Some cool on-the-fly resolution adjustments

[Shenanigunner]

This may be of use to only some players, but I thought it was worth posting.

 

CoX has some nifty screen and resolution slash commands that work from within the game, not requiring restart. You can change your physical screen resolution on the fly, and within that, the rendering scale... and independently on X and Y axes, to boot.

 

Since playing with these commands can leave your screen unreadable, it's essential that you first create a couple of binds - NOT MACROS - to reset things:

/bind SHIFT+F8 "screen YOURX YOURY"
/bind ALT+F8 "renderscale 1"

In that first, set YOURX and YOURY to your current, working screen resolution (1600 1200, 1920 1080, etc.) These keys should fix things if you get a messed-up screen.

 

You may also want to save your current window layout with /wdwsave so that you can restore it with /wdwload. These changes will make a mess of your UI layout.

 

Now... use /screen to reset your physical resolution as desired:

/screen 1024 768

...or whatever. It's NOT RECOMMENDED to enter values not supported by your video card/monitor. And Shift-F8 will fix things if you screw up.

 

More useful is the /renderscale set of commands. These let you change the actual graphics scaling within your current physical resolution. The argument range is from >0 (any value greater than zero, including absurd settings like 0.005) to 1.0, or full physical resolution.

/renderscale 0.5 

...will switch the rendering to 50% of full screen resolution.

 

I don't know if they're very useful, but /renderscalex and /renderscaley can be used to set horizontal and vertical scaling independently. You may find, for example, that the game looks fine with 100% horizontal scaling but 50% vertical scaling. Experiment. (And with the safety of Alt+F8, mess around with very low settings, 0.1 to 0.001, just for the hoot.)

 

So what's the use? Probably mostly for players on systems with older or marginal video subsystems. If you're running at a lower physical resolution than you like because the game bogs down in busy settings, you can now run at full res most of the time, and step down for busy public areas or mission battles.

 

So once you're done messing around and making your alt's world a smeary mess, consider the following bind set, substituting the values you've found optimal:
 

/bind F8 "screensize YOURX YOURY"
/bind CTRL+F8 "renderscale 1"
/bind ALT+F8 "renderscale 0.5"
  ----or---
/bind ALT+F8 "renderscalex 0.5$$renderscaley 0.75"
/bind SHIFT+F8 "screensize 1280 1024"

... so F8 and Ctrl-F8 will fix/restore things, and Alt-F8 and Shift-F8 will set lower, higher-performance settings. Adapt bind keys as preferred.

But again, using macros for these is NOT recommended... you may not be able to see the screen well enough to click them!

 

Edited December 13, 2020 by Shenanigunner