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[WOTC] Reduced Alien Weapon FX (v1.02)

This is a mod that strips down various weapon particle FX to help with performance, primarily when using Idle Suppression or any other mod that makes units fire their guns a lot.

Effects like these used to wreck FPS over time as the game has a memory leak issue with them, but as of July 2nd 2021, Highlander Update v1.22 fixes this issue with a new particle management system.

However, the effects themselves can still reduce FPS, sometimes quite severely. I'd notice the game freeze up for a fraction of a second whenever an Andromedon would fire his gun for example, because of how intense the Beam weaponry effects are plus the fact it's a shotgun. And that's just one unit with one gun.

Even with my more than capable PC, Idle Suppression is a performance hog. Sure, you could just lower all of your IS settings so it doesn't assassinate your FPS, but at that point, why even have the mod? It's kind of silly when only a handful of units are firing at each other every 5 - 10 seconds or something.

So here's my Reduced Weapon FX mods to help with this. I've done a performance test of these mods pre-Highlander v1.22 here, you can see what the test looked like in the preview video up top.

In this scenario, there's 27 aliens of all types and 7 XCOM soldiers using all tiers of weaponry, all shooting at each other with maxed IS settings. Even rocking a GTX 1070, an Intel i9-9900k and 16 GB of RAM was only enough to get an average FPS of around 24 with the vanilla FX.

In the proceeding test, this time with both my FX mods installed, i was running at about 34 FPS on average, a +10 FPS increase. Considering how extreme the conditions were, i'd say this is a hell of an improvement.

So if you're operating on a lower spec PC or just want more FPS when using Idle Suppression or similar, this should give you a pretty healthy performance boost.


You can find the XCOM Weapon version of this mod here.



Toned down alien weapon particle effects using Iridar's Weapon Skin Replacer, including:

• All alien plasma weaponry
  
• The ADVENT Assault Rifle (Including the Priest SMG)
  
• The Purifier's Flamethrower
  
• The ADVENT MEC's Cannon
  
• The Sectopod's Turret
  
• The Andromedon's plasma shotgun (the game REALLY hated this one during firefights)
  
• The Archon's Pimp Cane
  
• The Gatekeeper's Death Ray

If you don't like how i toned down a particular weapon, you can remove it's entry in the XComWeaponSkinReplacer.ini file located in this mod's Config folder.

• If you're using another mod that replaces aspects of the alien weapons with their own edits (a different Weapon Skin Replacer config, a Template Master config, XSkin, etc.) this mod WILL cause conflicts if they try to replace the same parts this mod does.

VERSION 1.02 (6/25/2021)

• Further reduced the particle FX on the Plasma Weaponry's beams and the ADVENT Mag Weaponry's muzzle flashes, as well as the Gatekeeper's massive laser beam
  
• Removed some particle FX on the Sectopod's cannon animation
  
• Added reduced FX for the Plasma Weapon charge-up animations

VERSION 1.01 (7/27/2020)

• Added the ADVENT Purifier, ADVENT Priest and Spectre to the reduced FX list
  
• Fixed some typos in the XComWeaponSkinReplacer config