For commercial games or titles that otherwise attract a large number of players, this increases the amount of error reports coming in and thus, the amount of time needing to be invested in technical support. So in this case it's better to disable some of these options to keep things manageable.

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