Agrajag

Guys, Does anyone know how you might go about running multiple instances of the game on same server? I assume you need to have it use different ports but I'm not sure how to set that up. We'd like to give it a shot. Any help would be appreciated. [Edit: Thread moved to Correct Forum (GR:AW 2 - Server Operators) - where there is already at least one thread about that]

We were using Clanwarz for a week there and it went from being awesome to being the worst lag we've ever seen. Sadly the latter case was what we had most of the time so we just closed that account. Roco, we looked at Primary Target but they were the most expensive and XE told me they had all sorts of trouble with them a while back which is what made us look at DS first. We just tried out Defcon Servers and it's been flawless so far. We went for the 32 server setup and tweaked it down to 30. Excellent as long as you monitor the 400+ pingers that show up. The one thing that's bugging is is GameRails: 1) What's the cost of this software? Can't find a cost reference anywhere. 2) Does it work with GRAW2? Their "Supported Games" list doesn't include GRAW2 but I suspect it would see the supporting server and work. 3) Many of us are having issues with the trial. I installed it a week ago and had it running and then uninstalled it when I saw GRAW2 not listed. Now that DS supports GR I tried to re-install it and it won't go. It just crashes continually after install finishes. It even does it if I try to uninstall it. 4) Is there a way to get an A/B comparison to see how it's routing traffic?

Guys, who out there rents GRAW2 servers? We're currently on Clanwarz and it's been both amazingly responsive but then later the worst lag I've ever seen. Their vent servers are the same thing. Great and then, poof, total crap. What other providers are out there?

In the Message of the Day, the game supports the ability to process a carriage return so that the message can be formatted to be a few lines long. However, I cannot remember what you use to get it to do that. I've tried several approaches and none have worked. I just wish I'd saved the settings file that had it working.

Guys, has 1.05 broken the ability to grab auto-screenshots and console screenshots? We can't get either to work these days. Nothing shows up.

Three more items for us: 1) The count down for end of maps is often absent or broken up. 2) in the server settings there's a setting that suggests it will display the message of the day every 90 seconds (by default) which we would LOVE to have to remind people about our "No GL" policy. That way no one can say they weren't aware of it. After setting it up, nothing happens. 3) We tried the Advanced Anti-cheat server settings. That was a big fiasco. Within moments of the map refresh every single player on the server was kicked for lack of a response. Imagine my surprise to find I'm a cheat and so is everyone else! heheheh

Wolfsong, Our Dedicated Server XML file wasn't touched by the patch. However, now our server is no longer giving us both sides of the map. We have the round and the match set to 13 minutes. Previously it would finish the 13 minutes say that the sides weren't even and flip us to play the same map from the other side. Now we're just getting one instance of the map and not the other. How do we fix that?

Well, maybe another way in. We'll have to chat as I'm not going to touch on specifics here. FYI, don't listen to the naysayers. Thanks for the patch and the effort. We realize what you're up against. This will hold us for a while.

We were under the map without being in the void.

Okay: 1. We're getting drop-outs we didn't get before. People are just being kicked to the login screen in game. 2. There's a problem with accuracy and the number of people on the server. We've had it show down to 23 (of 26) and still not be able to join a game. 3. While it's great that several of the glitches on FORT have been fixed, the worst one that lets you get under the map is still there.

Where does one get the update for the server software? I'm new to setting that part up for our clan and the person who used to do it (Specter) isn't on comms yet. Nevermind, I figured this out.

On the auto-downloader, the lack of it is purely a dent in the longevity of the game. Custom maps, plain and simple, kill any server running them. We've tried it so many times and each time you wake up to find the server dead with no one on it stuck at a custom map. 10 years ago that wasn't a problem with more computer literate players playing these games. Today a huge number of players have no idea about their computers. They just play. And auto-downloader is a necessity, not an option any longer. Many of us cannot stand COD4 or prefer GRAW2 to it. Yet we are compelled to leave simply because we're sick of playing the same maps over and over. The ability to have maps auto-download could keep the game alive indefinitely. I cannot understand how any company would choose not to want this. You're not cannibalizing sales. You're just driving people to other games, generally not yours. How Ubisoft can sit and watch COD4 just dominate their investment in this game is a mystery. Do they think everyone playing COD4 is going to rush back to play the next Rainbow 6 game knowing it comes from the same people who couldn't figure out that an auto-downloader was important? What I would give to be able to play many of the mayhem maps. Pity that they show up as "Custom" (another bad idea) so that many don't even see them or skip them. Oh well. Maybe by GRAW3 but I'm not holding my breath. Here's hoping that 1.05 at least fixes most of the glitches.

No problem. Be aware that many people are using wrong settings for their games. It's common. Just yesterday, one of our guys, Migs, found out that he'd been setup for surround sound and could never understand why he wasn't hearing the things we "claimed" to be hearing. He thought we were just pulling his chain. He finally changed the settings and, presto, suddenly he's hearing all the samples. One in particular sounds a bit like a very faint "change in the pocket" sound that keys me off to someone nearby but not moving much. He heard this, among others, and now his game is improving heavily.

Roco, Etymotic's earphones don't fall out. These are not earbuds. I've used my Etymotic ER-4P's for more than 8 years. Not once have they fallen out. I've been using a pre-production gaming headset for months now and it hasn't fallen out. We're talking hours of play each session. As far as reviews those will come soon after the product is officially out. Stay tuned. You were at D&H? I was at D&H each time. As far as giving you a headache, we don't get that complaint. You can go search comments from users on Google yourself. Not sure what the issue there was but I highly doubt it's something that would continue. Perhaps the volume was a bit for you. So did you and I talk? Which show was it? There were two this year and I just returned from one a few weeks ago versus say 6 months ago.

First, I'm not in sales. Second, to each his own. There was no way for me to post this and not have some people think what you did. The facts are what they are regardless. How about being helpful in your comment by pointing to elements of the post that you're doubtful of specifically?

Speaking of that, anyone who has ever hit a golf ball into a tree knows that the trees here are not handling items through them properly. A nade hits leaves and bounces off like it hit solid metal. I love when one bounces off the top and goes way upwards. Slow down the item or have it modify course a bit but stop with the aluminum trees. hehe

Are we talking about the "below ground" issue here? There's more than just that. There's a spot on the left ramp (tree spawn side) where you can see through the walls. There's a well you can see through. I've asked our guys to post the spots. We've found them on just about all the TDM maps and that tells me there are likely others on the maps we don't run. Give us a couple days for everyone to see the post and we'll have a good list for you. I'd almost forgotten about the Lagoon bridge. You get a sniper up there in one of the holes and he's almost impossible to hit from any angle except if you're on the bridge. You fire and fire and fire with NOTHING between you and his head but your shots hit nothing.

Then report away and I'll see what I can do. Haven't seen that many posts (right now only one issue not already solved in a patch), so it can't be that bad. Please talk with Specter from XE about this. We have a list around. There are glitches in nearly every maps. For starters, in Crashsite, there's an area you can lay in next to a grounded boat where you cannot be shot from most angles. In The Fort there is a well you can stand behind and yet see right through it to shoot anyone and they cannot see you. I'll note this response on our forums and get the list going.

I think I answered that. I used Etymotic earphones for several years over every other headphone and headset I encountered and then joined the company to help create gaming earphones for them when a job offer from them came my way. Obviously I'd recommend the products we're now getting ready to release. Look at the comments on our website. These are from tournament players and top industry people. John Miles wrote the most popular sound API in the business. It's used in over 4200 games. He's one of the top 3 people responsible for sound in PC's today and in getting it started back in the 80's. Then there's Jamey Scott's comments. He's the head sound guy for Epic Games and responsible for sound in Gears of War among others. All of us can use any audio product on the market and have tried just about all of them. You can find them on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/E-D-G-E-Acoustics-GX...2028&sr=1-2 Or you can go to our website at http://www.edgeacoustics.com for more info. If you don't want to go that way, the best gaming HEADPHONES I've encountered are the Sennheiser HD497's though you'll need a clip-on mic. Headsets I've tested haven't impressed me much. The more expensive ones have way too much bass. Cheaper would be better there as they tend not to be overdone. Logitech's are okay. Sennheiser PC160's aren't bad either. Yer me too same question. Vista or XP. The OS should make no difference to the solution here. Do yourself a favor and don't bother with USB-based solutions. These almost always use the absolute cheapest sound chip solution to provide audio. Think about it. If you pay $50 for a USB headset just how much do you think they spent on the sound chip that must be included with them???

My background is in game development and I've been a gamer in squads and clans going way back. On the audio side I've been involved from the very first days of PC audio. I currently work for a very high-end earphone company (Etymotic Research) and head up their new gaming division called EDGE Acoustics (www.edgeacoustics.com). ER makes $300 earphones for people like U2, Coldplay, Dire Straits and many other pros. We're aiming to do the same for pro gamers (and non-pros who want to be the best they can be). GRAW 2 has exceptional 3D sound. The spatial cues are better than in many other games with very small subtleties present to hear the opponent. When you think about audio know a few things: 1) Most headphones/earphones were NOT designed for FPS gaming. They were designed for music. Music audio is not the same thing as game audio. Music headphone companies design their products to "enhance" the experience. That means what you're getting is an artificial sound. In games that means that the spatial cues that were presented by the developer are also artificially processed, and thus, changed. 2) This "enhancement" usually means HEAVY bass boost. Bass boost is a MAJOR enemy of FPS gamers. If you're a good player with bass-boosted headphones, you'd be significantly better without bass-boosted headphones. Bass boost muddies spatial cues heavily. Each company colors the product to fit the needs of the perceived market. Color some highs, boost the bass X or Y amount, etc. All of this is bad for gaming but might be just fine for music. It's why some people prefer Sony over Sennheiser or any other comparisons. The different coloring goes a long way towards why these products are so different. 3) Isolation is a key factor. The more isolation you can get the more clearly you can hear. If you cup your hands over your ears you get a muffled sound as every outside resonance bounces around the cup. If you stick your fingers in your ears that goes away. You hear your heartbeat. That's isolation. GOOD earphones give you maximum isolation. For example, the BEST headphones on the planet give you 22dB of isolation. ER earphones provide 37-42dB of isolation and that's log scale so that's not double but 10x the isolation of headphones. Most headphones give you only 2-10dB of isolation. This is all about focus. The more you can focus, the better. Anyone that tells you that you can block out all sounds is lying. You have a bone structure so your body will convey outside sound. The key is to reduce it as much as possible. 4) Accuracy/Detail is king. Most products made for music are not accurate. This can be easily measured and most products on the market have accuracy scores well below 50%. The products I've used measure in the 80's and 90's.These are designed for a medium that isn't concerned about accuracy. They're sold to gamers because that's the predominant available technology. It's like using a butter knife as a screwdriver. It can work but it's not optimal. Just so you know, ER is a research company. They don't do marketing. They don't do commercials. I've been with them nearly 3 years and have yet to sell anything (the gaming earphones launch next month). I spent all this time on a research study testing pro gamers response times with all sorts of audio equipment. The results were pretty obvious. The BETTER (fidelity) the equipment, the better your results. Speakers did the worst. Surround speakers did SLIGHTLY better (they sound great and fun but they're totally inaccurate). Earphones (ER, Shure, Ultimate Ears and soon, EDGE Acoustics) give you a 30-50% performance improvement over headphones. It's mainly due to isolation but also, in the case of ER & EDGE, flat response. We're not bass boosting so you hear what you're supposed to hear without it being "enhanced." I'm telling you all this not to sell you earphones. I'm telling you this so that you'll think about the facts the next time you replace your heaphones. Our products aren't even available yet. I wrote the Official Sound Blaster Book. I helped get AdLib and Creative Labs started in the sound industry. I have literally dozens of headphones in my collection all sent free to me by the manufacturers. I used to use $1,200 studio-level Sennheisers when I gamed. When they wore out I tried earphones and never looked back. Be wary of marketing hype. I posted this specific note because I saw a recommendation of a pair of headphones that are almost entirely hype. For example, any product listed as using active noise-canceling is suspect for a gamer. These processes remove elements of sound in an attempt to reduce outside noise. What are they removing? In a game you can't afford to lose localization data! Also, the result of this, as I said, gets you to about 20dB of isolation at best. You can do much better without all the "technology". Another one is surround sound headphones. This one is pure marketing. If you feel you hear surround with it, great. What you're hearing is an effect very much like turning on any processed effect in your stereo like "Hall" or "Arena". Your ears are STEREO. Surround sound works only because of distance. To place multiple drivers in your headphone and think your stereo ears are going to pick up on this is just not realistic. The same result can be had from any good, clean, accurate stereo headphone. You also get what you pay for. I wonder with people who spend $400 on a video card, $100+ on a sound card, $90 on a mouse, $80 on a keyboard, etc., and then spend $30-$50 on a headset. EDGE earphones aren't cheap but neither are any of the headphones out there that are truly accurate. What you see debated most of the time are people arguing about the differences between low-end solutions. I also encounter the term, "best I've ever used" which, on the face of it, means nothing. How many have they used? I will get into debates with kids who have owned two or three pairs of crappy headphones telling me that their $30 surround-sound headphones are the best on the planet. Uh-huh. I cannot begin to tell you how many poor audio reviews I encounter. Most of them are clearly written by people who have only a cursory exposure to equipment. The best they can do is share a use-case review. They liked or disliked them "because" but to recommend them over other equipment types or levels they've never experienced is where I start to get annoyed. Be informed. Go look up what went on with the DVD debate of DTS audio versus Dolby Digital. Fans of each camp fought heavily over each one being better but in the end, the majority of consumers who did blind testing preferred the sound of DTS. Recent studies have analyzed this and found that the ONLY difference between DTS and DD is that DTS provides the same audio slightly louder than DD and most consumers equate "louder" as "better". The same thing happens with video all the time. TV's in stores have their color settings set way over the top as people look at one set over the next and if the colors "pop" they perceive this as "quality". It rarely means that but that's how people think. People in audio equate booming bass and volume as quality and that's what companies then cater to. If you have questions, don't hesitate to drop me a note asking about it.

Grin needs to push Ubisoft to fully support this game. The great and powerful COD4 has been released and a surprising number of players have tried it and come back to GRAW2 for the strategic play. Ubisoft has the right game here but they need to commit to it. This idea of just giving us little tidbits is a joke. They have the chance here to make a name for themselves as one of the top strategic FPS games on the market but the cheating, lack of new map support and lack of admin controls is going to kill the game. My items: 1) We need ways to defeat the cheats. How about an auto-patcher that patches the game monthly but just shuffles data around so that the hacks are no longer worth bothering with. Forget Punkbuster. Too late for that. Just put out patches that don't really require any ongoing maintenance but that hurt the hack efforts. Kids tire and move on. 2) Give us a way to set up the servers the way we want. =XE= runs a popular server that has a NO GL rule but we have to enforce an honor system because GRAW2 won't let us remove that one (to us) offending weapon from being selected. Everyone on our servers wants it gone but we have to spend half our time kicking people. 3) Fix the text chatting. I get stuck in TEAM chat, 50% of messages start out with "t" in them. 4) Give us auto-map loading. Our users are begging for new maps and we want to give them to them but every time we introduce a new map, the server dies as people get tired of being booted out for lack of having the new maps. Lack of new maps will continue to drive people to look for new experiences. 5) Give us the ability to add our own text to the map loading screen. We can then post our rules, comments and clan info to help with management and building community. We could list our Ventrillo server data as well. 6) Give us direct voice control. Interact with TS and Vent. Let bindings be tied automatically to Ghost/Rebel teams. 7) Fix the ALT-TAB issue. In most every other game I can jump out, check something or fix something and jump back in. Here most of us get dropped from play if we do it. 8) Fix the "Alterted Game Files found" bug. 9) Improve net code. I'm sick of the lag kills. It's an issue in most games but worse than most here. 10) Fix the various map glitches. We can point you to every single one of them. Remove them. 11) Down the line fix the issue of weapons and body parts extending from objects. You can't stick a weapon through a fence and shoot people. CoD4 did this right. 12) Give us some larger maps. CoD4 is like fighting in a dining room. GRAW2 has the ability to draw strategic players but we need space. Arroyo annoys the majority as it's too intimate for many. The biggest issue I see is that the maps we have are all terribly unbalanced and often too close to one another. Those uphill on Fort have an advantage and that's the case with most of the maps. Stop with the chokepoints out of spawns. You should be able to leave a spawn from almost any direction. Spawn killing them becomes strategic instead of just a balance issue. 13) Give us the ability to allow us to password Ghost or Rebel so we can have online live clan practices. Our clan has the password on one team and public gets the other side. Then we don't have to play around with trying to shuffle in and out. 14) Let us admin MOVE people. If we see a balance issue let us go to console and type "/move #22" which will move that player from the team he's on to the other side. If not instantly than on his next death. Now the only option is to kick and hope they rejoin and get the idea to join the other side. 15) Show us the kills/deaths while we respawn. I'm tired of asking and having to answer requests for that info. 16) If we turn on "Language Filter" let it knock out any words we find offensive. No need to autokick if we can just filter out the trash. These types of items will keep GRAW2 at the top instead of just being the stop-gap many of us viewed it as. We don't want to be here just because we haven't found anything better yet. We want to be here because it's the best game out there.

I've done this on my setup but for some reason it won't force it on. I continue to get between 90-100fps with tearing. My other games have no such problem. Force Vsync on and they lock to 75fps. Does Graw2 use another executible other than graw2.exe that I need to point to?

Yes. It's clear. It doesn't matter what other GR releases were. THIS effort was clearly first thought of as a console product and was then re-imagined for the PC based on that. There is absolutely no way that a PC-first game doesn't include key bindings for weapons and the scrollable menus for so many elements is also a dead giveaway. Go look at the long list of posts of people who couldn't even control their team in SP mode because of it. The UI is loaded with solutions that were made as a trade-off for a console controller. Solar, thanks for the kind words. You know me. I've done QA work in the games industry forever. I complain when something is broken. You hit the nail on the head. Why can I get dropped from server A and not get back into it but then jump right onto server B? Meanwhile many others have no problem getting into server A. I'm looking forward to the map editor as I suspect we'll see some amazing efforts. Our maps in Delta Force were some of the most coveted by online players so I hope our main map guys take to it. Back in the OLD days, Doom had similar issues. The core maps were claustrophic but when people figured out how to make maps suddenly many of the user efforts were just flat-out amazing. It showed what was really possible and many other games took their lead from that example. Look at Delta Force, BF1942, MoH and MANY others. Solar is also a great player so that's two experienced FPS players who have been entirely turned off by their experience with this game. That's all I'm trying to point out. I don't think the game sucks or Ubisoft sucks or GRIN sucks. I like the potential I see here. I'm just hoping that, unlike many past efforts, this one gets a chance to evolve. It could be one amazing product if it gets that chance.

I'm aware that the patch will add key bindings for the weapons but that doesn't change the fact that it should have never shipped the way it did. However, of course I'll take the patch and be happy to cross that item off the list. I'd also like to see them provide some really open maps for those of us who don't go for playing in maps the size of a coffin. <grin> Again, I'm impressed with the core technology. There's a lot to like here. It just hasn't yet done it for me.

Yep, it does indeed have a lot of potential. Generally I'd be very quiet about the current situation given this potential except that my experience has been, more times than not, that the potential is never realized. A patch or two comes out and things slightly improve and then the developer goes on to bigger and "better" things (read: more profitable) leaving the rest of us with a half-realized solution. That some of these items existed in the first place (like no weapon key bindings) is cause for concern about future enhancement in my view. This should never have been accepted as it is so forgive me if I'm doubtful that future patches will address all of this. Like you, I hope it will. I just have doubts that this will happen.