zfnI'm curious how you "find" launch options. Were these just added recently, or have they been there since release but no one has stumbled upon them yet? Is there a full list of launch options somewhere?
Also for the other launch options you list such as -nojoy, -useforcedmparms, -noforcemaccel and -noforcemspd, why did Chris tell us they don't work here?
They've been there since release. I just looked through the source code to find them.
I don't know why Chris claimed this because I can verify even without source code that nojoy does affect the game's behavior. TF2 outputs "Did not detect any valid joysticks" to stdout when nojoy is not present. Not sure about the mouse acceleration commands since I haven't used Windows in years. But from my memory, I remember them affecting mouse acceleration.
stabbyI'd still be interested in knowing what the ideal value is.
I would definitely recommend cl_SetupAllBones 0. Also any reason why you didn't use -nops2b?
joshuawnmastercoms states in her config that disabling the violence_hgibs convar forces sillygibs (which, due to what i assume are other convars that aren't explicitly related to gibs, still hides them from view). i'm not sure if these hidden sillygibs still cause a performance loss versus regular gibs.
also, i just realized that the major visual discrepancy that threw me off was violence_hblood. and since mastercoms verified that blood can be safely disabled, i'm satisfied as is. it has been so long since i used a config that enabled blood that it completely threw me off.
After looking at the code again, I think setting any of the violence_ cvars to 0 enables low violence mode/silly gibs, but I'm pretty sure the code I'm looking at is outdated so I'll have to test in game. The best way to disable gibs is through the prop break max pieces commands, I believe. Not sure about blood, how was this done traditionally?
Found a few more launch options, though I haven't fully investigated them yet
-mat_softwaretl : forces software vertex processing, might be useful for bad GPUs
-limitvsconst : limits hardware vertex shader constants to 256, don't think this one will be too useful
-primarysound : uses a single sound buffer, not sure what the real impact of this is
-snoforceformat : skips force setting of sound buffer format, not sure what the real impact of this is
-reuse : allow network sockets to be reused when busy (sets SO_REUSEADDR), not sure about this one but i tested it earlier and i didn't have any bad results with it, maybe someone with a better feel for net settings can test this
-usetcp : allows usage of TCP, probably useless because I'm not sure where TCP would be used in TF2, I'll have to investigate further
Some more kinda useless ones:
-shadersondemand : initialize shaders on use, though it still seems to allocate memory for the shaders, so don't see any use case for this...
-random_invariant : use the same seed for local RNG every launch, don't see a use besides debugging
-small : allow resolutions smaller than 640x480
-filmgrain : may enable a film grain effect, crashed on my PC when I entered a game