Bulletstorm on PC – How to make it not run like shit

Like many PC heads i was eagerly awaiting the release of Bulletstorm, the new FPS from the creators of the excellent PC shooter Painkiller. And like many other PC heads i was also left feeling like People Can Fly had deliberately taken a shit in my Corn Flakes when i fired it up and realised it runs like a quadraplegic at the special Olympics. Heres how to fix that:

First up, youre gonna need the bulletstorm ini editor. Grab it here:

http://games.softpedia.com/get/Tools/Bulletstorm-INI-Editor.shtml

This will allow you to actually edit the ini files that were so super encrypted it too the internet an entire 48 hours to decrypt them. Fucking pointless. Anyway, when you run the bulletstorm ini editor, youll need to browse to where your ini files are located. For most people, theyre in

Documents/My Games/BulletStorm/StormGame/Config

The important shit:

First off, MAKE  A FUCKING BACKUP OF YOUR INI’S BEFORE EDITING. Seriously, i shouldnt have to tell you this shit. Anyway, the worst part of bulletstorm for me was the fuckawful performance. My PC isnt exactly top of the line, but it blows any UE3 engine game out of the water on max settings, at 1680×1050. But Bulletstorm’s performance was so shit i was getting 20-30 FPS if i was lucky. Heres how to fix low FPS:

Open Bulletstorm ini editor, and open the ‘stormengine.ini’ file. Look for the following lines:

- “bSmoothFrameRate=True” <- CHANGE THIS TO FALSE 

- “bUseBackgroundLevelStreaming=True” <- CHANGE THIS TO FALSE 

- Under “[TextureStreaming]” set “PoolSize=320″ (this is further down the ini file, keep scrolling for a bit and youll find it. Change the default value to 320. I think its set to 120 by default)

This doubled my FPS. I am now able to get 45-60 FPS, on max settings, @ 1680×1050. This changes texture streaming so that instead of by default streaming textures as you go, it loads all textures into memory at the beginning of the map. You might get a bit of a loading pause at the beginning of the map but itll improve the whole game sperformance so its well worth it. I also noticed that it completely eradicated texture pop in. In some scenes i had seen the texture on Gray’s hands pop in, but now its completely gone. It also completely eradicated stuttering during setpeices. For example when the Ulysses flies overhead in the opening level, without this fix it stuttered as it went past, but with the fix, it was flawless. I have heard that this can make your game crash after you die and it reloads a checkpoint. To avoid this, you can just press ESC when you die and load last checkpoint manually, rather than wait for it to auto load.

Also, disabling Vsync has been known to give a big FPS boost, as has disabling in game AA which is a big performance hit. Its better to just force AA on your card using CCC or Nvidia control panel.

Now, how to make the game actually feel like a PC game and not a shitty console port:

Open StormInput.ini, find this line:

- “bEnableMouseSmoothing=True” (Change this to FALSE. Turns off mouse smoothing)

Go into the games options menu and under controls turn off Aim assist, and auto aim.

You can change the default FOV by opening stormcamera.ini and changing the default of 85. I bumped it up to 95 and found it alot nicer to look at.

If none of this is working for you (but it really should), i found there is an enormous performance boost by setting postprocessing to medium. On max, the game actually capped my FPS at 30. No matter what i did, evens taring at the floor in an empty room, my fps woud max at 30 with postprocessing on high. Seriously, what kind of fucking shitty console bullshit is that? And the only difference between medium and high, is that on high you get god rays (sun shafts).

Anyway, with all these tweaks the game now runs perfectly, and palys much better than the default settings. Its ridiculous that PCF didnt put these changes in themselves, but sadly it seems like once again its up to the people who bought the game to do the bug testing for the developers.