This may help you guys.Some tweaks may or may not help you depending on your connection, how your ISP routes you and ever changing Steam updates. But here are a few:
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Maximize your Video Card:
Click Start/Control Panel/Display/Settings/Advanced
Then Click onto your Video Card. You are looking for either Open GL or Performance Settings. Turn your Vertical Sync to Always Off.. This will increase your Frames Per Second (FPS)
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Connection Help:
How to do a tracert:
In windows, hit the start button, programs/accessories/Command Prompt.
type tracert and the ip address that you want to trace (for our Tx Reg Maps Server, ex. tracert 63.210.145.174)
Copy and paste the info after the tracert is done into a Notepad file and send it to your ISP.
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Making a demo:
In console, type "record"
If you want to name it, type record nameofthefile, ex record hacker
To stop the demo, just type stop
To play the demo: in your console, type playdemo nameoffile.dem
Ex. playdemo hacker.dem
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Recommendations
Hardware
Before you even turn on your computer, you have to make sure that you at least have parts from the 21st century in it, hehe! For DoD, make sure that you have at least a Pentium 4 and 1 gig of RAM. RAM is so cheap nowadays that you should be able to afford this nice little upgrade. Make sure that you buy the correct RAM for your computer and check to see how many slots you have available on your motherboard.
I started with 512 of RAM and DoD took about 20 seconds to load to the main screen and 30-40 seconds to exit the game while I was playing. When I added another stick of 512, the times were reduced to 4 sec. and 1 sec. respectively. AMAZING what doubling your RAM can do!
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Your graphics card is another component that is very important to a smooth DoD experience. Half-life games run better on ATI cards than NVIDIA, but in either case, make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card. ATI’s default drivers you should update from them, however NVidias’ default drivers suck. If you want to max out your ability with em I suggest using the X-Treme G drivers by TweaksRUs.com. Several members in {CPD} use them including _B_, and myself, Phoenix, and I have noticed it makes for a great ability. They also allow you to Overclock your card but I suggest that you be careful with that. The following link will take you to those drivers.:
Nvidia X-Treme G Drivers
Version: 91.28.v2
Go to the following link for download:
www.tweaksrus.com/index.php?option=...=661&Itemid=41/Release Date: 25.05.2006
After you update your graphics card, make sure you go into the graphics card settings and turn off or disable Vertical Sync or V-Sync. V-Sync caps your fps around 30 to prevent horizontal screen tearing. Turning V-Sync off will increase your fps. Since DoD is such an old game and since it is running on the old Half-Life GoldSource engine, computers that are less than 3 years old will not experience horizontal screen tear. Also read these graphics card tweaks: Tweakguides.com
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Some hot things are good, like the hot wings at Hooters, but heat is very bad for your computer. Make sure you don't have your computer sitting on the floor. Those computer desks that have than little ledge 1 inch off the floor for your box to sit on is actually bad for your computer. The most dust in a room is on the floor, so the closer your computer is to the floor, the more dust will be sucked inside by the cooling fans.
Try to make sure that your computer is at least 2 feet off of the ground. Also, clean your computer once a month. Wipe the dust off of the top, back and sides. Open her up and use a can of air to dislodge all of the dust bunnies living in your heat sink and motherboard. Be sure to do this outside. Also for you single bachelors, vacuum and dust the room the computer is in. Trust me, it helps, and the women will be impressed with you.....maybe. A clean computer will run cooler and that means more fps while playing DoD. Also make sure that there is at least 12 inches of open cool circulating air behind the computer. Don't have it backed into a corner because the hot air being expelled from the rear will not have any place to go. This will cause your CPU temp to go up. Turning on your ceiling fan will help a little too. Also be sure to wipe the dried saliva and snot off of your monitor screen from those times you sneezed on it but were to busy trying to shovel me to wipe it off, lol!
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Windows XP
Now that your hardware is all set, it's time to get Windows XP ready for some hardcore DoD action. The first thing you need to do is update your virus scanner and perform a full-deep system scan. Make sure and scan every file on your computer. After the virus scan is complete, you will need to get some spyware scanners:
Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.4
SpywareBlaster
Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware (its something else now but youll figure it out)
CWShredder Version 2.15
Download all of these, update them, and run them. It will take a while, but it is worth it and each one will catch things that the other ones don't!
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Next, click on start and then click on run. In the box that appears, type in "msconfig". Your Microsoft Configuration Utility will open up. Click on the "Startup" tab and you will see a bunch of boxes with checkmarks in them. These are all the programs that run when Windows XP starts. I only have two programs listed on my computer, you probably have a bunch. The goal here is to get rid of the programs that you don't want or need to run at Windows XP startup. This site will tell you what each "Startup Item" does:
www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php Also, read this short tutorial about "msconfig" here:
www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/. There is some trial and error here and if you are not sure about something, don't uncheck the box. You will have to reboot when you click on OK.
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Now, it's time to tweak Windows XP. It's very easy. Just download this zip file:
www.tweakguides.com/files/TweakGuides_XPTC.zip . Extract it to your hard drive. Inside is a simple .pdf file. If you don't have adobe acrobat reader, you can download it from here:
www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Open up the .pdf file and read pages 80-84 and follow its instructions. I did this and it is real easy and it won't harm your computer, just make it faster and better.
Next, you can clean up your hard drive by using disk cleaner, scan disk, and defrag. These programs are under start-programs-accessories-system tools. Make sure you have at least 1 gig free of hard drive space for your windows swap file when playing DoD.
These are all the non-DoD tweaks that I use. My computer boots up completely in less than 10 seconds and I can go from my computer being turned-off to playing DoD in the DODCops server in about 1 minute. (I'm not joking!)
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Steam Tweaks Ok so now your computer is the badess thing in your dorm room, apartment complex, or neighborhood. You feel like you could simulate space shuttle launches with it or communicate with GOD directly. But, we still have a few more tweaks to be in DoD heaven, so startup Steam and let’s getting rockin!
Okay Steam itself takes up a lot of system resources. If you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on Processes in the Task Manager, you will see a list of programs and services that are running. Find Steam.exe and right click on it. Go down to "Set Priority" and you will see that Steam.exe is set to "high" priority. I wonder what genius thought that Steam should be on high priority. The last time I checked, I didn't want to play Steam, I wanted to play DoD. This "high" priority is taking up valuable system resources that we could be using for DoD and having lower ping and higher fps. So we have to find a way to make Steam startup with a "low" priority. And if you have Steam startup every time your computer boots up, this makes it even more of a problem.
First, if you have Steam startup every time you boot-up, you will have to go back to that "msconfig" and uncheck the box next to Steam.exe and reboot. Now that Steam is not loaded, we can set it to startup with a "low" priority:
a. Open notepad or wordpad.
b. Type in “cmd /c start /Low Steam.exe”
c. Save as Steam.bat in C:ProgramFilesValveSteam.
d. Make sure to save it as a .bat file.
c. Go to your desktop and create a new shortcut.
d. Go to C:Program FilesValveSteam and select Steam.bat and click ok.
e. Choose a name for your shortcut and click on Finish.
Now click on the shortcut and it will run and startup Steam with a low priority selection. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on Processes in the Task Manager. Find Steam.exe and right click on it. Go down to "Set Priority" and you will see that Steam.exe is set to "low" priority. Yeah! We are now smarter than Spock and Albert Einstein!
Now that Steam is set to load on low priority, we must set your Steam connection speed. Right-click on your little black Steam icon in the lower right corner and left-click on “Settings”. Now click on the “Internet” tab and you will see a box under Internet Connection Speed. Click the little down-arrow and select “LAN/T1>1M”. Then click Ok. This will open up your steam internet connection to the max. Now Steam is ready to obey your every command in taking over the world, hehe!
DoD Tweaks Ok, now we are ready to make DoD run better, faster, and smarter. And hopefully with my knowledge, it will run liquid smooth for you or crash to desktop, LOL! Hmmm, I better not show you how to order pizzas from pizza hut through DoD until I finish working out the bugs. Last time I got 20 pineapple, canadian bacon, and powdered sugar pizzas under the name Mr. Meep.
Go to C:Program FilesValveSteamSteamApps***your steam account name***day of defeatdod. Find a file called config.cfg. Open your config.cfg file. Your config.cfg a can be opened, edited, and saved with Notepad, Wordpad, Word, Works, etc. Make sure you backup this file to a floppy disk periodically. Some DoD servers change it without you knowing. Enter in some of these tweaks:
a. For a much nicer white colored in-game text find con_color and change the value to "255 255 255".
b. To change the in game text size, find cl_hudfont and change it to:
"0" - Tiny
"1" - Small
"2" - Medium
c. Find cl_fog and change it to "0".
d. Find cl_dynamic_xhair and change it to "0".
e. Find cl_particlefx amd change it to "0".
f. Bind a key to "stopsound". Ex. bind "k" "stopsound".
g. The "g" key puts an X marker on your minimap for your team to see.
h. The "L" key zooms in and out of your minimap.
i. Find hud_fastswitch and change it to "1". (This allows you to change weapons faster)
j. bgmvolume "1.000000" will turn on the intro music, setting it to "0" will turn it off.
k. Find fps_max and change it to "101". (This opens your Video Card to its max level)
l. Find net_graph and change it to "3". In game you will see your fps and choke. Set it to "0" to turn net_graph off.
You can change these settings from the console too!
Now start up DoD and on the Main Menu, click on Options. Under the Multiplayer tab, click on Advanced. Another box will appear with several options you can choose. Make the only boxes that have check marks are Center Player Names and Automatically reload weapons. All of the other boxes should be unchecked. Next set the multiplayer decal limit to 100 and quality of special effects to low.
Now go to the Video tab and select Medium (16 bit) color quality. Then click on apply and then ok. DoD is now ready to play.
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