A friend of mine wanted to do some 2v2 MGE, but since there aren't any EU 2v2 MGE servers (or so I believe), he wanted me to set up one for him. I figured some EU folks might be interested in it as well. I've enabled 2v2 on all arenas, it might be a complete disaster, but we'll see!

The server is 24 slots ordered from tragicservers:

IP - 31.186.250.236:27015
Location - Frankfurt, Germany

Pretty sure that's it, thanks!

I'm glad you were able to fix it, and I suppose it's my fault too, resetting to default settings is probably the wisest thing to do first. I do wonder what your textures looked like though, it's weird that changing the LOD messes some people stuff up completely... Guess I'll add a warning or something.

Man, I miss having an nvidia card.

Everything's just so much easier and better... and cooler... and... stuff... *sniff*

Did you try rebooting your PC?

Are you sure you didn't use any of the console commands RRP posted?

If that doesn't do it, I don't really know what to do, since the program and the settings are all gone and the program is the thing forcing these graphics settings. So it doesn't really make any sense.

The LOD tweak only gives textures a really blocky look, like minecraft, though some textures might be completely clean and washed out.

Simply go to the profiles folder once again, (C:\Users\YOUR W7 USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\RadeonPro\Profiles, find the .XML profile, uncheck read-only, delete it from the folder or the Radeon Pro UI (probably best to do both - or simply don't run the program with TF2).

No, not yet, but I think if your fps struggles because of some particles it might boost fps a little bit? I can't say for sure, it's better just to try it out and see for yourself.

THIS MIGHT MESS UP YOUR TEXTURES! Use at your own risk. (See the other posts for solutions)

Feel free to skip to the actual tweak further down.

From my experience, Radeon Pro is a really good program to use for optimization / adjusting your graphics settings, compared to Catalyst Control Center (although it might be because I use a laptop the settings are fairly limited).

Here's just a quick picture to show you what the steps are to adding a hl2.exe (TF2) profile to Radeon Pro, although the little guide mousiope posted pretty much sums it all up:

1. Click on profile
2. Press the add profile button
3. Navigate to your Team Fortress 2 folder (usually on 64-bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Team Fortress 2)
4. Go to the "Advanced" tab
5. Check Texture LOD box and set the slider to +3.

http://i.imgur.com/rOfnCz7.png

Anyway, what I really want to show you is that you're actually able to go a step further with this. I started messing around with a lot of the Radeon Pro settings, and found the texture LOD slider to be very useful in-game as you can see from these first shots:

Just for notes or w/e, I'm using a modified Chris' maxframes, dx 8.1 and my resolution is 720p:

This is without Radeon Pro:

http://i.imgur.com/Ke2gSpAh.jpg

This is with Radeon Pro and LOD = +3:

http://i.imgur.com/sc1txYVh.jpg

This is what it is supposed to look like mousiope, you should be able to clearly see a difference with the walls and ground textures being much more washed out and faded. However, you might notice from the LOD +3 picture that to the left and also in the bottom near the control point HUD elements, you're able to see the textures as they were without Radeon Pro and LOD +3 enabled. This is really annoying in game (atleast to me), because TF2 is a fairly fast paced FPS, and with the LOD set to +3, the textures closer to you will always be more detailed and so there will always be this level of detail change going on when you're moving through all the different maps you're playing on.

Here's a shot showing the effect of LOD = +3:

http://i.imgur.com/BFGbHQSh.png

Here's a shot showing the effect of manually setting LOD to +20:

http://i.imgur.com/kqaueaDh.png

The lighting is a side effect of using a really high LOD setting, I'll discuss that further down and show some better comparison shots.

The tweak

So after messing around with Radeon Pro and this LOD slider, I wondered, why is the slider limited from -3 to +3? There's not really any reason for it to be limited to this, so I decided to go "investigate" the AppData folder (usually C:\Users\YOUR W7 USERNAME\AppData) where application settings (usually?) are saved. Luckily if you go from AppData -> Roaming -> RadeonPro -> Profiles (C:\Users\YOUR W7 USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\RadeonPro\Profiles), you'll find the profile or profiles (in .XML format) you've saved for your game(s) and also the global profile if you've edited that:

http://i.imgur.com/UNxkglp.png

Anyway, simply find the one that ends with "..._hl2.exe" right click it and open the profile with notepad. Now simply use Notepad's search function (usually ctrl + F) and search for "LodAdj", if you've already set it to +3, its value in notepad should be 30. I did some experimenting and found that with LOD = +20 (value = 200 in notepad) textures in game close to you don't seem to change, as opposed to +3. I also tried going higher, value set to 2000 in notepad, but I didn't notice a change from 200, feel free to try yourself. The other adjustment "TextureLod" you can see I marked below is the mipmap slider value, if you've already changed it in Radeon Pro then leave it, otherwise I believe the value set to 3 is "high performance" in Radeon Pro:

http://i.imgur.com/X6WfyGqh.png

After you've done this, changing anything in Radeon Pro regarding your TF2 profile, will reset the custom values in the .XML profile. So I recommend that you set all the different settings for your TF2 profile (like disabling Aero on TF2 startup, mipmap set to high performance ( recommended since this tweak messes up textures anyway), etc.) and once you've done all the Radeon Pro tweaking, you can edit the LOD value in the .XML file in notepad, save it and then simply right click the .XML profile -> go to properties and check read-only in attributes, and click apply. This option simply doesn't allow the program to edit the file and so if you accidently/try to change something in your Radeon Pro TF2 profile, it'll give you an error (I believe) and it actually tries to create a new profile in AppData for HL2, but it's not important since your old read-only profile will be the one used and the values won't change:

http://i.imgur.com/HozxGPC.png

I hope this helps some of you, I've certainly noticed the effect on a lot of things. Like the sentry buster smoke explosion in mvm is incredibly blocky / pixely, wonderful stuff, and I think this effects particles too like the flames coming from the pyro's flamethrower, I'm not exactly sure though!

Some side effects of LOD = +20

Here's a shot showing a jump with two speedshot platforms and a rampslide at the end. LOD is set to +3 on the left, while it's +20 on the right (same goes for the following shots). You can clearly see the lighting is much, much brighter on the right side of the first platform I'm standing on compared to the left. This should be visible throughout the shot on the next platform and the rampslide at the end as well.

http://i.imgur.com/Rw1XUgOh.png

Here's another shot only showing the rampslide, but you can easily see the trade off there is, no rings / different levels of detail, but much brighter lighting / textures on the right (LOD = +20) compared to the left with rings and a lot less brighter textures (LOD = +3).

http://i.imgur.com/y3N0B2mh.png

Here's just another shot showing what effect editing the LOD has on some textures:

http://i.imgur.com/HkNzJTZh.png

As you can see on the left (LOD = +3) you were able to see through those wall/grid textures originally (Radeon Pro disabled/no change in LOD), but with LOD set to much higher setting you can't anymore. On the right is again LOD = +20, showing that the LOD effect of +3 isn't there anymore. I don't know if there's an opposite effect of this with regards to some textures, as in, higher LOD (+20) = transparent textures where there originally are supposed to be solid textures. I haven't really tested any official map with it so I can't say anything about textures on those maps / lighting on those map. Feel free to do some testing, and post here with any results!

Sorry about the long post, but hopefully some of you'll find it useful!

EDIT 1: The "TextureLod" value in notepad represents the mipmap quality slider, with 3 being high performance and 0 being high quality, just keep this at 3 if you use this tweak

EDIT 2: The rings you see on the left side of the comparison shots, might have something to do with how TF2 is rendered, and might not directly show the different "levels" at which textures are rendered. All I know is that textures definitely aren't changing as much at LOD +20 compared to +3 - and they look way more blocky.