Battlezone II v1.3.6.1 Public Beta released

[GSH]

Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to announce that the Battlezone 2 patch version 1.3.6.1 Public Beta has been released. You can download it from http://matesfamily.org/bz2 .

Major features of v1.3.6.1 Public Beta:
- Reduced warp/lag for MP
- Tweaked network code for better performance with lots of players in game.
- Various other fixes and optimizations.

Legal disclaimer
This Battlezone II Combat Commander 1.3 patch comes with no warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the package "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose and the accuracy of the information contained within it. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the package is with you.

According to the publisher, the last officially supported patch is the 1.1 patch.

-- GSH

[index]

woot 4 mins left... now 3... dos... uno!..

[slayer]

Thanx for new patch!
I installed it this morning and immediately found a bag. When I turn off the lights of the ship (pressing 'L'), they go off and immediately turned back on.
Of course, I can turn off the display of lights in the game/graphics settings, but I love to blink them as a greeting

[Zax]

Note: When he says reduced lag/warp, that's the understatement of the year. Nearly Eliminated is more accurate.

-Zax

[squirrelof09]

Bzscrap mirror here: http://www.bzscrap.org/downloads/Patche ... nglish.zip

Feel free to put this anywhere.

Additional things, such as modder data found there too, http://www.bzscrap.org/downloads/Patche ... 1.3/PB6.1/

[-]NeRo[-]

Well today me and a couple of players were playin this patch and only had 1 good game.

There was so much lag in all the games especially with more than 4 players per game. Timeouts and lag/warp occur a lot more often in this patch
the performance of the patch is worse then the last patch. It is a lot more difficult to enter games and it takes way to long to actually enter the game, a lot of freezes happen also.
You would have a better chance playing in other patches.

This patch needs a lot of fixing

[Nielk1]

Step one to getting fixes is to give details and logs. Whenever something goes wrong, it tends to dump to the log. Freezing sounds pretty wrong to me.

I have not had time to really test much and as it was the most active testers at once was like... 2... but there is a reason this is called a public beta. So people can test it and create meaningful bug reports and reproduction steps.

I know a month or so ago when I was in a testing game lots of stuff was going on, we had four players, and we even tried smashing ships together and it seemed pretty stable, so such an vague description of systemic stream lag is unexpected to me. I somehow doubt something went so horribly wrong in the span between my last test and release, so I have to wonder what conditions are different between the test were we were trying to break it and the game where you were not.

I don't mean to be rude but your description sounds like something I have never seen, even in pb4 or pb6, let alone 6.1, though as I said I last tested it maybe a month or two ago as I have been increasingly busy. It would be good for you to do a few more tests, identify the general location of the other players, and check the pings. It might be the private testers, what few are active, just live close to each other, or it might be that you had a bad internet day.

(It is a sad day when one opens a game just to moderate and doesn't get any 'fun' in, and that wasn't even BZ2 in my case.)

[Zax]

Regardless of how many code fixes the game has, a crappy connection is a crappy connection.

[MrTwosheds]

Unfortunately, it seems to have a fairly serious bug, that only becomes apparent when you have more people in game than we ever managed to test with...

[darkwarrior]

Yeah, when playing a 6-way FFA, on my stable internet connection. It was apparent that if a new joiner joined, there would be a 50% the server would lag out and everyone would be kicked. Everyone would have to rejoin, ruining the game because people got other people's bases.

[Vearie]

Everyone I've heard from that's played this patch has lots of problems even worse than the last, I wouldn't know about MP though since the game crashes when searching for sessions, even after multiple installation attempts to a fresh CD install.

Poetic justice right there. No big loss. We have less lamer harassing MPI players and one less modifying odfs in-game. I would find it funny if that behavior was intentional, sadly I doubt it is.

[Ded10c]

Everyone I've heard from that's played this patch has lots of problems even worse than the last, I wouldn't know about MP though since the game crashes when searching for sessions after multiple installations to a fresh CD install.

Surely you've heard how few reliable and active testers we have? It's tough getting a 2-player strat up, never mind a 6-player FFA. All tests indicated that lag and warp was almost completely eliminated, are you suprised that led us to think it was?

But hey, it's called Public Beta for a reason.


No chance of logs for those crashes, I take it?

[Vearie]

This can be the MPI patch anyways, a large group of players including me are already heading back to another one.

[Red Devil]

i just joined a 3p MPI late and it played fine - even though i forgot i had Steam downloading 2 games and winamp streaming at 256 kbps on 1.5 dsl.

[Iron Maiden]

So, is this a good patch or not? Worth downloading? Unbiased opinions please.

Also, when I download this, I make a fresh install right? I do this by, simply becasue its been a while, Go to the directory or something and hit install, then save it to a diferrent place right. Just want to refresh myself. Thank You.