Techy Labs » Tips & Tricks

Counter Strike Professional Optimization Part – 2

Tushaar — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:37:51 +0000

Welcome back gamers, hope you had good time with my previous post about calibrating your mouse and optimizing it for better performance. Now in this post, I will discuss about three main settings for Counter Strike 1.6

Frames Per Second
Adjusting Resolution
Bindings

As far as I guess, majority of people never paid attention to these settings, but fraggers, its really important.

So, what is Frames Per Second (fps)?

‘Frame rate, or frame frequency, is the frequency (rate) at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames.’ -Source Wikipedia.

Now ask yourself, do you have hard time controlling recoil (blowbacks) of guns, drags rarely works while sniping and the game lags while going through smoke.

If yes, then surely you need to pay attention on FPS of your game. Make sure you play on 100 FPS and it should be stable. Best ways for increasing FPS are,

- Turn Vsync Off.

For Nvidia cards

Open Control Open>NVIDIA Control Panel

Now in Nvidia Control Panel, go to Manage 3D Settings and there by click on Global Settings
There you will find Vertical sync, select Force Off and then hit Apply.

Now start Counter Strike and press ‘~’ on keyboard to open console. Enter following commands in console:

fps_max 100
cl_cmdrate 50
cl_updaterate 50

For ATI Cards- To turn Vsync off in ATI Cards, simply download this software – ATI Tray Tools

After installing it, follow this steps -

Right Click on the icon on task bar>3D>Wait for vertical sync>Always Off.

* to override Counter Strike FPS for more then 100, type ‘developer 1’ in console. That will allow you to go more than 100 FPS in Counter Strike. Type maximum FPS you want in console (e.g. fps_max 300), but 100 is considered the best for rich gaming experience. Even after this, you are not able to get 100 FPS stable, get a good graphic card in your PC and if you have one, then its good to be thrown in dust bin.

That’s it for FPS Settings, now coming on Resolution.

What is resolution (Res)?

Resolution is the term used to describe the number of dots, or pixels, used to display an image. Higher resolutions mean that more pixels are used to create the image, resulting in a crisper, cleaner image.

But for Counter Strike, low resolution is better. A lower res makes crosshair movement less distinguishable while higher res makes crosshair movement more noticeable. Lowering res makes the same sensitivity potentially more accurate as there are less pixels skipped per the same sens number. Higher res makes potential precision of accuracy higher by having more pixels to aim at and making subtle crosshair movements noticeable to the eye. Lowering res also means that when you do for example, a 180, less virtual physical space is traveled thus making it easier to track what you are looking at. And since you are still moving the mouse the same amount of distance the crosshair moves slower to travel the same amount of distance to compound the effect. Even, having low resolution gives you much stable FPS and while you are in smoke, FPS wont go down.

Now for in game settings, Make sure you use OpenGL render because its really stable. You can notice a remarkable change in FPS with both renders, i.e. DirectX and OpenGL.

640*480, 800*600 and 1024*768 are good choices.

BINDINGS -

Coming to bindings, it is setting your keyboard and mouse buttons according to your game play. Now, what if you are in close quarters and you go out of ammo, surely you will scroll your wheel down and so to switch to pistol and try to land more frags. But it really takes time, prefer using number keys to switch weapons, for that you have to use a command in console ‘hud_fastswitch 1’ that will switch to weapon as you tap the key without showing that HUD option for guns. Now by pressing ‘1’ you switch to Primary Weapon, press ‘2’ for Secondary, ‘3’ for knife, and here the big trouble comes, switching between grenades.

Grenades are stacked up under same category so its really tough to get the right one on right time. Players have to buy time to scroll between grenades and that’s really time consuming. Best way is, assign different key to different grenades. For instance in my case, ‘4’,’5’,’6’ are assigned for grenades. To do that, open console and type,

bind 4 weapon_hegrenade
bind 5 weapon_flashbang
bind 6 weapon_smokegrenade

Now its your personal choice what keys you want to assign.

By switching your weapons from number keys, frees your mouse wheel and you can bind it for jump and duck, console commands -

bind mwheelup +jump
bind mwheeldown +duck

Or, you can do it in Keyboard options.

So, play game, make yourself comfortable with keys. Make sure to do any action in game, you must not be struggling with keys. Whatever you are comfortable with, bind it to your preferred key.

* Bindings differs from player to player, so make your own configs rather then following someone else configs. Just the goal is to be quick while swapping weapons and making fast reflexes.

Well Then, That’s it for today. Keep turning on for more updates.

Adios.

HAPPY FRAGGING

Counter-Strike 1.6 Professional Optimization

Tushaar — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:36:13 +0000

Counter-Strike 1.6 was released on September 15, 2003, way-way back from today, but still players are struggling to master it. The game is too old, it has low poly animation that works mostly on any computer, and even the game is very simple. There are two Teams, Counter Terrorists(CTs) and Terrorists(Ts) that try to achieve their objectives.

This game is round based, i.e. on a bomb site situation, Ts have to plant bomb on either of two bombsites and save it until it explodes while CTs have either to prevent it or if bomb is planted then they have to defuse it before it explodes. While on other hand, in hostage situation, CTs have to rescue hostages to rescue points before time runs out and Ts have to stop them from doing so.

That’s it. The game is Simple, the rules are too easy, then why we struggle?

Answer is here: Majority of players don’t have their own settings. They play with default in game settings which might not suit them. Before starting to play just enter the following commands in the properties of your game.

-noforcemparms

* reverts to desktop mouse acceleration settings.

-noforcemaccel

* reverts to desktop mouse button settings.

-noforcemspd

* uses desktop mouse speed settings.

If you are a Steam Player here is how to enter the commands:

Open Steam.exe
Go to your games “LIBRARY”, right click on Counter-Strike and click on Properties.
Then click on “SET LAUNCH OPTIONS…” and paste each of the above commands with a space in between.

In case if you are a non-steam player then all you have to do is:

Right click on the desktop shortcut of your game and go to properties.
Enter the three commands in the Target space after the path of the game.
Hit enter and thats it.

Also make sure ‘Enhance Pointer Precision’ is unchecked in your mouse properties.

If you are concerned about mouse sensitivity then try keeping it less than 5. Personally, my sensitivity is 1. Adjusting sensitivity depends on DPI (dots per inch) of your mouse, Lower the DPI-higher the sensitivity and vice versa. Make sure that a minute mouse movement must not be resulting in more movement on screen. Calibrate your mouse sensitivity such that movement of mouse and reaction in game is near about same.

SELECTION OF A MOUSE

Before starting playing Counter Strike at enthusiast level you must have a gaming grade mouse. For low budget buyers, Logitech MX 518 is the best selection but the mouse performs really well. Beyond that you must take care that mouse fits in your palm, you can comfortable use all buttons on mouse without changing your grip.

That’s it for mouse settings, later in next post I will be telling you how to bind your mouse buttons for better game play and more exciting stuff about this wonderful game.

Till then, Bye

Keep Fragging

Spy On Your Friend’s Facebook Chats In Real Time

Anurag — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:05:10 +0000

Facebook has been world’s top social networking sites. They have always laid priority on the privacy of a user, but are failing to keep up with the privacy policies of a profile. Firstly Facebook could not be trusted as, its employees had access to the data of all the users. Then came the hack code which gave you access to all the private photos of any user. Now comes the biggest bug of them all, “Spy On Your Friend’s Facebook Chats In Real Time“. With this bug, Facebook gives access to anyone who can view each and every word you utter in your chatbox in Facebook

You might have noticed that Facebook chat was down for a little while. The message appeared that “Chat is down for maintenance at this time”. This was no regular maintenance, Facebook chat was brought down in order to remove a bug. A bug in through which you could spy on any of your friends’ private chat. The following video will show you how exactly it worked.

Though Facebook is fun but it is not a secure place anymore. There are hundreds of bugs in Facebook yet to be discovered. So keep your eyes wide open.

Update: Within few hours of this bug discovered, Facebook took their chat service offline (the reason, why you were not able to chat) and patched the security hole. But the point is, for how long was this bug in Facebook?

View Anyone’s Private Photos On Facebook

Rishabh — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:58:29 +0000

Now anyone can view Facebook’s private photo and album without being in the friend list.

Steps :-

Just go to the Main Page of the person you would like to see the private photo and album.
In the address bar copy the JavaScript shown below and hit enter.

javascript:(function(){CSS.removeClass(document.body,%20'profile_two_columns'); tab_controller.changePage("photos");})()

Most of the time it works and you would then redirect to the Photo Page of that persons account.
Sometime it would not work and you would get “There are no photos to display. Photos of may not have been tagged, or may not be visible due to privacy.”

NOTE : The script is in no way, malicious and is safe to use.

So all you guys and girls on Facebook, if you think I can’t view the pics of your last birthday because I’m not your friend, think again

When I gave this tip to labnol today, they featured it on their website. Here’s a video which Amit made out of this issue:

I hope Facebook now listens.

Find Movie Subtitles Easily

Rishabh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:46:43 +0000

How many times have you came across an awesome movie, but in a foreign language? If you’e faced such situation, subtitles are the answers. Subtitles lets you understand any movie in any language. But where can you find subtitles of those movies?

Subtitle Search, which is a free program is your friend here. Subtitle search finds and downloads subtitles of any movie and that too, in many languages. Using the program is also very simple. You just have to enter the name of the movie and hit the ‘search’ button. The software automatically searches it’s massive database of verified subtitles and prompts you for download.

The results can also be classified within categories like title, label, languages etc. Plus, you’re also greeted with full movie info from IMDB.

Link | Subtitle Search

Tip: Watch Full Length Movies, FREE and Legal