Bet you never knew what this hubcap really looked liked.

Getting TDR
to looks its best.

No matter what the C2 community thinks.
TDR completely rocks and is ten times better then that lightless, smoothless, 8 wheel limit, 256x256 map size limit, 256 color limit, crawly' spewing piece of outdated crap.

(But the new C2 Advanced mod is pretty cool)

 

You like TDR but don't like the blurry textures, or you've made this great skin on a huge 512x512 map, slam full of detail; but as soon as you load your new texture in TDR its a milky mess, WTF ?!?!?!?.... if this is you, then you have come to the right place. The images below will show you some of the improvements this tutorial will teach you. At left is the game using the default render settings, in the middle is after a few changes have been made, and on the right is with the changes and the Force switch. Click each image to see the full size version.
Default settings - click to enlarge
Tweaked settings - click to enlarge
 Tweaked and -f switch - click to enlarge

Click each to see larger versions. Hit the back button to return to this page.

Torus Games made the 3rd installment of the Carmageddon series and upon its release, left many faithful players unhappy and clinging to its older cousin Carmageddon2. This is really not the fault of Torus Games. IMO the TDR engine is one of the most robust and powerful driving engines on the market .... but as with many cool features in several games, the powers that be (mainly SCI) made a choice to not give Torus Games the time to fully integrate these features, as well as not to document the additional features and felt it was not worth the trouble to fully explain these features to the TDR user base.

We are here to correct this short coming. We make some of the most advanced and creative vehicles found in any game and we want the people who download our vehicles to enjoy playing them as much as we enjoy making them .

We will be dealing with two switches TDR uses : the -s switch and the -f switch. When these switches are used correctly, the look and feel of TDR will improves greatly. The brightness/gamma issue will also be addressed, and it will not involve adjusting your monitor, but this will come at a later time.

Step 1 - Using the -s switch - Edit your TDR shortcut to include the -s switch in order to get the setup screen, If you need to make a shortcut, right click on the game's exe file, and tell it to create a shortcut(s).

When you right click the shortcut, select properties. It will look something like this -

Editing the properties of a shortcut

Notice in the target window that the -s has been added behind the tdr2000.exe. Do not hit find target or apply, just add the -s and hit OK. If you cant get the shortcut to work (users who are not administrators on there boxes might have this problem) you will need to make a batch file. This is nothing but a text file that has the path of the EXE file and the txt extension renamed to bat. Remember to add the -s to this path in your text file.

 

Now that you have edited your shortcut, double clicking it should bring up the following menu-

Start - this will start the game

Options - This is where you tweak game settings that are not available within the game menu system.

Profile - Run this when you first install the game to find the basic settings your computer will run the best at.

Close - This will close the program without starting the game.




 

Step 2- Adjusting the advanced features - Click the Options tab and the following window will appear.

Option tab for video Option tab for Audio - Replay and Gore tabs also have adjustments.

Click the Advanced>> tab to open additional video card adjustments (The settings shown below resulted in the improvements to the middle screen capture of Loaded).



Display Driver - This will only be different if you own an add-on video card like a voodoo card. for the purpose of this tutorial, leave it at Prinary Display Driver.

Render Device / Display Resolution - You have 3 render modes : HEL (Hardware Emulation, aka: Software), HAL (Hardware Acceleration), and T&L (Transform & Lighting). Go with T&L if possible. Its more efficient in memory to set your resolution to the same as your Windows desktop. Hopefuly your card can play TDR at higher resolutions.

Opaque Format - Usually you would set them all the same, but some cards can not handle this. Lowering Transparent Format to 16bpp will ease lower end video card woes, but at the same time lower the quality of textures with alpha channels. Rule of thumb : Higher is better.

Min. Filter, Mag Filter, Mip Filter - We don't know the reason for having 3 mip map settings in TDR, so set them all the same for now. We think one has to do with distance of the texture and the other has to do with angle of texture to camera, but this is somewhat of a guess. Setting Mip to None, and the others to Point will give you the look of playing C2 and increase video card performance. Anisotropic is the most expensive. Be sure to test all varations on your video card ( mix and match). Both Linear and Point give a real grainy look in most games, but TDR seems to look better. Play with these three options to get the best results with your video card.

Filter Transparency - We believe setting this makes the 8bit alpha go throught the same filtering as the other maps, but this is just guessing.

Depth Buffer - Choose the highest number possible. It will yield better results dealing with Z-buffer errors and alpha channel draw orders.

LOD Bias - This tells the game when to switch to the lower poly model. 99% of our cars do not use LOD (Level Of Detail). Adjusting this setting will improve card performance, but at the same time lower model quality.

Anti-Alias / Dither - Anti-aliasing blends the edges of the model making it fit better into the background (removes hard edges)... using the TDR version of FSAA will kill your framerate, and should not be used. If you want to use full screen anti-aliasing, use the settings of your video card (FSAA or 3D Anti-Alias under display properties, you might have versions for both DirectX and OpenGL. TDR only plays in DirectX). Dither is a way to reduce the color depth. When TDR generates a screen, it decides how best to fill a block of area, dithering comes in when that area exceeds the color direction of the block shown on the screen, in effect giving 16 bit a better closeness to 24 bit, but if you set TDR to 24 or 32 bit performance, then dithering is not used.

Pixel Fog / Triple Buffer - Using triple buffer will improve texture quality very little in TDR, but will hurt performance. Pixel fog is something ive never heard of (unless it has to do with a fog table), it may deal with how textures are seen thru smoke or other particles. if it is for a fog table, use your cards fog table setting (under advanced settings in the display properties)

Now that the video card has been adjusted, hit OK and return to the setup screen. You will then start the game to view the results. The menus in TDR is not sprite based, so you should see the changes within the menu system. This can save time because you should be going back several time to test all the different settings your card can handle. Believe us, you will be viewing some horrible settings before you get it fully tweaked, but that's OK. Keep returning to this option screen until you can get the best look possible and then go after good frame rates. If you have frame rate troubles, but like the look of your game world, try reducing the screen resolution to improve frame rates.

What this setup UI is doing is editing the TDR2000.gfx file. This is really a text file with all relevant information about your video system and settings. You can edited it by hand if you want, but clicking buttons is more fun then typing. If for some reason you mess up the settings in TDR to the point of the game NOT starting, you can delete the TDR2000.gfx file and the game will reset.

Step 3- Using the -f switch - Copy your TDR shortcut after you get the advanced setting worked out and replace the -s with the -f switch (the -s shortcut should be named TDR set-up, and the -f shortcut should be named Play TDR). You will add the -f just as you did earlier. If you had to make a batch file you will need to make a copy and edit the switches. What the -f switch does is force TDR to use the 512x512 texture maps. Using the 512 maps is very expensive in video memory. You should not bother with this switch unless you have one of the newer game cards that are on the market (GeForce, Radeon, Matrox G series, etc.). This switch might not work with Voodoo cards, but this has not been verified.

Using the -s sets up your card and updates the TDR2000.gfx file. Using the -f forces hi-res textures to be displayed. All that's left is playing the game and enjoying the eye candy.

Below are some additional screen captures showing the visual improvement done with these tweaks.... Enjoy !!

This drone is looking really good.
You can read the numbers
on the container !!!
Even words a great distance away
can be read.
Note the rivet detail on The Beast,
and the clean flames on surfcrate
TDR set up to look more like C2

Click each to see larger versions. Hit the back button to return to this page.

 

 

This tutorial was made by CADster, and Should not be copied without permission.  You may use Links to this tutorial, as long as you provide information about it's creator on your website.  Torus and SCI are copyrighted and are not being misused.