Ever since I first started playing WoW back in 2004, I’ve been trying to find ways to make it look more appealing visually. Thankfully, there are in fact console commands at our disposal which allow us to push the graphics settings beyond what is normally possible using the standard video options.
(As of Patch 2.3 some of the older console commands have been superceded by new ones, for instance frillDensity is now groundEffectDensity)
More Flowers Please
The setting that makes the biggest difference visually is “groundEffectDensity”, and quite simply you use it to control how much foliage/rocks/bones litter the floor around you. More is better, and the cap is currently 256. It used to be 128, but thankfully Blizz raised the cap a couple of years ago. In addition to this command we can tell the client how far we want our foliage to be drawn, and we do that using “groundEffectDist”. The cap on this is 140.
You can type the following commands to achieve the above:
/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 140
You’ll notice outdoor zones now have grass, stones, bones, and all manner of other clutter in great abundance all around you. It really adds a lot more depth to the game, assuming of course your graphics card is meaty enough to cope with it. If your machine grinds to a halt, try lowering the values a bit until you find a balance you are happy with.
Doodad Alpha
Grass and Flowers have a transparent border around their graphic, because basically they are all square images. The command “detailDoodadAlpha” allows us to adjust how much of this transparent border is culled. If you don’t cull it enough, flowers behind other flowers are not drawn, but if you cull it too much flowers become very wirey. It’s a real balancing act to get the foliage nice and bushy without going too far in either direction.
/console detailDoodadAlpha 100
Check out the following examples, which are values 1, 100, and 252:
From above, you can see 1 has too much transparency, and 252 does not have enough. I find 100 to be a pretty good value that works accross all zones. Different zones have different foliage so you’ll never get it perfect for them all.
Ambient Lighting
All players and mobs are generically lit by a fake ambient light by default. This is fine, but it lessens the effect of world lighting and makes models appear quite flat. The “characterAmbient” command controls just how much ambient light is used, and you can turn it off entirely if you don’t supply a value, as shown below:
/console characterambient
The official range is supposed to be 0.0 to 1.0, but 0.0 still applies some fake ambient lighting. To use only world lighting (which looks the best), you need to leave off any value after the command. Annoyingly, this is not remembered by the client if you restart the game, so you need to set it again if you close WoW down after playing.
Min & Max Detail
I sometimes two-box WoW on a single PC, with the game running twice in windowed mode. My machine isn’t that great so I have to lower the graphics to make it playable. To that end, I have two useful buttons that allow me to set Min and Max graphics modes on the fly. Check out this example:
My “Min Detail” macro looks like this:
/console showDetailDoodads
/console showLowDetail
/console horizonfarclip 1305
/console farclip 177
/console groundEffectDensity 256
/console detailDoodadAlpha 100
/console characterAmbient
/console maxLOD 2
/console SkyCloudLOD 1
My “Max Detail” macro looks like this:
/console showDetailDoodads
/console showLowDetail
/console horizonfarclip 2112
/console farclip 777
/console groundEffectDensity 256
/console detailDoodadAlpha 100
/console characterAmbient
/console maxLOD 3
/console SkyCloudLOD 3
The commands “showDetailDoodads” and “showLowDetail” are actually toggles, and turn off flowers and the mountains in the distance respectively. You can press the same button twice to turn the flowers on/off and such, which is useful for finding quest items hidden in deep foliage.