Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

I'm buying it today b/c its cheaper now in stores than it is online.

[DesertFalcon]

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

i cant play it because EA DOWNLOADER IS ALWAYS ****ING BROKEN. NEVER UNINSTAL SF.

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

I don't play it because of the awful coding in it.
It lags too much on my PC, and I can play vanilla on 1600x1200 at high settings

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

In game browser indiactes 83, and that's the situation last night. Sad!

Use qtracker and you will find a lot more servers than in the crappy ingame browser. SF isn't dyiing.. I'm playing it every day.

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

I am a great fan of Battlefield 2. As you know, this game is both CPU and GPU bound. I upgraded to this specification just last week. And I have finally managed to obtain 30+ frame rate at medium setting. However, when it comes to a bigger map, the frame rate drops, and choppiness starts to surface. So I bought another stick of memory making it to 2GB. Still the choppines wouldn't go.

Now having 2GB of memory, I have sufficient memory for aperture. So I went to change the aperture to 256MB (max supported by my motherboard). The difference is obvious! I have also up'd the CPU to 3.0GHz without adjusting the voltage.

Now even I run Special Force, which demands more memory, the frame rate is between 31 and 70. Taking an average, it is around 50. Maybe 128MB video ram is not sufficient. Any AGP card of 256MB and is faster than my 6800XT?

SOMEHOW,
Battlefield 2 is built to challenge CPU technologies and GPU capabilities of the future, still. If you would care to look back to Battlefield 1942. Try running Battlefield with your current rig and you will see what I mean. I tried it just yesterday, it runs with 100% smoothness with all Video settings stretched out to the Maximum. Even FH 0.7 no longer lags, in my case. Having said that, don't forget we are talking about a game which is 4 years old already!

Have you heard about a flight simulator called Falcon 4? It was released in Jan 1999 and almost all the mid-end system users were getting stuck at the extreme hardware requirements. 7 years down the road, if you could afford a Intel Core 2 Duo with a GeForce 7900GTX and 2GB of RAM, you will have no cpmplaints. That's another example of games which are built for future hardware.

Battlefield 2 vanilla version is okay. The onboard memory usage max'd out at some 800+MB. As for special force, it demands more. I have checked out many times, it can at times, stretches on board memory up to 1GB and beyond. But that only solves choppiness due to swapfile/pagefile utilization. Don't forget the GPU is also expected to work like a cow. And the video memory is demanding as well. As I mentioned above, because my card falls short of onboard video RAM, I have to sort of "borrow" memory from the onboard memory. That's why I set the aperture to 256MB.

Looking at this particular game again, one will have to make a machine with "all round" processing power to satisfy her needs.

Sometimes, I wonder if the hardware industry, like processes, memory kits and video cards are driven by game development. At least it looks like it that way.

I agree with you. Like in BF 1942, had it not becaue of the sound algorithm, the game would have been more efficient. Like Call of Duty original version, the game never has a lag problem. But it looks like for games like Call of Duty, in which the graphics looks like plastic and 2D more than 3D are always "fast". But for games like BF2 and even Ghost Recon 3, there are more hidden features which are not unvealed until you are upgrading to a higher end video card or higher end hardware. The PPU is one of the examples. With PPU, you will be seeing blasting effects completely different than on a machine without a PPU card. When a dust bin say, blasts off, the effect which PPU brings about is like what happens in real life where fragment / pieces of the destroyed dust bin blasted out in to all directions. Without a PPU, the dust bin will just be rendered as a deformed object with some smole effect added to it.

My experience tells me that with an old video card, you will see less candy graphics than a new one even the new one is slower than the old ones. But, all in all, I think theule of thumb is that if you are after some high frame rates, go get the most latest and fatest CPU, you won't miss much! By the way, Iron Gator map is now looking very very smooth on my new machine. I used to complain about this map alot. Looks like what was wrong before is my poor out-dated hardware. If EA is reading this, may I beg for their forgiveness for some negative comments about this particular map of the game.

[Revoluti0n]

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come save this great expansion!

I sure hope they hurry it up with DCON already. Been over a year.

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

I stopped playing SF because I need to put in more time in jets & helos in order to progress. Once I meet those requirements I'll go back to SF

[Sars99]

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

i have different moods.

sometimes i want the fast pace gameplay that SF gives (like palace battles on warlord, iron gator, or the sneaky night maps) otehr tiems i feel more liek having a relaxing slower paced game on Sharqui, Wake or mashtuur.

but what i find is after playing a fair bit of SF. go back to vannila and with the same playing style (i.e fast blitzkrieg kinda way) and you leave the vannila no0bs in ur wake. i think a good variety is needed, thats also why i'm going to get EF and AF so that when there is a server running them i will play htem for variety.

[james_1991-fight]

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

Yeah but I bet only half of those 83 are filled most of the time.

True True, I have to admit i am probably one of the people who has deserted SF. When i first got it i thought it was the bestg thing since sliced bread but now i just prefer vanilla.

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

In game browser indiactes 83, and that's the situation last night. Sad!

Yeah but I bet only half of those 83 are filled most of the time.

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

In game browser indiactes 83, and that's the situation last night. Sad!

Re: Com'on! SF needs rescue, come safe this great expansion!

I don't know why fewer people are playing it. I guess as a whole there are fewer people. But the remaining servers are pretty hardcore and will be up for a long time. I play more SF then vanilla right now. I play mostly on the 24/7 warlord servers but sometimes will go to a rotating or 24/7 Ghost Town a couple times a week. It's kinda wierd because I know a lot of the players who play the 24/7 warlord servers or atleast reconize their names, ranks, score, and sometimes playing habits. When one server crashes most of us will come back or join the all join the same server because there are very few. It kinda sucks though because when I go in search there are about 900 active wake and karkand servers but less then 50 active SF servers.

I have recently upgraded my PC. The old rig specification is:

AMD AthlonXP 2200+ (128 L2 Cache) ~ 1.8GHz
Asus A7V8X-X Via chipset based motherboard
Leadtek GeForce 5900XT (AGP ver, 128MB)
768 SDRAM (PC2700)
Excelstor 80GB 2MB cache 7.200rpm
2TheMax EP-530 (600Watts) PSU
Generic CD-RW
Windows XP SP2

BF2 and SF runs quite slowly under this profile. Normally, it was very laggy. Frame rate moves between 17~28. Here is my new toy:

Intel Pentium D 805 (FSB=533)
Asus P5P800 SE Intel chipset based motherboard
Leadtek GeForce 6800GT (AGP ver, 128MB)
2 x 1GB Super-Talent (CAS 2.5) PC3200 DDR400
Excelstor 80GB 2MB cache 7.200rpm
2TheMax EP-530 (600Watts) PSU
Generic CD-RW
Windows XP SP2

Now I can enjoy eye candies graphics at Medium settings, same as in the last rig. Not only that, but I also have way better frame rates. Now I get around 38~60+ FPS. I have overclocked the CPU slightly to 3.0GHz.

In fact, my favourite map is SF's Warlord, Surge and Ghost Town. Quite the contrary, the frame rate is slightly slower than in vanilla version of BF2. Now I really enjoy Special Force enormously. The most disappointing thing I see is that there are fewer and fewer players. Last night, using QTracker, there are only 80+ servers.:cry:

There are 2 additional kits I find extremely useful in whatever FPS games, not only Battlefield series: zip line and hook. Besides there are more infrantry combat. Please, come and save this game join more. I am on the other side of the planet. And here there are only 1 to 2 servers which has less than 100 ping.

I wonder, why fewer people are playing it.