Planetside 2: Night Vision

  Everyone who likes playing FPS games is or was at some point a military enthusiast so the concept of Night-Vision isn't something new, but for those that do not understand its concept here is a simple explanation.

  Humans can only see a small spectrum of light that we call "visible light", so basically NV compensates the lack of visible light by allowing us to see other light frequencies such as Infrared and ultraviolet.

   Some interesting facts about Night Vision:

• Most NV images/films are shown as green images because the human eye can differentiate more shades of green than any other color, giving us a clearer image.
• Infrared light goes through some types of clothing making them semi-translucent.

In the game

  Night vision in the game tries to mimic Real night vision by changing illumination values according to its distance, meaning the closer you are to your target the brighter it will become to the point where it will become plain white/green.

  There are three types of NV in the game: Basic(vehicles only), Infra-red (infantry only) and Thermal(vehicles only). Both vehicle NV types have much bigger range than the infantry IR-NV.

Basic and Thermal Night Vision test video:

  As you can see from the video, the only difference between the basic Night-Vision  and the Thermal is that the basic one tints your screen with a green color and has a slightly bigger viewing range, the Thermal on the other hand makes targets a bit more visible but costs much more to unlock, making the basic NV the most used optics enhancement.

Problems with the Night-vision

   I have two complains about infantry Night Vision in Planetside 2. One thing is that as you can see in the image bellow the cross-air color is black, considering that everything beyond the range of the NV is black as well you can see how that may pose as a problem, many have complained about this since beta and nothing seems to be done about this.

  Another problem with the infantry NV is that since the game tweaks the illumination over the textures to create the Night Vision, it makes it unusable in the Esamir continent because it's a glacier type map thus everything is already white, this makes near impossible to distinguish white silhouette of players from the white background as shown in the image bellow.

Thanks for reading, good luck and have fun!

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Planetside 2: Increase your FPS

  Several of us gamers who still use older PCs struggle to get decent FPS(frames per second) in newer games, in my case I just don't have the finance to get a new CPU since it would also require me to buy a motherboard and because of that I'm stuck with my old dual core.

  Don't get me wrong I have no problems what so ever playing most games, as long as they are not  CPU intensive, the problem is that MMOs tend to require more CPU than GPU since its the CPU who deals with the number of players on the screen and what they are doing... unfortunately MMOs is most of what I play now a days so I had to find something that would improve my Planetside 2 frame rate without impacting my financial situation.

  Open your UserOptions.ini located in the game folder and change these values:
(for steam users: ...\Steam\steamapps\common\PlanetSide 2\)

[Rendering]
GraphicsQuality=2
TextureQuality=3
ShadowQuality=0
RenderDistance=-1.000000
Gamma=0.000000
MaximumFPS=40
UseLod0a=1
VSync=0
OverallQuality=-1
LightingQuality=0
FogShadowsEnable=0
EffectsQuality=0
TerrainQuality=0
FloraQuality=0
ModelQuality=0
ParticleLOD=0
MotionBlur=0

  This will give you the lowest settings possible(even lower then the one you can choose in-game), with the exception of the "graphicsquality=2" which is needed to be able to see stealthed infiltrators, otherwise they would just be completely invisible.


  The "RenderDistance" is -1 by default which means the game will select an appropriate range depending on its performance, if you change this value(I've read people talking about setting it to 10000) its should also increase your performance, the problem is that if you set it too low you may end up being shot from players who are not showing on your screen(mainly snipers and vehicles).

  Windows has the habit of parking some CPU cores and not always unparking them very effectively, this may(or may not) influence performance while gaming, this feature however can be disabled allowing your CPU to be ready for maximum performance all the time with the following program:

 instructions and download link

Warning:
  Unparking your CPU cores may(or may not) increase its heat generation, while not a problem for desktop PCs(unless you are having heat problem to begin with), notebooks/laptops usually suffer from airflow problems by design making them very susceptible to heat problems which may lead to reduced life expectancy of the overheated parts, so use it at your own risk.

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Planetside 2: beta keys

The last few weeks I've been playing Planetside 2 which is a large scale FPS game that's going to be released on the 20th of this month. Last weekend they added a large patch with lots of changes and content, so I received a few keys in the mail which want to share with the readers:

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