Welcome to this week’s World of Tanks mod spotlight! Featured this week is Millbarge’s Slow PC Pack, a settings mod created by Millbarge.
The Mod
World of Tanks offers many stunning visuals from explosions of dirty and steel, to sprawling forest of waving trees and luscious waterfalls. These visuals serve to immerse us into the game environment but also can put a hefty toll on our computers. This mod pack serves to slim down all those wonderful visuals to a more manageable level for computers that don’t have that umpf to handle it, or for those tournament perfectionist that want to squeeze out every extra bit of FPS.
The following features are turned off with this mod installed:
- Smoke from destroyed tanks, fired rounds, and the environment.
- Explosions.
- Fire and sparks from muzzle flashes and collisions.
- Special effects from destroyed objects.
- Tree sway.
- Sniper mode shadow.
Testing on my low end laptop on medium settings showed an increase of at least 5-10 frames per second and an even larger difference on evil tree filled maps. Here you can see the visual difference between medium settings alone and with Millbarge’s Slow PC Pack.
Interview
I managed to hunt down Millbarge for a quick interview:
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What was your motivation behind creating this mod? I originally made this for my little brother. He has a rather old laptop and wasn't able to play at all, even after turning all the settings down. I became determined to fix this for him. So building off the work of great mod makers like Minoson, I taught myself how the file structure works and how to eliminate effects from the game. Then through trial and error I figured out which effects can be removed without crashing the client. It made such a big difference and he was so thankful, I figured there has to be more people out there that might need this. My original forum posting had over 10k downloads that first week... it blew me away how desperate people are to squeeze out some FPS from this great game. Helping others really makes you feel good and when I see people in battle and they tell me how they wouldn't be able to play without it ... well it makes me feel great! So what's my motivation for the mod??? Shameless self promotion! Nothing wrong with that! What specific tools did you need to adjust the settings? Just Notepad and lots of trial and error. Any other mods you are working on or looking to work on? I will keep refining this mod, the developers like to add new effects each patch to keep me busy. I also make a "Not So Slow PC Pack" which removes far fewer effects, for those people that like to retain more explosions and fire and such, but still want a boost in fps. Do you have any other advice for those trying to squeeze out that extra bit of PC performance from World of Tanks? Personally I would recommend turning off shadows, turning water to low, water simulation off, turning off grass, turning off both types of post processing, turning off extra effects, and unchecking the tracks and track effects. These might seem like obvious things, but many people overlook one or another. As a more drastic measure, you can look into things like Minoson's Compressed Texture Pack to replace the games textures with lower quality versions. Beyond that would be lowering the games resolution. And beyond that... I don't know.. move closer to the server maybe, though that might be a tad bit drastic for some. Technically that last ones for ping time, but I like it! |
Huge thanks to Millbarge for creating this mod that keeps the mice who turn our PC wheels happy.
Make sure you check out the Curse Client which now supports World of Tanks mods, just in time to get your 7.5 mod changes up to date with a few quick clicks!
Also make sure you stop by Curse’s all World of Tanks youtube channel, The War Hall, where we will be covering the very exciting conclusion to the World of Tanks Classic League: Season 1!
Comments
Hey nice video...
I am definitely using that as my new demo.
oh and thanks for the Spotlight.
Glad you like it!
Dear Curse..Any chance of a follow-up spotlight here?
We need this updated to try combat 8.0 and its savage fps drop.I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that times are tight and a new chip/graf card combo are way down the list of priorities.Any chance you guys at Curse can have a word with someone at W.O.T to look at Millibarges offence?Did Millibarge really deserve a permaban?He's one reason I use your website - He's a small but important part of your organisation too.