Engineering updates to make Starcraft 2 (patch 2.1) better

As of writing, Starcraft 2 patch number 2.1 has been available for a while. I must say that my ADSL connection is not extremely fast, but it is not horribly slow either, some people with fiber optic would consider it slow as 2MB (about 96kbs download speed).

Based on my connection speed and user experience, I recommend that the following changes should be made to Starcraft 2:

1. Download progress indicator for the map list. Just a spinning animation does not tell me anything since the connection could have stalled and I do not know how long I still have to wait.

2. Have some internal checksum system for the map list, especially for Blizzard maps, to avoid repeat map list download if nothing has changed.

3. If the game crashed due to stalled connection and like in my case I was in a multiplayer game with a friend then I would like to be able to reconnect to the game or at least spectate it if there was a record that I was involved in the game. This actually happened in a custom game when some other application decided to start downloading massive patches in the background.

4. A mute or volume control for that annoying voice about base being attacked. The noise spam gets worse as there are more players and especially with Zerg this gets rather annoying and is a really good reason not to play 3vs3. There are several forum entries on the Blizzard forums and it seems like Blizzard has not bothered sorting this out after two years and then they put out ads to ask for people who are passionate about gameplay and quality. Apparently annoyances are not a quality issue.

The game Borderlands in multiplayer

Lately I have been playing the game Borderlands in multiplayer online. The whole process is quite seamless and the biggest hassle is either firewalls of other people and my slow 384kbps connection which causes me one to two seconds lag. Other than that it is quite interesting and the game actually makes the opponents harder if there are more players and rewards accordingly. The other reason to do this is to get quests done faster. The occasional car accidents and hectic shootouts with the locals are part of the fun. On LAN it works the same way but obviously with slightly less lag.

I finished the game Split/Second

This last weekend I finally managed to finish the PC game called Split/Second, which is a racing game with explosive surroundings.. Some reviewers might complain about there not being enough tracks, which is partially true, but there are multiple variants of the existing tracks and many of them have route changes or nasty accidents that cause track differences. The multiplayer part is very easy to get started for LAN. Initially it looks like the game only supports two players, but as players connect, new slot appear. Most likely the game seems to support eight players. Some people complained about the 30 frames per second, which in my opinion is more than enough. There is no need to slow down the game by doubling the processing intensive rendering when going to 60 frames per second. Getting first in some of those races can be a mission. Being in front is a risk because of everyone trying to take a shot at whoever is in front of them. A small accident or delay can easily cause position changing.

Game comments: Supreme Commander 2

I really love this new Supreme commander 2 game. It has many improvements over the predecessors while keeping the style of construction, epic large scale battles with long range artillery and the same well known factions.

The game itself had many things simplified and automated, like the automatic repairs done by engineers as well as automatic nearest placement of buildings when trying to put them onto an area that is not meant for construction, like being too close to an edge for example.

The single player campaign is not impossible and there is an exact roadmap laid out to see how far there is still to go in a campaign. Multiplayer is unfortunately internet only, but it automatically uses the friends list from Steam, which gets rid of that problem. For me that is a really nice way of doing it instead of having to add the friends all over again like other games do. The building and unit parts flying off when attacked is also a nice twist as well as getting mass resources back from the wreckages as it has been tradition since Total Annihilation.

Some people were of course complaining about this game, but the reality was that it took far too long to build the big things in the previous games or to get started in a good battle. Supreme Commander 2 simplified all of this and made the existing system far better in my opinion. The game is now more fun than the previous games used to be. Long battles can still be fought.

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.