So what happened to 1.3?

[*GEL*Victorius[gm]]

The only thing why i didn't give 1.3 more of a chance was the units jerking around... It was horrible... how are you supposed to play a game like that if you cant even hit ai units?

[Spacecomber]

There are some settings in the GamePrefs.ini file that can be played around with, if someone wanted to take the time to see if they could tweak how the visual and multiworld currently are brought together.

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// Maximum percentage of a craft's normal forward velocity it may be
// smoothed by in MP. This applies only to units that are piloted by a
// remote user; AI units don't count. This value should be between 0.1
// and 5.0, where 1.0 means that the craft is allowed to travel up to
// 100% of its forward velocity per frame. BZ2 1.0-1.2 used 0.25,
// though that was based on an arbitrary max velocity of 45, not the
// craft's physics parameters. Setting this number higher will be
// slightly more jumpy, while lower numbers will tend to induce warp if
// remote players maneuver really quickly.
MaxMWSmoothPercentage = 0.4

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// Flag to use the newest timeskew code. If false, the code from 1.2
// will be used instead. This option may go away at some point.
UseNewTimeskew = false

I'm not sure how much can be done with these parameters in the current v1.3 public beta.  Basically, I'm just repeating what I mentioned earlier; this is something that appears can be (or could be) adjusted in various ways.  Up to now, it has never been very extensively tested, since most of the v1.3 work has been on finding bugs and rewriting code that seemed prone to instability (e.g., the old Aureal based sound code).  Although I have no real knowledge of whether v1.3 multiplayer can be made to "look" the same or better than v1.2, I wouldn't take the current public beta as the best that could be done in this area, as not that much time was put into working with it.

This is an after thought that I had to what you were saying, Victorius.  Were you using a low MWF setting like 1 or 2 when you noticed a lot of AI jumping about or mini-warping?  I play a lot of MPI games with v1.3 and use a MWF of 5 typically.  The AI units don't seem to jump around much with this setting.  I'll have to try some lower MWF to see if this makes a difference.  Paradoxically, it may be that while a lower MWF makes human players less warpy, it may cause problems with how the AI craft appear.  As I said, this is an area that still needs a lot of testing and further work.

[Red Devil]

Argh.

The 1.3 patch was *Public Beta*.  Beta, as in, "not final".  Beta, as in, "for testing and debugging purposes".  But, due to some (unwise and ill-advised) personal affronts visited upon the developer(s) of the patch due to a lack of understanding of the meaning of the word "Beta" and an increasingly heavy workload at work, work on the BZ2 1.3 public beta patch was not worked on, but was continued for a bit in private, which produced some interesting effects and introduced more enhancements  and bug fixes.

Hopefully, after their workload at their income-producing jobs abates somewhat and they take a well-deserved break, they will find it in their hearts to revisit the beta patch.

[† Trinity †]

What a colossal effort to go to such a waste.

As much as Nathan is an unmitigated ass I feel bad for what happened for him as well as the community. I think if the game could have worked better for me while playing MP I would have given it more of a chance. But it sure was hard to like a game that warpy and prone to "net' issues. I would have thought that would have been a central focus of the 1.3 patch as opposed to whether units should fly or not.

Oh well. Still a pretty game.

[spAce]

What if 1.3's lag handling code would be replaced with 1.2's ?
in all previous versions (1.0, 1.1...) there appears this crazy warp when somebody takes highest possible speed by putting nose down (with automatic leveling turned off and absolute pitch enabled) and pressing w+e. In 1.3 this causes apocalyptic insane warp...

(1.3 strat is really unplayable, no change to hit nothing really. as if the game was played with 2000 ms pings)

otherwise 1.3 is really good when not talked about laggin and clumsy physics.. Im sure that it would have hc players using it if these things were fixed..

Elite players had fought so many years against the horrible warping of 1.2 that how in the **** could have they accept more among with a new patch......

But anywas 1.3 really has some positive features aswell that would really bring lotta new features to bz2. Sad to c it so distracted atm...

EDIT: forgot to mention that i was talking about 1.3beta..

[Red Devil]

beta

adj 1: second in order of importance; "the candidate, considered a beta male, was perceived to be unable to lead his party to victory" 2: preliminary or testing stage of a software or hardware product; "a beta version"; "beta software" n 1: the 2nd letter of the Greek alphabet 2: beets

[Spawn]

1.3 is really annoying to play strat in, there are a lot of balance changes, and while the physics does matter, the warp is a real pain in the ass, i couldnt kill someone running in a straight line, they jumped 7m to a side every second or so.  I did kill them, but it took 5 times (in my gameworld, before sync).  The new g66 is good tho, and with the 1.3 better mpi stuff, its a bit harder.  not much work has been done for awhile, cause the devs are working on starwars battlefront, but once that is dont 1.3 might get some work done, and i have heard that there have been improvments in many of these problems in the last few betas, but i wouldnt know.  I still like 1.3, but nobody is there so i go to other versions.

[GreenHeart]

Last time i've heard GSH & Ken Miller were busy working on the Star Wars Battlefront Game which is set to be released September 21st & they most likly don't have anytime to work on the 1.3 patch until sometime after Battlefront is Released.

[DarkFox]

personal affronts visited upon the developer(s) of the patch due to a lack of understanding of the meaning of the word "Beta"

I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall/neanderthal, but I'll repeat just once more...
The reason players were distressed was not because everything that needed fixing wasn't already done in the beta, it was that the devs had demonstrated very clearly that they didn't care about people's opinions on these issues.
It's not about people not knowing what 'beta' means, it's about devs rudely stating 'I know, I just don't care' in reply to balance and/or detrimental physics changes.
In short, how were people supposed to say 'It's only beta, it'll be ok in the final release', when they'd already been informed that the devs knew what was wrong, but were not going to do anything about it because they didn't care?

[BZZERKER]

I think the entire argument would be moot if the version we all got on the cd was 1.3 (which btw, is what the remaining devs are trying to give us). The fact of the matter is, that had it not been for Activision accountants, things may have very well been much different than they are now (code and community wise). Now everybody, please stop this senseless discussion as it appears to me that the thread starter brought this up to provide just this sort of entertainment for themself.

[MowerMan]

Simply not true on all accounts BZZERKER (execpt for maybe the Activision accountants point).

You could fly in the BZ2 demo for crying out loud.  It was left in.  It wasn't until some jerks made pests of themselves by overusing it, and subsequently a bunch of babies crying about it that it got any attention at all.  There are an infinite number of better methods of correcting the problem than what was implemented, but as DF has pointed out, the programmers developing the patch simply didn't want to listen to reason.

Ruining the craft dynamics was definitly not a good fix.

[Red Devil]

I know what you mean... once again, that response was meant for the hovering whiners and was not intended for those who had valid concerns about balance and physics, but people chose to expand its scope and used it as ammunition for their own weak arguments.  In my experience, relying on injury to fragile and overinflated egos instead of valid and logical points to buttress a case will not win many cases.  Try pulling that off with your boss at work and see where it gets you.  Yep, nowhere...fast.

[BZZERKER]

Mower, you may very well be right but we'll never really know for sure. If Pandi had more time, someone may very well might have said something about it during "polishing". It's all the accountants fault

And yes, that was primarily aimed the bruised ego club.

[† Trinity †]

... it appears to me that the thread starter brought this up to provide just this sort of entertainment for themself.

Actually no. I knew there was a lot of anger over 1.3 and I saw a bit of Nathan's tirades but I just couldn't imagine all this angst over flying vehicles. I guess I would need to play 1.2 and 1.3 to compare but I just can't get past the god damn warping. I was surprised to find that the thing that bugged me the most about BZ2 (other than the crippled DM) was the warping lag was even worse after all that work. I would have thought it was a priority to fix. I was wrong.

[MowerMan]

If only BZ2 got the time and money that Halo got...