That's a really good question to start with

So when making a game specific video the first thing that I always research is what

engine is the game using because there's a lot of

standardization in the industry

Well, it's very common for most of the big games that are coming out to be on

five or six major engines, especially because

up keeping an engine, a custom engine, has become such an expensive task that most studios just

license some other engine to use

and

often that means that, if there's a moving or modifying community, if there's a community of people who are examining

previous games of the same engine there's a lot of things that you can learn from that that you can use -- even in older versions

of the engine. Very often when a new game comes out

which is the first game in a new version of an engine

the first thing that I will do is like research developer documentation

for the previous version of the engine because they tend to be a lot of things that still cross over

Traditionally, a good number of PC games store the variables that the game

uses to set up its graphics in a series of files. If you are lucky and these files are user reachable

and that means that you can play around with them

Most engines have a dev console

Like the Linux terminal like any console that you would think

Most of the time it is not user reachable

Sometimes it is so you just have to press the right letter and it comes out

In older games it used to be always reachable, but sadly it's become a less common thing

and, from there, It's a matter of experimenting. OK, like... let me let me let me find a very specific example

Frostbite, which is the engine used by the Battlefield games

Battlefield games still allow user access to the console

So a new Battlefield game comes out. First thing I do is I know there's a variable that you can add to the launch

commands of the

exe that enables that

developer console, and I start the game and I press the tilde button and it opens the console and then look ok

Let's see if there's autocomplete and I will start writing things and see if it's out of completing comments to me like like ok

If I press tab, does it auto-complete it to me? Okay

so using that I will search if there's a command like "list all"

"list command variables" or something to see if I can get a dump of

All the things that are inside there that I can play around with

if not, then it becomes a very painful process of going "a" and then

pressing tab and autocomplete and see what comes out, and like taking

screenshots and documenting all the little variables that are inside

And then from the names of the variable experimenting

trying to guess which ones are the ones that have to do with graphical fidelity, or graphic rendering in general

and start changing values see if they can be changed in runtime, see if those

values I can put in a certain file, and they will read them, and see what changes the game

A lot of it is guesswork

but once you sort of figure a certain engine, a lot of the games on the same engine thing tend to do something similar

For Metal Gear Solid 5, that's probably my favorite most proud case

Metal Gear Solid 5 runs in something they called the Fox engine, and that engine wasn't made for PC, and you can often tell

When an engine wasn't made for PC because it has no configuration files this all like a black box. It's all super contained

But I really really like this game and I really wanted to make a video about it. So I was exploring what to do and

I came through

The game had a pretty big modding community. There were people making like model swaps

There were people introducing like new weapons in the game through mods, and I kept telling myself like OK

But how did they figure this out, like how they did this? So I started doing some detective work

and this mod is

taken from this mod that is taking from this mod that I

started digging digging digging and found the first mods of the game and reverse google search them and

trace them back to like a couple of forum posts

So I searched that entire forum thread, and went through like the first post

and started reading them and it was a post about like the performance of the game

but halfway through like post 300 or something

someone figured out how

how they game encrypted its files and

created like a set of commands that you could do to unencrypt them

and someone made a tool about it and people started experimenting a modding with it

And I remember finding this very specific post of someone who went

"Hey, I unencrypted the files."

"I realized there's this folder here which has a bunch of Lua scripts"

which are what the game runs every time you change a graphical setting so and this is often how games do it like when you set

shadows to low

The game will search up a script and it will be like ok shadows to low means that this resolution

set to this this resolution set to this and this draw distance is set to this so they have this on different pockets and

I remember seeing that and being like oh, but now that I have access to this file

I can change what that script does and I could instead of

Lowering the resolution of shadows. I could make them not draw shadows at all and I started doing this sort of thing and

created basically a

Script that you could put in

Replace the normal script of the game and it will basically like not draw shadows and use a lower resolution

Texture than what it usually will do and it will be immediately obvious why the developer didn't do it?

because it really screw up with the

Dynamic lighting system of the game. Oh, but it before it was like a thirty five performance game. So yeah, that was amazing

I remember dude. I was so proud of that

I'm putting a video about it and someone else took what I did in the video and created a mod

Which was called like the potato metal gear mod or something in retrospective

I wish I who could have thought of that and I could have published the mod instead of him

But yeah

That was that was an interesting contribution that I could do to that community and and I was a very fun process like vegan

figuring out how to unencrypt it and seeing all those files there and play around with them that

Done it that always makes my day. So it was really fun the Far Cry games run on

Can't remember the name of the engine they use but it's the same one for all the Far Cry games

it's just different versions of the same engine and

It has configuration files that I read everything in XML. So I thought to myself

oh, you can just probably find things there and change them, but it wouldn't really read it anything and

I could not do like a really good video on several or most of our games for a while

So I consulted with my discord community and someone

Reminded me that I think Far Cry 3 or 4 has a decent modding community

So altogether, we started looking through the documentation of the modding community

It had a bunch of encrypted configuration scripts that as most games do

Execute when you setup and the specific settings and people were putting around with those

so I started trying to basically what I did with Metal Gear and figured it out if I could replace them and

Some very bold person for my discord just decided to copy all the variables from those hidden encrypted

configuration files copy and

paste them on the normal XM user reachable XML

And the game read them all

like the game read all the variables that were not supposed to be on that file perfectly flawlessly and

From that discovery we were able to for example more

dramatically modify the draw distance of different elements of the game so you will have enemies

three meters in front of you and they will not be rendering and you can like

It was obviously very impractical but it was something that you could play around with for extra performance

And from that we made some interesting discoveries

so an LOD system in video games is

basically, and I'm in a nutshell because it's a very big topic is

When you create

different

versions of the models inside games that have different quantities of polygons or different quantities of details and

then with low detail ones you display far off into the distance and if that things gets close to you you

Gradually replace them for more details. That way you can serve the PCs resources and

Player doesn't really have to notice that that is happening. But those usually are set to distances

So X quantity of pixels you load a different model

Double X quantity of pixels you blow a different model

when you play around with that interesting things happen, for example in the Far Cry games a

few different objects seem to be in different pockets in

Terms of if they are drawn or not or if the use of lower version model or not

I think higher priority buckets or to run farther which are critical things that the

Player needs to notice and not so important stuff tends to be not rendered at the same distance

Now there's the game called Far Cry primal

Which a happens during the Stone Age. We noticed that the clothing of the

Caveman was in a different pocket

That the cavemen themselves and that means that if you set a really low value of your distance

If you were a certain distance from the caveman

They will be completely naked until you get close to them and the clothes will render

so you will see them completely naked at a distance and we'll try to get clothes and the clothes and the clothes will appear and

It's a makes you wonder how they sort of

created this game, but

Those are the interesting things that happen when you sort of play around with the inside variables of a game that you were not supposed

to reach in the first place and to their credit these

variables that the far cry engine reads directly from the user reachable XML

They have not been fixed to this day. The last game in the Far Cry franchise

Was released was for cry nuan and they just copied over the same set of variables that I've been using forever before cry video work

At the first try. So thank you for that far cry team. Thank you yourself. Please continue doing that

That is just very very fun that you can poke around in that eighty

Ninety percent of the work that I do is simply figuring out what are the variables that the game is loading?

when

You set up a graphical setting or when the engine is loading on the first time

trying to see where the names try to see where the maximum and minimum values and

Trying to see if you can make them breathe and the main values and see what happens from there

it would be I think will be healthier for the entire PC gaming ecosystem if we get more and more games that allow

that sort of control over most particles a good example of someone who does that is it so

the new newest versions of the eat engine used by the

latest doom and Wolfenstein games

They have an user which able developer console

it's you set over a

Variable and the lunch comments of the game and you press tilde and it opens up in most games and from there you can not

Only play with a lot of the graphical settings

But also activate things like god mode or infinite ammo like you can use it for actual cheats

but what I have always liked about this games is

That if you open up the dev console and you type anything

you get a message that says you have enabled dev mode and you will not get any achievements on the game like

And I think that's a fair deal. You can play around with the game. All you want you can a

Custom settings you can play around with your graphical settings in no supported ways

The game is just making sure you're not cheating your way into

Achievements seems like a fair deal to me and I and I wish more games that this because this is something that you can

all other players can get a lot of benefit out of and

III have discovered a couple of things on the on that that console that makes both the new doom and the new Wolfenstein games

way more accessible and low-end pcs

So that is a tradition that I that I hope it continues

the worst cases are the games that are

Complete just bad ports from consoles

they will try to grab the code base from the console and

Slight adapted as best as possible with limited resources to PC

That means not many graphical settings. That means often that you will find quirks

There's two two examples come to mind

near automata and

the latest Monster Hunter game

Both of this games and this is not me saying it this is that was a community discovery

what are people started poking around the games and

started

realizing that the games use timing systems that are very common for consoles, but when you use that sort of

System to calculate your timing on a PC. It causes stuttering and

So when you notice stuff like that

you're like it's a little bit irritating, especially because

There's a tool that the guy who did the discovery

Developed a tool that will in real time

intersect the calls that the game will be doing on the code and replaced them with calls that were more efficient for PC and

He has been he added a lot of different things to this tool that improved

it improved the CPU performance of monster hunter by a lot and that allow things like changing the global illumination for