If you run an ATI or Nvidia graphics card, I have written two comprehensive guides which you should check out: the ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide and the Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide. These guides cover absolutely everything about the latest graphics drivers, how to set them up correctly, as well as advanced tweaking, overclocking and benchmarking tips. They're a must-read for configuring your graphics card correctly.

Config Files

Aside from the in-game settings, Battlefield 2142 has a range of config (.con) files spread throughout its directories. These files can be edited using any text editor like Windows Notepad or Wordpad. Of course before editing any .con file, first make sure you make a backup copy of it.

However unfortunately editing most of these .con files can prove completely pointless as the changes seem to have no impact in BF2142, or they are designed to control certain gameplay parameters such as world physics and should not be altered. The main configuration files which control your Soldier's settings can be found under your \Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\Battlefield 2142\Profiles\ directory, with the settings for each soldier (profile) listed under a numbered directory (e.g. \0001 for the first soldier, \0002 for the next one, etc.).

In general I don't recommend editing these .con files as it seems that any changes either have no impact, or can cause problems. Most of the settings in these .con files can be changed using the in-game settings, which is where you should alter them. Below I try to cover the few useful things you can do with the .con files, though none of them could be considered major tweaks - it looks like EA Games is purposely reducing the 'tweakability' of the Battlefield series, perhaps to enforce greater standardization.

In this section I provide full descriptions for Battlefield 2142's in-game settings, and where possible I provide general recommendations. I note the general performance impact of each setting, although bear in mind that it is impossible for me to give exact performance impacts - it all depends on your specific hardware combination and your other game and system-wide settings.

This section covers all the main Battlefield 2142 Console Commands and the known descriptions where possible. To access the BF2142 in-game console, press the '~' key (or the key above TAB) to open/close the console. To see the list of command categories, press the TAB key twice. To see particular sub-types, enter the start of the command press TAB twice. E.g. enter renderer, then press TAB twice to see all the renderer sub-class of commands. The following are working commands in BF2142 sorted by category: