BF1942 Issues That Never Should Never Have Been Issues?

[deckard]

I played the BF9142 demo many months ago when it first came out. It would not run on my Win2k machine. After the fix was discovered to enable refresh rates, I could run the demo. Then, the in-game text was blurry and illegible. Disabling AA and AF and changing resolutions were discovered to help. So then the game overall didn't look as good and ran choppy but I could almost read the text and it was still fun despite everything. I blamed my system for the low performance, soon gave up playing and promised myself to come back later with a faster PC to enjoy the game better.

Fast forward to now with a brand new PC and fresh installation of the full game to see what's changed after 3 patches. You still have to edit a file to enable refresh rates, right? You have to edit a file to get resolutions past 1280x960? You still have to disable AA and AF to be able to read the in-game text? The game still runs choppy? The options menu is stuck at 800x600? The mouse response is laggy?

I'm a total newb to what's been happening with this community but have the developers agreed these problems exist? AA and AF are features that improve every other game on my hard drive yet I have to disable them specifically for BF1942. I have an LCD with native 1280x1024, why isn't that an option from within the game as it is in all other games? Small blessing that I don't have to worry about setting refresh rates since LCD's default to 60.

Sorry if all these issues have been recognized already by the developers but if not, does anyone know if they will be addressing some or all of them?

[Brutus]

You having to edit a file to get your refresh rates to work is not a problem of the game, but of XP.

[Morat]

You still have to edit a file to enable refresh rates, right? You have to edit a file to get resolutions past 1280x960?

Yes. You have to make a whole 1 character change to a file. Is this such a massive issue? Personally if it was a choice between making a menu item for this and having to type "[GFH]*" into a buddy list file rather than game.listplayers then game.addplayertobuddylist for each buddy every time the map changes, then I know what I'd rather they worked on.

The two major FPS engines (Q3 and UT) both encourage the use of config files for accessing additional capabilities of the game, I don't see this as a huge issue for anyone.

You still have to disable AA and AF to be able to read the in-game text?

Yes, and 1942 is not the only game with problems with FSAA as anyone who tried using it with the otherwise excellent Dungeon Siege could attest.

The game still runs choppy?

No. It should be fine for anyone with a capable enough machine, notwithstanding some people have had issues with some soundcards. This isn't unusual in the heterogenous world of PC configurations. A friend of mine upgraded his PC at the same time as me and we have virtually identical systems, and he ran 1.3 fine while I had problems. It turned out to be that I didn't have the latest Via motherboard driver. That's hardly DICE's fault.

The options menu is stuck at 800x600?

Personally I could care less. It's good enough to see everything you need to see.

The mouse response is laggy?

Never has been for anyone I know. Is your mouse sensitivity very high? What kind of mouse are you using?


There are certainly some useability issues, the game.addplayertobuddylist command is just a joke, but personally I'd rather they spent time on the important stuff that's really broken that people can't work around. At least for now.

[deckard]

Untrue. Yes, 2K and XP have a refresh rate problem but there are plenty of utilities available to set a full-screen refresh rate. Once set, BF1942 simply doesn't recognize it until you edit the videodefault.con file. These 2 issues are independent. Name another game in the last couple years that has had such a requirement.

Anyway, I'm talking about these issues as a whole. It's silly to nit-pick over each one at this level. That should be for the developers while engineering the next patch, which is the whole point of my post.

Any other opinions?

[deckard]

Thanks for the reply, Morat. You bring up an interesting point. You seem to be an individual that does not concern himself so much with the polish and shine of a game as long as the core gameplay is solid. I generally agree with this opinion but perhaps I'm just a little spoiled now with my expectations of the finer details from experience with other recent games.
I would just like to see some of these loose ends tied up in BF1942. I mean if you're 3 patches into a game's life cycle, why not address ALL issues?

Yes, editing the file to allow refresh rates is so easy a shaved chimp could do it. You are missing my point, however. Keep in mind that for many 2K and XP users this game was unplayable out of the box. It literally would not even start. They had to either call tech support or spend time finding the answer on a fansite forum somewhere That's pretty frustrating and is something to think about, don't you think? The OOTB experience is sometimes VERY influential to people in a number of ways.

None of the issues I mentioned are in and of themselves show-stoppers but having to deal with all of them to obtain a proper gameplay experience is, well, disappointing I guess.

[_54th_ElephantNest]

You're right. This game has more issues than Anna Nicole Smith.

[BPP]

I started out playing BF 1942 on Windows 2000 Pro with no problems. I switched to Windows XP and it ran a little choppy, but I went to this website: http://www.tweaktown.com/document.ph...Id=420&dPage=1 and followed some of their tweaking advice. Now the game runs like a champ.

Check it out, it might help you.

[deckard]

Thanks BBP. I actually did read that and am able to run the game reasonably well at this point. The only thing that really bothers me now and cannot be worked around is having to disable AA and AF which I REALLY enjoy having enabled due to the IQ improvement, espeically AA.

I was more looking to get some opinions on the overall feeling of having to deal with so many arguably minor issues to get a good gameplay experience and whether the developers plan on fixing them.

I'm reading now about this debug hack that will require another patch to fix so who knows what's ahead.

[mr.fresh]

Somehow changing my sound cache in the defaults.con file to 150 made my frame rate go up considerably

[PxR|GrimJack]

Originally Posted by deckard

None of the issues I mentioned are in and of themselves show-stoppers but having to deal with all of them to obtain a proper gameplay experience is, well, disappointing I guess.

actually I think that is the answer to your question in itself....none of the issues you've brought up ARE show stoppers......the 3 patches we have (and the upcoming patch patch) went after hard core game play problems

if we had waited till they fixed EVERYTHING in a patch, then we'd still be playing 1.0

I dont see a prob with editing to change the refresh rate.....and honestly I'd MUCH rather do it thru a fast edit than run a 3rd party program to fix it

as for AA & AF....yeah its a pain, but then, its a pain on MOST games.....yes its an issue that can be addressed down the road, but I dont think its something that deserves undue attention right this second, and there are only so many programming hours in a day

lets get the game playable & stable for as close to everyone as we can, THEN "spit & polish"....until then I dont mind doing a little tweaking on it

[deckard]

Tell ya what Grimjack. If the dev team shares your attitude then I think ulitmately everyone will be happy, even the detail-fixated like myself.

[PxR|GrimJack]

we can hope