June 2010 – Something Odd!

I played about 20 minutes of Bad Company…

I played about 20 minutes of Bad Company 2 last night. Only 2 memorable events:
1. I play with headphones and I caught the sound of echoing footsteps as I passed by a house on Arica Harbour. I looked up to see a medic who saw me. My grenade thrown in the window didn’t get him but I loaded my 40mm grenade launcher and headed to the door. Suddenly the medic appeared and WHAM! Blew him back with a grenade to the chest! 🙂

So, use headphones if you can, you’ll hear things on even a cheap set that you won’t hear from your tv or hifi.

If you’ve ever wondered about the patch…

If you’ve ever wondered about the patching process that goes on to support a game, this post will make it clearer. I hope.

Having been involved with WordPress MU for many years (which involved merging code from WordPress core to MU after each new release) I can only dread the amount of effort required to figure out what changes in the cooked data files were benign or not. Merging PHP source code would have been a doddle compared to examining binary files.

The post ends on a somewhat positive note however. DICE will continue to support Bad Company 2:

We want to continue supporting the game, but if we want to change anything else than the game executable itself, we will need to spend time on figuring out how to do so with a less error-prone patch generation procedure … and preferably without generating as large patches.

There’s no point asking them to release smaller patches more often. When the data is “cooked” it doesn’t produce the exact same files each time. Even small changes will create cooked files that are vastly different to each other.
I presume this is similar to how lossy compression like Jpeg works. Save a file as a Jpeg twice and you’ll have two different files.

(via reddit)

I don’t think anyone plays Bad Company …

I don’t think anyone plays Bad Company 2 Onslaught any more. Or at least hardly anyone does and it’s only been out a short while (which makes things worse!)

If Onslaught is the bastard child of Bad Company 2 that nobody wants to know about then it’s curtains for it. In Onslaught review Fieldoperative suggests some disturbing figures for Xbox usage of the game:

I don’t wanna be dramatic and everything, but have you checked the latest Major Nelson‘s Xbox Live Activity lists? Well, for a whole month now BFBC2 has dropped even below COD4! Which is very alarming, because when once in a while I play a few COD4 matches, I check how many people are online and there aren’t more than 20.000-25.000 at any given time!

If there are fewer than 20,000 people playing Bad Company 2 regularly then it’s going to be really hard to play Onslaught, a DLC that requires further monetary commitment.

Anyway, I had a quick game over lunch. I went looking for an “easy” game, any level, and found a game on Valparaiso, played by a solitary soldier, SKMG42, fighting against the odds. He had made it right to the last base when I joined and with only a few kills left the game ended in a win. He scored 155 kills, but it took 33 minutes to do it! I stuck around for the next one and we had a chat about the game. Unfortunately his friends haven’t bought the DLC and he spend quite some time looking for a game to play. I presume he created a “public game” but it took 33 minutes for someone to join him? That’s depressing and a bad sign.
We had fun, I came out of the game with 79 kills and 3 deaths. We were desperately looking for an engineer kit in the last base to take out the tank but all the enemy soldiers are assault or medics! Took us 12 minutes this time. Not great but there were only the 2 of us there.

I joined Mike in a game last night and ended up playing against him first. I hopped in a tank doing some damage to his team and he almost blew up the vehicle with C4 but got killed just before he hit the trigger. When the tank did blow I quit and asked him to invite me later. Which he did! I ended up on his team attacking and had good fun.
Here’s a tip (if you didn’t know it already), if you’re attacking lay down C4 on the crate. We were attacking on Port Valdez. I took a quad bike and raced down to Alpha with Mike. Dived into the house and plastered explosive all over it. Jumped out and pressed the trigger. 360 points later and I had a big grin on my face. 🙂

We eventually won the round. A memorable moment in the last base was when Muse got killed by a medic sitting on top of a filing cabinet next to Bravo. I took the medic out, grabbed Muse’s medic kit and revived him. We defended the crate until it blew! Woo!

47-0 on Atacama Desert

I think the highest number of kills I got in Bad Company 2 Onslaught is 79, in one of my first games with Mike last week. It was only the two of us playing, and it was on easy difficulty so the enemy practically stand in the middle of the road for you to shoot.

Here’s a screenshot of the scores from a game this weekend. It was on Atacama Desert, on hard difficulty and I had the tank most of the time. We crushed all who opposed us. I got 47 kills and I didn’t die once!

I have to give credit to Mike who can land a tracer on a speeding bullet. Without his skills those Havoc helicopters would have been a lot more deadly.

For more tracer hell, check out this video David created of a Rush game on Isla. Mike helped take down helicopter after helicopter. Madness!

The MU forums are moving

The MU forums will shortly be closing up shop.

WordPress 3.0 integrated everything that MU always did so it’s better to consolidate the forums too. There’s a MultiSite forum on WordPress.org and any queries about upgrading or problems using WordPress 3.0 should go there.

The old forums aren’t going anywhere but later today or perhaps tomorrow I’ll be making them read-only. You’ll still be able to browse the forum, and Google will still index the wealth of information already there but posting will be disabled.

So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the forum over the years. You helped make WordPress MU great.

Bored of Bad Company 2 Onslaught already?

So I went online last night to play 20 minutes of Bad Company 2 as Mike had said he’d be on. We dived into a game of Onslaught because you can be sure that the game will last 15 minutes or so.

22 minutes later we finished Atacama Desert on hard difficulty. My best time there is 14 minutes so it was a really sucky game. Mike expressed his boredom with the DLC and as a competitive game mode I have to agree. I don’t mind, and enjoy playing it with random players but when I join any friends online it’s to be competitive and go for the win, in a meaningful manner. A better completion time is an incentive, but only a small one. With a little more imagination, DICE could have made the mode a lot more exciting and competitive. We’re all stats freaks aren’t we?

One part of the problem is that each game is much the same as the previous game on the same level. For example on Atacama Desert there are always 2 enemy tanks at the start, then 1 tank rolls up from the left, and a heli attacks. On Isla there’s always a sniper on the building next to the B flag. On Nelson Bay there’s always a medic and assault guy upstairs where Alpha 2 is. It’s predictable where Rush or any game played against humans can’t be.

It speaks volumes when swordsmanx75’s review of Onslaught suggests self imposed rules (only use shotguns) to make the game more interesting. Check out his review here:

Onslaught is fun, it’s lots of fun actually, but rush beats it hands down.

Edit: David has his own review of Onslaught. He pulls no punches:

I gave it a go with Donncha and Mike on hard and to be honest, I was not impressed. As a game mode it’s Squad Rush meets Conquest with AI. And as always the AI is stupid. I’m not expecting total consciousness from AI, but I’d be impressed if the level of intelligence had moved on from that of the original Tom Clancy Ghost Recon games from the beginning of the decade.

I got tea bagged last night. Well sort o…

I got tea bagged last night. Well sort of. Mike and myself were defending on Arica Harbour and we tore through the enemy on the first base thanks to our tank.
On the second base it was more varied but I sneaked up to the top construction site and hid behind some bushes. Enemy soldiers poured past, and even though I got 4 or 5 kills in the space of 10-20 seconds nobody came looking for me! Two lads ran past me so I decided to follow them around the back of the town. I knifed the guy behind, and knowing that he might alert his squad mate rushed the second guy but unluckily ran out of ammo just as I caught up with him. He turned around and shot me! Argh!

I laughed out loud when he went over to my corpse and fired round after round into it. I should have sent him a “LOL” message. Nice to see I upset someone’s plans. 🙂

I only played the one game of rush after a game of Onslaught. My KDR remains at 0.81, but I got a KDR of 1.43 in that game. Skill level went up 75 points! Oh dear.