Yet another BF2 Crash

[Stuxnet]

My responses in bold:

Originally posted by: M0RPH

Originally posted by: jbourne77
F--- it... I can't resist... here are SOME of the problems just off the top of my head:

1. Borked hit detection

Are you just mad because you can't be the uber sniper? Is that what this complaint is about?

Bad hit detection is bad hit detection, regardless of the class. You have some obsession with hating snipers, so I'm not sure what that's all about. I play mostly assault with some sniping on certain maps... the hit detection sucks either way, and I'm very much NOT alone on this.

2. Lousy netcode

Much improved over the previous Battlefield games, actually.

I wouldn't be bragging about that if I was you, EA, or Dice. That's like saying horse sh1t smells better than pig sh1t. It's still SH1T.

3. Game crashes with no errors

Some of these may be due to game bugs, but the majority of these crashes reported by people are caused by something in their system, not the game.

Now you're just pulling conclusions out of the air. ACTUALLY, most game crashes are the result of the Battlefield 2 engine not gracefully handling video setup changes, such as going from a CRT to a TFT device.

Quit talking about stuff you know nothing about, and quit blindly defending against accusations that are widely known problems.

With all due respect, you're being a fool.

4. EAX doesn't work with the RECOMMENDED/ENDORSED Audigy 2 cards

I don't know about this. It works fine with my Audigy1.

Exactly. You DON'T know about this... a good reason to keep your mouth shut. If it doesn't apply to you, be quiet.

5. No widescreen support

This is a missing feature, not a bug.

So what. It's still a PROBLEM. Suppose the game only came with 640 x 480 support... would you give a sh1t about what it's 'technically' called? Well, people with widescreens (or 19" monitors for 1280 x 1024) could give a rat's ass about technicalities. There are standard levels of compatibility that people expect, and BF2 doesn't come close.

6. First patch (need I say more?)

Of course there was a patch. There are bugs and they need to be fixed. There will be more patches. It's a natural part of game development. Not just for this game, for any other online game.

Brainiac, I wasn't talking about the fact that there WAS a first patch... I was talking about the RESULTS of the first patch... or do you pretend those problems didn't exist, either?

You are such a textbook fanboy.

7. Switching from CRT to TFT is a nightmare
8. Browser woefully feature-incomplete

The browser has never been that great. Get over it. It still does its job. If you want a more full-features one, get ASE or something.

Now you just flatout don't want people talking about problems. Don't fvcking tell me to get over it. People have a reasonable expectation for even basic features. When they're not delivered, it's a PROBLEM. YOU get over it.

9. Filters dont work
10. A million other very well-documented bugs/incomplete features.

Exaggerating a little, aren't you?

Hardly. The only exaggeration is "million", but it's used to illustrate a point because anything less subtle is apparently wasted effort on you. As long as the game fires up, you're apparently happy. Excuse the rest of us for having slightly higher expectations. We're not ALL doormats, you know.

Even EA, of all entities, acknowledges the countless problems. This game was released about 6 months too soon. So there's nothing wrong with recognizing good game design, but to deny the fact that it's plagued by far more problems than most games is akin to denying the sky is blue. The problems are just simply too widespread and too well-documented to ignore.

It's an ambitious game. Considering the scope of the game, I think they've done a decent job. It's a significant improvemet over BFV and despite its flaws, it's an extremely fun, addicting game and there's no better game of its kind out there. And don't say CS, because that's nothing like BF2 with huge maps, vehicles and large scale warfare.

So what if it was ambitious. That doesn't excuse mediocrity. If I claim to have the cure for cancer but my cure only gets rid of headaches, no one is going to just say "well, he had good intentions".

You are the epitome of "sheeple". I used to hate that word, but now that I've met one I can totally understand its existance.

Go to EA's support forums. Go to totalbf2.com. Go to just about ANY fansite. If you can't see that this game's stability is far worse than most titles and doesn't come close to meeting even the loosest of standards, you're blind.

 

[Stuxnet]

Also keep in mind that those 10 points are just the things that sprung to mind. If I felt like it, I could easily introduce you to many more problems. Hell, there?s a post on EA?s support site that is LITERALLY about 30 pages long just trying to fix the EAX bug.

Like I said, you have to be a fool to not be able to recognize that this is NOT normal, and you have to be a doormat to be able to accept it.

I didn't even mention the C4 bug in that list of ten, which is probably the single most aggravating bug I've ever experienced in a game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then it's another reason why you should probably not be talking.

 

[Stuxnet]

Have I mentioned red friendlies and blue enemies?

Or automatic TK punishing?

...

The bugs won't stop coming to mind!!!

 

[M0RPH]

jbourne77,

It's really too bad that you're so bitter about this game but hey, that's up to you. I guess I'm just not as demanding as you about computer games. I'm not gonna argue with you any more.

Everyone, please get back to discussing the original problem of this thread.

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: M0RPH
It's really too bad that you're so bitter about this game

No, it's really too bad that the game has made most people bitter. Big difference. You've repeatedly ignored my advice to you to go looking at community/fan sites. You have to be in total denial to not recognize the global distaste for the problems in BF2.

Originally posted by: M0RPH
I guess I'm just not as demanding as you about computer games.

Yeah, crazy us... we actually expect $50 software to FUNCTION as promised. We're such demanding a**holes.

This game has serious problems. Much more than is typical, and to a much greater extent. This is not an opinion. This is documented FACT.

I know you're afraid that EA won't feed you another half-baked title if too many people get pissed off about BF2, but rest assured, that will certainly not discourage them. You'll get another release of shovelware that you can graciously pump $50 into. No worries, bro. EA isn't exactly known for responding to customer demand.

In all seriousness, things would go a lot smoother for their next major release (read: Battlefield 3) if:

1. Dice stuck to what they were good at: designing games, NOT writing engines. Let the pros do what THEY'RE good at, and license their proving products from them. The majority of the problems with BF2 can be chalked up to poor engine code. As demonstrated by BF1942 and now BF2, engine development is not Dice's strong suit. There are far better options out there for engines.

2. EA doesn't cram deadlines down Dice's throats. Give them WHATEVER TIME IS NECESSARY to release a QUALITY, STABLE PRODUCT. Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 were anything but quality and stable.

Again, let's not confuse DESIGN with EXECUTION. I think Dice are probably the most brilliant game designers around right now, at least in terms of first person shooters. I'm not complaining about the design, nor do I hear anyone else complaining about it. We're complaining about things like being penalized for shooting teammates who are showing up as enemies, or flying fully loaded choppers into buildings due to terrible prediction code by the server, or by not getting the sound experience promised even though we're using the soundcard advertised as "best experienced with" in the manual.

This isn't "being picky". Like I said, unless you're just a doormat or a mouthpiece for EA, these problems are severe and inexcusable. They are problems concerning basic functionality in the game. And don't give me this "every game has bugs" crap. That implies that these are things that likely didn't surface during testing and are relatively minor. There's nothing minor about the problems I listed above or the dozen other deal-breakers that I didn't list.

 

[M0RPH]

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: M0RPH
It's really too bad that you're so bitter about this game

No, it's really too bad that the game has made most people bitter. Big difference. You've repeatedly ignored my advice to you to go looking at community/fan sites. You have to be in total denial to not recognize the global distaste for the problems in BF2.

Actually I did go and peruse some forums, including EA official forums, PlanetBattlefield and TotalBF2. They are not filled with complaints as you would lead us to believe. I don't see an inordinate number of posts with people screaming about bugs and how bad the game is. What I see mainly is people discussing a game that they seem to like.

BTW, I tried searching for your C4 bug and I couldn't find anything about it on any of the forums. So why don't you enlighten me?

 

[rise]

nice job f'ing up the OP's thread guys. are you both incapable of stfu and walking away?

 

[Spacecomber]

Originally posted by: rise4310
nice job f'ing up the OP's thread guys. are you both incapable of stfu and walking away?

:thumbsup:

I think this thread got hijacked along the way.

 

[ericnmu]

Originally posted by: M0RPH
Are you overclocking your video card? This is exactly what I got if I try to overclock my X800 GPU too high. At 415 MHz it's fine but at 425 I will occasionally get BF2 crashes just like you describe.

I am running at stock speeds. My graphics card is a BFG, so it is overclocked by default, but its nothing the card is capable of.

I reformated and installed my drivers and software again, exactly how I did the past 3 times. It seems to be stable so far. I will stress test it tonight with an hour or two of BF2 play.

 

[ericnmu]

Back on topic,
I seem to got lucky with the third format and it looks like battlefield is working.
Now though, when I download a file larger than 50MB from a multipart download, the computer completely locks up. This happends with download accelerator programs, newsgroups, etc. Guess I'll have to format yet again and hope for everything to work.

 

[ericnmu]

Well its not fixed. I cant download anything from a mulitpart download either, the computer will completely lock up when it tries to compile the parts.

I think I am going to part out my computer and put it on ebay. Rebuild from scratch. Im out of ideas and patience.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Now you're just pulling conclusions out of the air. ACTUALLY, most game crashes are the result of the Battlefield 2 engine not gracefully handling video setup changes, such as going from a CRT to a TFT device.

Whether your display is CRT or TFT has nothing to do with the game handling video changes.

I don't know why the filters still aren't working, but the rest of it isn't that bad. Instead of exaggerating, record how much time you're having fun playing it vs. being annoyed by a bug. The ratio is damn high. I have had the red friendly bug happen once in the demo and that's it. Big deal. Do I want the bugs fixed? Of course I do, just like everyone else. But they don't drastically affect my game play. The damn thing even works flawlessly on 64-bit XP. Complain about stuttering, but the performance it upholds with 64 players is astonishing. Just try that with Wolfenstein: ET, it's an absolute lag fest.

That said, I do agree with most of your points and the bugs are starting to piss me off one by one, especially since they've had the chance to patch them. However I still find a way to enjoy the game.

If you're calling me a mouthpiece for EA, you couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm disgusted with EA's shady business practices, "exclusive" licenses, buying out other companies, piss-poor employee treatment (as read from a blog). I'm sick of all of it. I almost didn't buy BF2 because of this, but I knew it was basically dICE who developed it and EA publishing it (and rushing them, hence the bugs).

Originally posted by: jbourne77
1. Dice stuck to what they were good at: designing games, NOT writing engines. Let the pros do what THEY'RE good at, and license their proving products from them. The majority of the problems with BF2 can be chalked up to poor engine code. As demonstrated by BF1942 and now BF2, engine development is not Dice's strong suit. There are far better options out there for engines.

Actually the engine isn't bad at all. It's the client game ("main mod") and interface code that's all buggy.

Originally posted by: jbourne77
1. Dice stuck to what they were good at: designing games, NOT writing engines. Let the pros do what THEY'RE good at, and license their proving products from them. The majority of the problems with BF2 can be chalked up to poor engine code. As demonstrated by BF1942 and now BF2, engine development is not Dice's strong suit. There are far better options out there for engines.

Like what?! For a 64 player multiplayer game? All outdoors with that kind of graphic detail, map size, and physics effects? Doom 3 would die in that condition. As much as I hate EA, some of your points are still ridiculous.

 

[Spacecomber]

Originally posted by: ericnmu
Well its not fixed. I cant download anything from a mulitpart download either, the computer will completely lock up when it tries to compile the parts.

I think I am going to part out my computer and put it on ebay. Rebuild from scratch. Im out of ideas and patience.

Sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water, but some people like wrestling with recalcitrant hardware and software more than others. Since you BF2 is running (for now) and you're seeing problems with multipart downloads, after a fresh OS install, I think we're back to wondering what peice hardware is flakey.

If your system stood up under the three tests I mentioned earlier (Memtest86, Prime 95, and rthdribl), I would begin wondering about the hard drive controller (perhaps the hard drive itself, too?). I'm not sure how best to test that out, maybe create a very large zip file (a few hundred MBs) and copy and paste it to different folders. You'd know if it got corrupted when you tried to unzip it.

If you were to do another attempt at reinstalling the OS, that would be a good time to use the hardware manufacturer's utilities to run a thorough surface scan of the drive. You could also use the manufacturer's utilities to write zeros to the whole drive before partitioning and formating, since this would return the drive to as close to its original condition as you can get.

Space

 

[Pr0d1gy]

Originally posted by: M0RPH

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: ericnmu
EA said make sure I dont have spyware. f***k them.

Roger that.

BF2 was my last EA purchase. I won't go into a rant, but I'm just sick of their bugged, pricey software.

I don't know how or when, but there will come a time that they will pay the price for continuously screwing their customers.

Take it easy there, buddy. The game runs fine for the vast majority of people. It's a damn good game too, and I for one am grateful to EA for bringing it to us.

D.I.C.E Sweden brought it to you. EA is just the money monkey who paid for publishing rights so they could make a cent of each dollar.

 

[ericnmu]

Originally posted by: Spacecomber

Originally posted by: ericnmu
Well its not fixed. I cant download anything from a mulitpart download either, the computer will completely lock up when it tries to compile the parts.

I think I am going to part out my computer and put it on ebay. Rebuild from scratch. Im out of ideas and patience.

Sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water, but some people like wrestling with recalcitrant hardware and software more than others. Since you BF2 is running (for now) and you're seeing problems with multipart downloads, after a fresh OS install, I think we're back to wondering what peice hardware is flakey.

If your system stood up under the three tests I mentioned earlier (Memtest86, Prime 95, and rthdribl), I would begin wondering about the hard drive controller (perhaps the hard drive itself, too?). I'm not sure how best to test that out, maybe create a very large zip file (a few hundred MBs) and copy and paste it to different folders. You'd know if it got corrupted when you tried to unzip it.

If you were to do another attempt at reinstalling the OS, that would be a good time to use the hardware manufacturer's utilities to run a thorough surface scan of the drive. You could also use the manufacturer's utilities to write zeros to the whole drive before partitioning and formating, since this would return the drive to as close to its original condition as you can get.

Space

Thanks for the ideas. I have nothing to loose, so I will give it a try.
Just to note, BF2 was and is not working. I guess I never had it fixed.

 

[ericnmu]

As far as hard drives go, I am using 2x 36GB Raptors, RAID-0 with a Promise Fasttrack controller.

Heres something else I should mention. My friend is having the exact same problem as I am, both with battlefield and multipart downloads. The only hardware we having in common is the graphics card (BFG 6800GT) and sound card (Audigy 2 ZS). We installed windows from different disks (multiple times each), different updates (network sp2 vs slipstream and windows sp1 upgrade to sp2).

His problems started happening when he installed the graphics card. Mine started when he installed his graphics card as well, but I didnt change anything hardware wise.

 

[marrr]

Try changing your agp from 8x to 4x in smartgart in ati options it worked for me

 

[ericnmu]

Originally posted by: mar23
Try changing your agp from 8x to 4x in smartgart in ati options it worked for me

Sounds like more of a work around than a solution. I wonder why it was working at 8x, now its not.

Either way, I'll test it. Im out of ideas, so any are welcome.

 

[ericnmu]

Well I talked to BFG today. Turns out they sent out a batch of these cards that have a improperly flashed bios. This might be affecting my roomate and I.
I will have the advanced RMA'd card here on Wednesday of this week. I will update this thread then, hopefully it will be fixed.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Originally posted by: M0RPH

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: M0RPH
Take it easy there, buddy. The game runs fine for the vast majority of people. It's a damn good game too, and I for one am grateful to EA for bringing it to us.

Are you crazy? You can't visit a single forum (that talks about the game) that isn't swamped with problems. There are so many bugs in the game that we all lost count. Miniscule things from the buggy C4 all the way to terrible netcode and lousy hit detection (you obviously haven't tried being a sniper) make what SHOULD HAVE BEEN a "damn fine game" and turned it into a $50 "lesson".

I'm not going to go through the effort of pointing out all of the problems... a million people have already done that. But this is NOT a "damn fine gamn". It's a pile of sh1t with "damn fine game DESIGN".

Every game that's released has some people with reported problems... but I haven't seen anything like this since Daikatana (though Daikatana's gameplay sucked in addition to being bugged to death).

Even mainstream industry sites have ceased biting their tongue...

Gee, for a game that's so bad I wonder why it's the most popular online FPS next to Counter Strike? I wonder why so many people are upgrading their computers lately just to play this game better?

While you're whining about all the little imperfections in the game, the rest of us are enjoying playing it. Bugs will be fixed, that's what patches are for and all games have them, especially online games like this one.

people did that for doom3 too you know. its all in the hype machine

 

[karstenanderson]

it's your soundcard. see here:

http://forum.eagames.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=3256

 

[skace]

Hopefully you will get your hardware issue fixed.

As far as jbourne goes, BF2 is an excellent game. Your list of bugs is terribly whiney. Let's take your top 2, borked hit detection and lousy netcode, well you just summed up Counter-Strike to a T, half-life having some of the worst netcode ever seen. Yet lots of people still play it. I will agree that it would be nice for BF2 to have a better ingame browser and support for TFTs/Widescreen, but these are tiny issues in comparison to things like gameplay that they did do very well.

There are things I'd love to see fixed in BF2, but it is extremely far from being a botched release or a terrible game. It is probably one of the most fun multiplayer games that I've played in some time and I give credit where its due.

 

[ericnmu]

Originally posted by: karstenanderson
it's your soundcard. see here:

http://forum.eagames.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=3256

I crash playing any 3D game, CS:S, AOE3, BF2.

BFG is taking longer than expected with the graphics card. Hopefully I will have it tomorrow.

 

[Nextman916]

I have a soundblaster 24 bit live! its like a $30 dollar sound card and i run it on high with EAX enabled no problem. However i run it in software mode is hardware much different in terms of sound quality??? Does it impact game performance alot???

 

[ericnmu]

Yes and yes nextman. An Audigy is the minimum for hardware/high.

Anyways, I am trying out the sound fix. All I did was update my creative openal.dll. It's been going good so far, hopefully it will last.