Dynamix' Dave Moore sent along an email to add some info and corrections about the Starsiege TRIBES tweaks posted in the story that follows. Here's the scoop:

Just wanted to drop a note about the news items re: TRIBES OpenGL tweaks. Some of these are out of date since PC Gamer's articles are written (I believe) several months before actual publication, and this article seemed to be based on a version of TRIBES that included only beta OpenGL support (1.3 or 1.4). I thought I'd correct a few items that have been changed in later patches, and add some info on what some of the other flags do.

$OpenGL::Enabled and $OpenGL::overrideLights: Both of these are obsolete flags now, OpenGL is always enabled in the latest patches, and dynamic lights are always enabled. There is no longer any need to create a special autoexec.cs.

$pref::OpenGL::NoAddFade == false: This flag should always be false unless you are attempting to run TRIBES in OpenGL mode on a RIVA 128. This prevents the additive effects like the plasma bolt from fading slowly out, as the RIVA 128 lacks the [SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE], blending function. Because of some limitations in the TRIBES 3Space engine (and time constraints), we were unable to modify this to work with existing blending modes on the RIVA 128. (i.e., [GL_ONE, GL_ONE], with a constant color GL_MODULATE texture environment.)

$pref::OpenGL::NoPackedTextures == false: You should let the Options::Video setup for your card set this for you. (It probably will anyway...) This value should only be false on nVidia architecture cards. The packed format we choose is optimized for the RIVA 128/TNT/TNT2, and is not necessarily well supported on other cards. 3Dfx cards have trouble with this packed format evidently (the format takes a non-optimal path through their drivers).

$pref::waitForVSync: This flag has no effect on OpenGL, it exists only for Glide. We have no control over whether a SwapBuffers() waits for VSync or not in OpenGL, this is driver dependant. (You might check the advanced properties tab for your video card in the Windows Display Settings, this option is sometimes hiding in there...)

$pref::mipcap = 13: This has no effect on OpenGL in the latest patches, only on Glide. 9 is the last meaningful value for textures that shipped with TRIBES. Since we constrained ourselves to 256x256 textures for Glide support, textures can have at most 9 miplevels. This option is very useful for increasing Glide performance on 4/2/2 Voodoo2 and Voodoo1 cards though.

Overall, the tweaks from PC Gamer are quite good, and still relevant in the latest patches. OpenGL power-user types will find that the most effective speed modifications are in the pref::interiorLightUpdateMS and pref::dynamicLightDistance variables. (Particularly if dynLightDist is set to 0, and intLightUpdateMS is set to something ridiculous like 10000000.) $pref::OpenGL::Use32BitTex can give a rendering quality improvement on cards that support 32 bit rendering, though as noted in the PC Gamer article, this won't really help if your card is set to 16 bit mode.

...dave