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Target Commands

Historical capture recovered from the Wayback Machine · captured 2004-03-09 · 3 posts
I have used the screen shot thread and it helped me. I saw in the target you also used the -console and -novideo commands. What do they do ans how do you use them?
-console is for controlling a server
-novideo removes the begining videos when starting halo
Online gamers should know the following commands:

-use20
Without any -use command, Halo defaults to pixel shaders 2.0, provided your video card supports the feature. It's an advanced technique for applying special effects to computer graphics at the pixel level, and no video card on the market does it very well. High-end Radeon cards out-perform their GeForce counterparts when using 2.0 pixel shaders. But to be quite frank, no one should use Halo's pixel shaders 2.0, unless major performance enhancements are introduced in the near future.

-use14
Forces the game to use older and faster pixel shaders 1.4. You lose bump-mapped mirrored surfaces. Some effects are two-pass.

-use11
Best balance of performance and appearance. Forces the game to use older and faster pixel shaders 1.1. You lose bump-mapped mirrored surfaces, model self-illumination, animated light maps, and specular lights. Some effects are two-pass. Fog calculations are triangle-based instead of pixel-based.

-useff
For really old rigs. Turns off pixel shaders, looks pretty ugly. This may be faster for old video cards, but it is probably slower for modern ones. The ff stands for fixed function. It really does make Halo butt-ugly. No shadows, glows, or flares. Very basic fog, water, and lighting. The camouflage effect is simple and difficult to see. The only benefit I can think of is that it makes it easier to tell red and blue uniforms apart, because they become flat red and flat blue (not glossy or metallic).

-console
Allows gamers to access the game's console by pressing the tilde (~) key. Halo's console appears at the bottom of the game screen, whereas most games have it at the top. Really, though, the Halo console isn't very useful—compared to that of other games.

-novideo
Allows gamers to skip the various videos at the start of the game.

-nojoystick
Prevents the game engine from wasting time polling the joystick for input, pushing frame rates up.

-screenshot
Allows gamers to take in-game screen shots by pressing the PRINT SCREEN key on their keyboards. Halo will save your screenies sequentially as TGA (targa) files in a Halo\screenshots folder. There is a pause in game play while the shots are saved.

-timedemo
The timedemofunction runs four cinematic sequences and records frame rates. Test results are added to timedemo.txt in the Halo game folder.

-vidmode w,h,r
This command overrides settings made in the Video Setup GUI to play Halo at a particular width, height, and refresh rate. For example, -vidmode 1024,768,85 forces the game to run at 1024×768×85Hz. The only time you'll want to use this command is while testing multiple resolutions with -timedemo. It is faster to change resolutions in the command line than it is to launch the game and make changes in Video Setup. Halo supports the following video resolutions:

• 640 × 480
• 800 × 600
• 1024 × 768
• 1152 × 864
• 1280 × 768
• 1280 × 960
• 1280 × 1024
• 1600 × 1200

» OF MICE AND MEN

For some unfathomable reason, there is no menu option to turn off Halo's mouse acceleration, which makes fast aiming all but impossible. Until Gearbox gets Halo's menus in order, online gamers should create a CFG (configuration) file to turn off mouse acceleration. It's a very simple thing to do with Windows Notepad.

• Click on the Start button
• Move up to All Programs, then to Accessories
• Click on Notepad
• In Notepad, type mouse_acceleration 0
• Click on File, and then on Save As
• Save this CFG in your Halo game folder
• Name it something clever like mouse.cfg
• Change the Save as type: box to All Files
• Click the Save button

• Now find your Halo icon in your Start menu
• Right-click on it and select Properties
• At the end of the Target: box, add a space and the following: -exec mouse.cfg
• Click on OK

This tells Windows to run your mouse.cfg as it starts halo.exe.

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