Crucible of Stars

Crucible of Stars is a single-player First Person Shooter (FPS) game, and should play similarly to most common shooters. Each level will have objectives which must be met by moving through the level and shooting or otherwise destroying enemies and by utilizing psychic powers.

All controls can be set by editing controls.cfg in the config\ directory from the Crucible of Stars installation directory. These are the defaults

Action	Key/Mouse Control
Forward	w
Backward	s
Strafe Left	a
Strafe Right	d
Use	e
Crouch	c
Jump	space
Fire	mouse1
Reload	r
Cycle Weapons	mouse wheel
Drop Weapon	b
Use Medpack	m
Activate Current Power	mouse2
Set Next Power	g
Set Previous Power	v
Push Power	1
Pull Power	2
Shield Power	3
Console	~
Pause	pause
Menu	Esc
Screenshot	p

Video options may be set in video.cfg in the config\ directory from the Crucible of Stars installation directory.

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
Resolution	Pixel dimensions of window	800,600	large
Color Depth	Number of color bits per pixel. 16,24, or 32 are valid	32	moderate
Full Screen	Self-explanatory. Specify yes or no	no	moderate
Vsync	Sync screen refresh to monitor refresh rate. Yes or no	no	small
Depth Bits	Determines accuracy of the depth buffer. 16,24, or 32 are valid. Leave this alone unless you know what you’re doing.		small
Antialiasing	Attempt to smooth jagged lines. Larger numbers produce smoother lines at the cost of slower performance. 0, 2, 4, 8, and 16 are valid.	2	large

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
Portal Rendering	Special culling technique, usually gives higher frame rates, but worth experimenting with on a given system. Specify yes or no	yes	variable
Hardware Occlusion Culling (hwoc)	Special culling technique, often gives lower frame rates (less must be rendered, but there is more overhead), but worth experimenting with on a given system. Specify yes or no	no	variable

Leave these fields alone unless you know what you're doing, in which case you don't need an explanation

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
filtering	Type of texture filtering. Bilinear is faster than trilinear, but doesn’t look as nice. Options are none, bilinear, or trilinear	trilinear	moderate
lodBias	If using trilinear filtering, biases the determination of the mipmap (detail) level	1.0	small
correctionHint	General option for texture quality. Options are nicest, fastest, and dontcare	nicest	varies
anisotropy	Improves the look of textures which are far away and slanted by taking view angle into account. Any positive floating point value may be used, although the video drivers may impose a limit	4.0	moderate

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
maxLights	maximum lights acting on each object. This value may be hardware limited as well (usually to 8)	8	large
perPixelLighting	If yes, uses expensive per-pixel lighting. If no, uses faster but less visually pleasing per-vertex lighting. Pixel shaders must be supported for this to work.	yes	Very high

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
enabled	whether to use shadows or not. Options are yes or no	no	very high
resolution	resolution of shadow-map textures. Both x and y dimensions must be a power of two	512,512	high

All sound options can be set by editing sound.cfg in the config\ directory from the Crucible of Stars installation directory

Users should ignore most options in this file, the only option of note is masterVolume, which can be set to any value between 0.0 and 1.0, with 0..0 being mute and 1.0 being max volume

All physics options can be set by editing physics.cfg in the config\ directory from the Crucible of Stars installation directory

Parameter	Description	Default	Performance Impact
solver	Specifies which mode to use to solve collisions. The valid modes are, in order of decreasing accuracy and increasing performance, exact, adaptive, and linear	exact	moderate
passes	Only meaningful if solver=linear. Specifies how many linear passes to perform in collision result determination. A greater number of passes will be more accurate but slower.	N/A	small
friction	Specifies which friction model to use. Adaptive is less accurate but about 10% faster. Options are exact and adaptive.	exact	small
useContinuousCollision	Specifies whether to use accurate collision testing for fast objects. Incurs a slight performance penalty, but without it small, fast-moving objects may go through walls, floors, etc. Options are yes or no	yes	small
continuousCollisionThreshold	If useContinuousCollision=yes, then it specifies the maximum radius of objects on which continuous collision will be used (it is unnecessary for large objects).	2.0	small