Technical options

Official page: This page is maintained by Frozenbyte, the developers of Starbase, and cannot be edited by users. Information on this page has been confirmed to be correct at the time of writing (please get in touch if you notice anything odd or outdated).

Overview

You can find the technical initialization/configuration file (in Starbase custom format) at
%APPDATA%\Starbase\options.txt

This allows you to manually set multiple graphics options including resolution, and also edit certain settings that aren't exposed in the actual Graphics settings menu ingame.

General notes

It should be noted that Starbase is using the same underlying core game engine components as other games Frozenbyte has made, including the Trine series. Some options available in the configuration file may not be relevant to Starbase - they may relevant to other games or they may be deprecated.

Change resolution

While you can change the resolution in the game's Settings -> Graphics menu, you can also do it in the options.txt file.

setOption(rendererModule, "ScreenWidth", 1920)
setOption(rendererModule, "ScreenHeight", 1080)

These control the "screen" resolution, i.e. how big of a screen is rendered by Windows. If you play fullscreen, you typically want this to match your monitor native resolution. This resolution determines the size of the user interface as well.

Adjust internal resolution

The game rendering resolution can be adjusted separately:

setOption(rendererModule, "RenderWidth", 1920)
setOption(rendererModule, "RenderHeight", 1080)

Adjust internal resolution scale

If you have trouble running the game smoothly, you may want to adjust the internal render resolution further. Just above the actual render resolution, you can find these settings:

setOption(rendererModule, "RenderResolutionMode", 0)
setOption(rendererModule, "RenderResolutionScale", 1)
setOption(rendererModule, "RenderResolutionFixedAspectRatio", 1.77778)

The middle one, RenderResolutionScale, is important - you can use anything from 0.1 to 1. Using 0.5 will halve the actual render resolution, and should give more performance. The game will look a bit more blurry but the UI will remain sharp. If you go for 0.1 or 0.2, you will see how Starbase could look as a 3D pixel game.

Move the window by enabling titlebar

If you play in windowed mode and you want to move the window location, enable the titlebar:

setOption(rendererModule, "WindowTitleBar", true)

Then you can just drag the title bar of the window to move it wherever on the desktop.

Occlusion culling settings

Occlusion culling in Starbase does not have a whole lot of optimization possibilities. It is generally recommended to leave it alone (at 0).

setOption(rendererModule, "HzbResolutionDropMipAmount", 0)
setOption(rendererModule, "CascadeHzbResolutionDropMipAmount", 0)

These settings affect the quality of occlusion culling, and they are rather important at e.g. bigger stations. Any tweaks may cause unwanted side effects.

If you are suffering from low performance and you are on severely limited hardware (such as integrated GPUs), you could tweak the first a little bit (single digits) and see if it helps anything. Technically the higher the number, the faster/worse the culling quality (but also more 'overdraw'). As a small side effect adjusting this may also increase generation time.