Killing Floor 2: How to Force Motion Blur

Guide on forcing camera motion blur via a configuration file edit

Table of Contents

Disclaimer – before you start

While searching online on the subject, it has become evident to me that some people have strong feelings against motion blur and just can’t pass an opportunity to express them. Please… This guide isn’t meant to wreak disputes or force anyone to use it, just to (perhaps) help those who might prefer to have motion blur. Hell, maybe I’m the only such weirdo out there, so what.

Introduction

Since the days of KF1, even when I had a high refresh rate monitor, I found KF’s complete lack of motion blur very jarring and difficult for my eyes. With KF2, the issue still holds true. Especially since I switched to 60hz IPS panel and have mostly moved away from fast paced and FPS games.
So with my very recent recurrence of interest in the game, I’ve looked into this a bit more.

The regular motion blur setting in the game settings hardly does anything; the amount of blurring applied even during very fast paced turns is so minimal, it doesn’t aid in motion fluidity at all, only very, very slightly de-sharpens the image.

The tweaks below are what I’ve been able to find / make work for myself.
They ONLY enable CAMERA driven motion blur.
I haven’t been able to find a way to activate object motion blur, but camera motion blur does the job for me.
To elaborate: you only get motion blur when camera moves, rotates or shakes ( when you move or shoot too ), but not when you’re completely static.

READ: Killing Floor 2: Items Quality and Rankings

I’ve tried to get some understanding of the values / settings – to best I could, for now at least – and to provide reasonable description.

Some info regarding Motion Blur Post Process Effect can be found on UDK documentation site here[docs.unrealengine.com], however, it is not KF2-specific.

Tweaks

The needed tweaks are located in

%userprofile%\Documents\My Games\KillingFloor2\KFGame\Config\KFSystemSettings.ini

All of these variables exist in the ini file to begin with; you can find them via search.

MotionBlur=True

false corresponds to “off” setting in the video options menu

UseComputeMotionBlur=True

this specifically enables the camera motion blur (not present in the options menu)

MotionBlurQuality=1

0 corresponds to “off” setting in the video options menu
1 corresponds to “on” setting in the video options menu

MotionBlurStaticScale=0.1

amount (scale) of motion blur
contrary to my initial assumptions, this is not the shutter angle / length, but the scale/multiplier for the effect. Default is 0.8, which felt too much; I dropped it to 0.1 and still get decent amount of blur
the other one, MotionBlurDynamicScale, doesn’t seem to do anything

Performance

I haven’t seen a performance impact, but I guess your mileage may vary.
Share your experience if you want.
(Myself I’m currently on 1080Ti at 3840×2160, 60hz with vsync on, settings are mostly Ultra except unimportant stuff like filtering,shadows and reflections. FleX off.)
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