FI_FlimFlam

Not unusual. When we hosted, we never got a completely stable server. Crashes often happen especially with custom maps. I don't know if it's a memory leak as that original dedicated server had or what but we were never able to find the root cause.

Rocky and everyone, My take on it, is that it only works well with content optimized for it like Ageia Island as Rocky noted earlier. Below is my info and my experience so far. Let's see: OS: Windows XP Video Card: BFG Tech 880GTS 512MB. RAM: 2 GB DDRII 800 - OCZ brand CPU: Intel Core2 Duo 6600 at stock (2.4ghz) - no OC'ing Audio: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Mobo: Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe HDD: WD 500MB SataII Monitor: LG Flatron 22" LCD (L227WTG) In GRAW2 here's my settings (without listing the Physx setting): Aspect: 16:10 Refresh: 60 Resolution: 1680x1050 Brightness: 1.0 (middle setting I think) Environmental Detail: 1.0 (Full) Texture Quality: High Texture filtering: Anisotropic 8x Effects: High Dynamic Shadows: High Dynamic lights: On Post Effects: High Anti-Aliasing: Off FPS (First campaign mission, Search and Destroy, used to test): With Physics Normal, Physx Device None: ~75 dropping to high 50's with explosions With Physics High, Physx Device None: Not Available With Physics Normal, Physx Device GForce Physx: ~50 dropping into the low 20's with explosions With Physics High, Physx Device GForce Physx: (crashed whenever I attempted to load a save game - any save game). Had to start level from beginning and was getting low 20's with no explosions, dipping into the teens when engaging enemies before crashing. With Physics Xtreme, Physx Device Gforce Physx: Did not attempt. Weird. Ageia Island didn't have these problems last night and seemed to run smoothly at around 30 fps even the helo engagement didn't stutter. I didn't use FRAPS to get FPS like I did today. Also of note, I can also select the extreme setting but I did not attempt it. I also have not downloaded any of the other bonus demos from Nvidia to test or Benchmark with. I'd be interested in seeing how they perform as well. EDIT: I think it is interesting to note that the FPS seems lower just with the GFORCE Physx enabled even with the setting to normal. Evidently, the my CPU is capable enough to handle the Physics on that setting better than my GPU (which is no slouch) is in addittion to the graphics. If you are not going to enable any higher physics setting, you are most likely NOT going to see any benefit from it performance wise unless you have a second card handling the physics as a dedicated physx processor. At least that it what it would seem to me.

Rocky, There is a dedicated PhysX control that I think you might be able to turn it off with. Go into your start menu under Nvidia Corporation (the default install location) and look for Nvidia PhysiX Properties. There is a settings tab where you can turn off Physx acceleration (or select GeForce Physx or AGEIA PhysX). I haven't benchmarked it but try turning it off and see what happens. After I turned it off, Agiea Island was no longer available. I did notice that my in game Physics settings were still set to High however I did not notice a drop in FPS at all from enabling Physics or off. I have an 8800GTS (the newer G92 chipset).

since my original post on using Virtual PC - which I believe was from the demo, a variable in the server config was added to allow server operators to specify the port the game used. <var name="port" type="number" default="16250" /> While I never attempted it, you should be able to use 2 different install directories (or you will get file sharing violations), specify different ports and server names in the config, and be able to run the 2 instances on one box without going through the trouble I did messing around with getting the demo.

I must admit, that news of all this does not suprise me in the slighest, especially considering UBI's propensity for quick and dirty ports. I'm glad to hear performance is good for users like Dia, but seems many others have a fair number of issues. But performance issues aside, there are no excuses for NOT making the port fit properly. Like supporting common PC resolutions properly or optimizing the menus for the PC. That just smells of lazieness or cheapness in the port. (like R6 Vegas and Splinter Cell for example). It's these simple things that you would think would be no brainers but are ignored by UBI when porting games lately. It just means to me that they are not really interested in making the title fit on the platform properly. Which also means that it's likely that they shortcutted elsewhere in the port - like for example Quality Assurance / testing. Which could also be the reason so many people are having issues performance and bug issues with the game. I played the game on the PS3 and enjoyed it for the most part. But by the last 3rd of the game, the repetitive nature really got old. Infact I stopped performing the side missions of rescuing people etc and just went for the main quest assassinations just to finish the game. All in all, it was a nice story but I felt the gameplay mechanic of the same thing in each city got old fast. They should have varied it up a bit more and actually made you have to use the information that you gathered to perform the assassinations. After finishing the PS3 version, I really had no interest in playing the PC version. I would look at the next episode however on the PS3 or Xbox because I think it is an interesting story line.

It would be nice if there is but I caution people to not get too excited. She'll know if there is a patch planned or not. This is NOT confirmation of future work only letting us know that she has been inquiring if they will work on the game more and that she should have a "yes" or "no" in about a week. With UBI, I gotta be honest. I sincerely doubt anything else will be done with the game. I'll happily eat those words if she comes back and says that a patch is in the works but really, I think it's a little premature to get worked up yet.

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware that they left it up but butchered. Still it shows that persons or even a whole website/magazine can be "bought" - like Jeff's opinions or writing style or not (I didn't particularly)

So I guess you missed the whole Atari paying off reviews for good Driv3r reviews. Or the whole Gamespot Jeff Gerstmann debacle of the Kane and Lynch scores. That brought to light serious issues with media's marketing departments putting pressure on the reviewers for higher scores. It might not be considered a direct payoff as was claimed with Atari and Driv3r, but it's still pretty much the same thing when a publisher threatens to pull at least tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue when they get a bad review. Notice, if I recall correctly, Jeff's review was never put back up by Gamespot. Also the mass exodus of reviewers from Gamespot lends weight to the validity of the claims by Gerstmann and others. Those are just a few recent ones that were brought to light recently. If you think buy-offs in the review scene don't happen (be it games or movies or whatever), you are looking through some pretty good rose colored glasses. Thank you for that insight. I had no idea. I no longer feel a sense of loss because of the "sell out" nature of this whole thing. While I enjoyed a few of his books, I found the later ones a lot of "work" to plough through. I guess I now know alittle why. I'm grateful for your and the rest of what was RSE for the work you did developing a great concept and the collaboration with TC for Rainbow. Then your work with R6 and GR games. Bravo and Thank you. I will be awaiting anxiously for whatever Ground Branch will have to offer. I promise I will support you with at least one purchase when you release - immediately at release. It's the least I can do to support your efforts to give the community here what it wants - even if it ends up not being exactly what I want (which I doubt will be the case).

While this is old - it's just indicative of what UBI is going to do with the TC name: http://computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=172618 Tom Clancy's Air Combat. LOL WE should be on the look out for the announcement of Tom Clancy's Mini RC Racing next.....

Yes you read correctly.... wait for it.... wait for it..... yep that's the sound of millions of little hopes evaporating into thin air... Well it looks like TC is such a cash cow at this point that UBI want's Intellectual Property rights to everything Tom Clancy in the future. So they bought it. Well I hope I'm not the only one that sees this as a inherently BAD thing. UBI's been driving Rainbow and GR into the ground. Further and further away from what they were originally into Hollywood hockneyed B movie stories. It's terrible. [Merged with the existing thread]

I have this in my notes that I made while hosting GRAW1. It MIGHT work for GRAW2 - you are just going to have to experiment and see if you can get it to work. "While it is not supported, enterprising admins have gotten the SADS files to run on Linix and Unix. Thanks to ben0 on www.ghostrecon.net here is some detailed info: “Its running on Dual Opteron 244, Tyan S2882, using the stock on-board VGA. Using slamd64, www.slamd64.com, current, think its V11 RC2. I installed X, and KDE, using Fluxbox as the window manager, mainly cos its lightweight. Using the 32bit version of wine from the slackware site, 0.9.20. No extra config. Wine has to be launched from the X session because the graw-standalone requires a d3d window to run. I use x11vnc for the remote management. I started the xdm session manager from inittab on bootup, with it configured to start x11vnc with it. Only 1 tip for this, use 16bit colours, make x11vnc soo much faster! With X running and x11vnc between them they use next to nothing on resourses.â€"

Yeah but that didn't happen all that often and usually you fell through the map if you went out side the mission area. Sucked but you just left and re-joined and you were all right. We hosted a GRAW COOP server for quite a while and it wasn't a real issue if I recall correctly. Still you would think that would have been a reasonable expectation to be fixed in GRAW2 rather than scrapping the whole design. I remember I complained about the kits and no squads and got hammered pretty hard by adversarial players who didn't really play coop. As if I had the nerve to suggest something for a game type they didn't really care about. But they thought it important to bash those that did. I learned then that as a community and how it's become, we've gotten what we deserved when we have people like that. I guess I didn't know what I was talking about, especially since COOP was my team's bread and butter and GRAW2 just fizzled and died. It had no where near the interest for my team that GRAW1 did. But what do dedicated coop players know about things like that...

Kris, I think you see the picture that some don't. UBI doesn't owe anyone anything. They are a business. And businesses want to make money or even more money. Given the comercial success of Black Arrow on the XBOX and GR on the Xbox, they saw the potential to make the series grow. Also, from a sales standpoint (esp in regards to piracy) the consoles were and still are a much safer bet. (See: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1263 for some real scary numbers based on a single day of 1 bittorrent site) You can bet that UBI and other publishers see or are beginning to see the PC platform as nearly rotting limb. It's not worth it to develop for it. Hence the desire to spend as little money on games for it as possible. This is easier when they can develop for the 360 and virtually run it on a PC. Very little investment is needed to port it. It's also why PC games like Vegas and Splinter Cell:DA were in terrible shape and lacking PC specific features. It also explains why UBI was/is reluctant to support PC titles beyond a minimum few months. All this in hopes to see enough to offset the porting costs and make a little money when it is all said and done. I completely understand why UBI is doing what they are doing from a business standpoint and you know what... It sucks. But there is nothing I can do about it but shake my head and wish all the pirating gamers' computers would suddenly crash permanently. What was interesting was to see how UBI handled GRAW. I think UBI tried. Yes you read correctly. I think UBI tried to give the PC community a game they wanted. Which was the impetus for hiring GRIN and paying for a PC specfic version. And I think GRAW and GRAW2 were mostly there in several areas. The problem with the the game was hey made bad design decisions that didn't improve the game overall even given the enhancements. They added multiple objectives but removed squads and custom loadouts in COOP. Also they made it harder to admin - dropped autodownload, no remote admin, no decent logging - but they did add screenshots. Was it time or was it money or was it simply a producers decision? Who know the real reason but it goes back to Roco's post and my earlier statements about quality for the specific platform and providing the community with a relatively bug-free game with the backend functionality that it needs. I realize that we are for the current time frame going to get ports. What UBI and it producers need to realize is that regardless of whether or not we like the concept they need to technically pull off game and give it (on the destination platform) the features that it needs for success. While I really didn't like Vegas or it's design, many people did (unfortunately) and it brought many new crossover players to the series. Which is good from a business point of view for UBI (trust me I hate admitting that). What wasn't good were the technical issues that hamstrung the game on the PC. Not just framerates but the game was simply not given what it needed to be anything more than a buggy single player game on the PC. It could have thriving community around it, if it had matched the backend of successful shooters. If it had been tested in a meaningful, gameplay bugs would have been better addressed (at least console specific menu options would have been removed at release). Then if they had a useable and rich dedicated server and map editors like COD4, RvS, Bf2, etc etc. There would be a rich community surrounding the game and copies still moving off the shelf. But then the piracy vs investment issue creeps back up and you have to at some point see the catch-22 here for any business. In regards to GR2. People need to get over it IMO. That was a wise decision by UBI to NOT put it out on PC. Those of you complaining about GRAW1/2 and blasting BUI for not publishing GR2 on PC would have been first in line to complain how that one wasn't GR - because it wasn't. Let's see 3 or 4 man squad, 3rd person view, over the top hollywood story, future weapon systems... Oh wait that sounds familiar doesn't it? For some miracle, UBI realized that it wasn't the game the community was asking for and pulled the plug. After playing it on the XBOX, I said good riddance was glad not to have it on the PC because it was a DRASTIC change from GR1.

I'd thought since it's loosely related, I'd post a link to an article about Publisher Ranking based on game rankings. You might be wanting to draw a direct parallel to UBI tanking PC gaming and their decline in ratings but that would be a mistake as the rankings include all games and the article does not single out PC or console specifically. Infact it doesnt mention PC at all that I recall. Still it's interesting to note that UBISofts average game ranking has dropped over the last 2 years (starting from the 2005 rank). While lower ratings could be a sign of taking chances (yeah right UBISoft going out on a limb? hahaha) it could also be an indicator of game quality not only in design but bugs and what hits home with the consumer. Evidently, UBISoft is missing something and has been sliding from their previous mark. Maybe they should listen to the fanbase for a change and actually try to make a HIGH Qualilty game and not just pump out another imitation of some other publisher's successful game to meet a deadline. They should focus on making the game as bug free as possible, and give the respective platform community the support it needs to be a great game. It's a shame when things like poor backend support and bugs kill a game but UBI just doesn't get it. They'd rather just throw the game out half baked and barely working just to get on base just to save a few bucks and/or meet a street date.. Maybe they think it's better to do that than work to knock the ball out of the park with taking some more time and spending a little more. Perhaps, it's things like this that have led to their decline in rankings. Kleaneasy are you listening? Black Widow? Maybe you should pass this on up the chain. Of course it won't matter because all evidence points to the fact that UBI will continue on it's current half-finished, barely tested, mostly working releases. The article: http://next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_c...mp;limitstart=0

First off, the server is going to peg a single core cpu at or near 100%. That has been an "issue" with the dedicated server since GRAW1. If you have multiple cores or you have a Intel Hyperthreading compatible CPU that can appear to be 2 cores then you would see the load balanced a bit more over the cpus (virtual cpus as is the case with Hyperthreading). Also be aware it takes very high priority on other system resources like disk access and memory usage. So don't try to run anything else on the box unless you have alot of memory and it doesn't require a lot of hard disk usage. 1.3 upload is probably ok but you need to try it and see. If you are using a home connection and not a connection with guraranteed bandwidth like a T1 or something business class, you most likely are NOT getting that upstream speed. Also consider that your performance isn't going to be limited by just the bandwidth. Your CPU might also be a bottle neck. I would suggest starting with 16 players and upping the size until you find lag and performance issues.

You're welcome dporter. I often host a closed server to lone wolf coop missions. Sometimes it's just good fun. This one isn't a terribly hard mission once you find all the "cheap" tango placements (it's pretty hard to do it with no deaths however). By cheap I mean, rediculous ones that are covering a side street that apparently has no strategic value except to ambush you from behind. Anyway, after playing the map several times, I don't see any great benefit from having other teammates to act as distractions for the tanks. I say this because you still have to clear the area of tangos first before you can get near the tanks to place C4 on them. Once you do that, you are close enough to NOT have to rely on a distracting team mate. Just get behind a corner on the street near the end of a tank's patrol path. When they start moving by the corner just run up to it and place the C4. Nothing to it really once you do it a couple of times. The key with this mission and killing the tanks is patience. If you take your time like I mentioned and clear the tangos from around where you need to be to take out the tanks, you will be good to go. Good luck with it.

This is completely OT but since you asked.... It's pretty simple actually. First is patience. You essentially do the same thing for all the tanks. First tank you blow is not the one past the fountain. It's the one on the left side road. 1)You have to clear out all the tangos by waiting for the tank to go to the opposite furthest end of it's path. 2) Advance to the next intersection. Making sure to clear out tangos that can line up on you. You can take cover in the blown building. While lining up the tangos across the street. Once you take the tangos out (and the 2 fixed turrets in the area) you can concentrate on the tank. Let the tank go to the farthest point on it's path. Then move to the wall across the streen (the one with the fence on top of it) and get near the intersection - but stay back behind the wall - you should be looking perpendicular to the road that the tank moves on. Wait for the tank. Once the barrel of the main gun gets into view run 2-3 meters and slide up to the tank. Place C4. You can either wait for the tank to turn around and start to move back down the road before you move back to cover behind the wall and blow it. Or you can simple run across the street into the wrecked bldg and blow the tank. You shouldn't have to run more than 3 meters either way and be behnd cover before the mounted gun can fire. All the rest of the tanks are just like that. Take out all the surrounding tangos first while letting the tank move down the patch. Then get close to the tank's path but out of sight. Run up to it, plant C4, run behind nearby cover again and blow. The tricky one is the last one. The I use the retaining wall with the bench for cover (west side of the court yard that the tank patrols). It moves right past this wall and you can lay behind it as the tank gets close. Wait till you try to extract and you run into the glitching tango. I've played the map over a dozen times now and 100% of the time the tango is glitching in the stairs or shooting through the wall of the building that you have to pass through to get to the extract point.

Here's the image for the glitching tango on coop_retrieve:

BUG: COOP Retrieve map. AI glitching in the stairs after the last tank and you have to move through the building to extract. I have a pic and FRAPS video of it. But the file is huge (500MB which would take forever to upload to youtube) and I haven't uploaded the pic to a file host yet. It was annoying but luckily the top of the tango's head was exposed and I was able to kill him to finish the map. Otherwise it would have been terrible.

Same thing happened to me while hosting - exact error. Except because I was hosting and playing it took the server down. It's pretty simple to get the tanks. There are corners near the end of their runs that you can use to get close to the tanks. Then sprint the last couple of meters to the tank and not even have a shot fired at you. No need for smoke at all. The issue is being patient to not rush the tank and also to take out all the bleeding snipers and fixed turrets. I laugh every time I see a fixed gun placed in such a way that it covers a 10m square courtyard and not any kind of distance or approach. It's just behind a blind corner to force you to die repeatedly to get a shot on him so you can advance in the map. My opinion is the map is just another meat grinder until you memorize all the positions of the enemies. I did find that it seemed easier to sneak up on the AI from behind or the side (not the tanks they still have ESP). They no longer sensed you and if you were silenced they didn't seem to react. Of course this is terrible when there is a tango 3m away from the one you shot and they are still standing there. I would say from the AI perspective, it's better than it was before. Also worth mentioning is the spawn forward aspect of the map. While I lament the gameplay design that removed squads, this helps alittle. It doesn't replace the natural teamwok fostering that squads do, but no you don't have to run forever to get to the action once you die. This will be a nice change for a few days and then I'll be back at other games unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it). I'll leave it at that and keep the complaining to a minimum as I know you guys are tired of my ranting. Still thanks for the effort GRIN.

Did you search for an RPG or TOW that you could pick up? I seem to remember reading that they had a fix that made sure items like those were spawning correctly. I haven't had a chance to play the map since I'm at work so I'll leave it up to you fellas to check for now.

Thanks Wiking (or should we call you Mattias now? I'm glad to hear about the logging? Can you give any more details on it? Is it more detailed or verbose? That would help a good bit for server operators. Also I imagine/hope the screenshot reliability was improved as well as the name bug. Those would definitely be most welcome. While I'm not a s stat person I'm sure Roco will absolutely love them! haha

Not that I've seen, but we should find out in a few hours... Can you FlimFlam be any more negative? Live Happy. I wasn't being negative with that post. Just stating the facts and infering that we'll know the full fueatures in "a few hours" once the patch is released so people should be patient just a little longer. Perhaps it would have helped if I put a " " at the end of the comment eh? Anyways, I know I have been negative at other times during the thread so pehaps you took your cues from that and I can't fault you for it. I am negative about it for the most part because UBI and GRIN hamstrung a game from the COOP perspective and killed it for me and my team. Terrible server design and administration (we hosted but finally decided to take our coop server down because of the difficulties related to hosting). GRAW1 was very good and rough around the edges we had hoped that they would have improved it and made it better. But they didn't - they actually made it more difficult to host and administrate. Granted some things they improved but others they didn't. Gameplay wise on adversarial yes I would say it was for the most part bettered. COOP ended up like the server tools. They added multiple objectives but gutted the rest for most people. Like COOP, hosting took 2 steps back for every one forward. Personally, as someone who hosted GRAW1 and 2, I saw improvements on the dedicated server administration as to being the key to making the game last longer and potentially bring players back by making it easy for them to get new content - IE maps. The rest while nice simple aren't going to make the game last longer for most people once they play out the 2 to 3 new maps that are included in the patch. But I guess that doesn't matter and I most certainly could be wrong. I'm curious where the game will be in 3 months once that content gets stale. Hopefully I'll be wrong and they'll include the autodownload in the patch as a feature that wasn't listed. Either way we'll find out in a "few hours". Anyhoo, I just checked and the patch isn't out for release and Colin hasn't posted any patch details on the official UBI forums in his release announcement.

Not that I've seen, but we should find out in a few hours...

they go in the custom maps folder in the GRAW2 game folder. If they are in a compressed archive like a .zip or .rar file. Just unzip or unrar them and place them in the folder. They should be .bundle files. If you don't the game will not see them. To get more maps, goto the downloads section of this website and check out the GRAW2 section. Use the links at the top of the page.