NEWS - Thursday, September 23, 2004
Lucasarts Addressing Online Issues
The following was posted at the Lucasarts forums today. Apparently Lucas is aware of some of the online problems and are working to correct the issues. Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available. Greetings from the Star Wars Battlefront development team. We?re very excited that the game has finally hit the shelves and is in your hands. We?re committed to supporting the game and improving the experience for players. Many of us are monitoring various boards and listening to player feedback regarding the title. We would like to address several known issues regarding the gameplay and the player experience: - Server Browser and Join Problems - Servers may not always appear in the browser window. In addition, some people can’t join servers that appear to have spaces but are actually full. We are currently working on a solution for this. In the meantime, we suggest trying to refresh the server list if you’re playing on the PS2 or PC. If you’re using a Xbox, we suggest joining games through Quickmatch or through your Friends List. - Lag on servers ? For people hosting games on their home systems, the important thing to keep in mind is that game performance is most affected by your upstream bandwidth. This is the amount of data that you can send to the Internet. Most standard DSL connections are capable of sending only 128 kilobits upstream. Star Wars Battlefront needs to send at least 40kbps per client over the upstream connection. Therefore, on a standard DSL connection, you will only be able to host a game for 3 other players. If you’re hosting a Star Wars Battlefront game, you can set your Hosting Bandwidth in the Online options menu. We do not prevent you from setting this higher than your actual connection speed, but everyone in your game will experience poor performance if too many players join the game. If you’d like to host your own games with a large number of players (i.e. 16 or more), then we recommend you have at least a T1 connection to the Internet. For more information regarding your bandwidth, we suggest you contact your Internet Service Provider. - Can’t find\join games with your friends (PS2) ? We are exploring several different options which would allow people to find/join games by session name. Xbox players can use the Friends List to find games with friends. PC players can join a specific game by IP. Please check these forums for more information. - Voice issues ? We’re researching the issues that some people are experiencing with voice chat. We’re also looking into ways to improve voice chat for the PS2. Since there are several voice choices on the PC (Roger Wilco or Teamspeak), we made the decision late in development to remove voice chat support for the PC version. However, we are investigating alternative communication methods such as voice commands for the PC version. - Dedicated server options ? We are working to improve the dedicated server programs for both the PS2 and PC versions. We’re currently working on a Linux port of the server code. We will then focus on options that will provide admins with greater control and flexibility. - PC Multiplayer Frame rate lock ? The framerate lock is set to 20 by default. You can set the values to 15, 20 or 30. To change the settings, go to the main menu and select Options/Online Options and then change the ?Ticks per second? setting. Please check these forums for regular updates from us. Thank you for your detailed responses and enjoy the game. Sincerely, Star Wars Battlefront development teamSource: http://www.lucasarts.com
