I ran the game’s updater with Admin privileges, and it took about 10mins. Loaded up the game and when I went to the Browser and searched, with my standard settings (Ranked, Not full) the game froze. Well actually the search animation icon was updating every 30 seconds. So I went back to my desktop and close the app which Vista said was not responding.
I then launched it again, this time went to my Browser History and that showed up quickly and pings were low. Then went to favorites and they showed up, and pings were low.
Decided to jump in an empty server to see how it was. My Controls didn’t work!
THE GAME RESET ALL of my keyboard controls…………………..
@(&%#$*@^%$#*^@%#$*@. What a pain in the ass. So heads up. and please let me know if this happens for you or if I was just the lucky recipient of a DICE patch hiccup.
——————————————————————————————————–
Great read from a DICE developer sharing the complexities on game development and why this patch took so long to do and why its over 800MB.
Snippet:
Each patch gets larger than the previous, because the game drifts ever further away from what was shipped on the DVD. Changes that require shader database updates make the patch balloon in size. And we have to be careful and clever when selecting which file types to include and which to ignore when creating the patch.And that’s where we finally ran into real problems. It was too difficult for one person to identify which changes were required and which were not, and how to update the patch generation process to accommodate the latest set of changes. Most of the delay of Client R8 was because there are very few people at DICE who have the in-depth knowledge of the far-spanning corners of the game engine *and* the cooking tools *and* the patch generation process, to work out what is going wrong, why, and how to fix it.
The new content did work a long while ago – but the patch was back then approximately 7GB large. The patch had to get down to less than 1GB, or else some customers in Australia and South Africa would not be able to download it due to bandwith caps. [As an aside - how about distributing the patch as an installer, for those who prefer that option? We would love to do so, but creating an installer that does anything out of the absolutely most ordinary installer-y requires ridiculous amounts of development time.] I think that we have a proper Client R8 patch ready for release, but the approach we have been using thus far has been taken as far as it can go. (A bit too far, considering the delays.) We want to continue supporting the game, but if we want to change anything else than the game executable itself, we will need to spend time on figuring out how to do so with a less error-prone patch generation procedure … and preferably without generating as large patches.
Thank you Mikael Kalms for sharing this insight.
Comments on this entry are closed.