Slow Enemy Territory framerate and solution

This last weekend, I played Enemy Territory - Quake Wars with a friend of mine. First we played it at his place last week when I bought the game. There it ran fast. Then during the week I tried to play it at home, did the online update (500+ MB), and it ran slow. Initially I thougth it was the patch that gave problems. It was not the firewall (Panda), my ADSL internet connectino or Punkbuster which I had installed. Punkbuster did bring some portscan warnings on the firewall of my friend.

On Saturday, my friend and myself played the game at another friends place in a three player game and it ran fast. The next day (Sunday), I tried it at home and it was terribly slow. After trying to replicate all conditions present at the places of both of my friends, it came down to the fact that I have a second screen at home.

Solution: Unplug the second screen and reboot, or set up screen cloning, then Enemy Territory runs fast. The game seems to to think it has a really wide screen or something similar and even runs slow in 800x600 in low detail. I can actually run it on 1280x960 in high detail on my PC.

Hectic CNC3 battle on a LAN

Last night my friend David and myself had a LAN session using Hamachi of CNC3 Kane's Wrath. Both of us used standard Nod. The opponents also seemed to be some Nod variants. One opponent was hard, one was medium.

The computer opponents attacked early and expanded quickly. My own base was first in line and nearest to theirs. The first wave was a mix of Awakened and motorbikes with an engineer rush. After that things got much worse and both of us had just barely managed to keep them out with heavy losses on all sides. My resources were at a major low point and my refineries were destroyed. Most builds had to be destroyed to build one refinery. It was painful.

What really helped to keep them out were the cloaked Reckoners with the troops inside. The vehicle factory was repairing them when they got damaged.

Getting lots of costumes

The latest dilemma is which costumes to get and how many I can get. There is the regular dmeand for Western costumes which are needed, as well as Halloween and expanding my range, plus costumes I want to get again (Hulk and Ironman) and getting existing costumes improved. More Zentai suits are also being planned. Unfortunately this all costs money.