Serious patching required for multiplayer.

[CombatGold1 0]

I'm guessing many of you have noticed that both Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 (including their expansions) require some serious patching, because it's current state is below awful.

 

Ever since EA took control of the online facilities, there have been somewhat no updates at all.

 

Here is all the stuff I have found to be labeled "required".

• Support for the TCP/IP protocol needed over LAN. IPX is outdated, and rarely used now.

[*]56k performance and lag over a gigabit ethernet backbone or a broadband internet connection is simply not acceptable. Are you transfering bitmaps or something?

[*]Constant reconnection errors for random reasons.

[*]Shutting down all network adapters and forcing the user to do a hard reboot after a reconnection error.

[*]Support for UPnP devices (eg Routers) is an absolute must, some of us HAVE to use NAT.

• I'm sure this list goes on much further. Just wondering what you all think.

 

I know it's up to EA Games to fix problems now, but haven't you all noticed a major downfall since EA took over?

 

 

 

 

Meh!!

[Cygnus X-1 12]

Look who jumped on the bandwagon late... :wink:

 

Yeah, WOL is terrible, and the games need a lot of outside patches to work (for most people anyway, all I have is the official patches, which are Bob knows how old, and my RA2, YR, TS, and FS all work fine on WOL and XWIS)

[CombatGold1 0]

Yeah it is a bit late I been using WOL for quite some time, just never posted what I think of it on a forum.

 

 

Are there any 3rd party patches around that can fix any problems?

[Cygnus X-1 12]

Mine are just run in compatability for Win98 and have the latest Westwood patches on them.

[CombatGold1 0]

does the win98 compattibility help?

[Cygnus X-1 12]

Seems to help in gameplay and running of the program itself, might help with online issues, your computure may be reading something slightly wrong due to XP, but under 98 it should read everything correctly, after all, the games (RA2, YR, TS, FS) were designed with Win98 in mind.

[chickendippers 1]

I've never noticed any of those forced reboot problems (on 2 different computers), it must just be your comp.

 

As for reconnection errors, play on XWIS (there's a guide to it on CnCWorld here)

[CombatGold1 0]

I've moved over to XWIS now, damn impressed with the time it takes to join the lobby.

 

I'll try the Windows 98 compattibility.

 

 

 

Are there any patches to improve general multiplayer performance, for LAN as well as online?

[chickendippers 1]

Nope, they're hard-coded into the game, without the source code there's nothing anything we can do to fix it

[alleylee 0]

yeah.. need new patches... ra2 actually got up to 1.006... yr only has 1.001... kind of pathetic... show some love EA... or westwood... who ever can make patches official...

[Doctor Destiny 41]

What kind of things need patching? Maybe pd or jonwil can have a look into it.

[CombatGold1 0]

I found out why my network card crashes and makes me have to reboot.

 

Page from EA's Custhelp.

 

I have the Netgear GA311, and the drivers for everything in my PC are up to date, looks like only a patch can solve this problem.

[GeneralZ 0]

THANK YOU

 

That really helped

 

Everytime I finish an Internet game, it reboots.

 

Thats why i can never fully finish a game with Cygnus and Acerz

[CombatGold1 0]

That provides a cause, but not a complete sollution

 

Bad code makes network cards crash.

[GeneralZ 0]

Arg...my drivers appear to be up to date.....

 

And the game is patched up to latest version

 

The damn thing only happens on my XP

 

My ME uses the same network card and wireless card adapter and it never reboots.

 

The problem is with the XP in some way

[CombatGold1 0]

Windows XP was out after RA2, so sure there would be some problems, but EA or Westwood should have patched their game to run on XP when it came out.

[chickendippers 1]

I can't understand why some people have problems running RA2/TS on XP - I have never had any problems.

[Luk3us 63]

Myself included..

[CombatGold1 0]

I can't understand why some people have problems running RA2/TS on XP - I have never had any problems.

The problem making us have to restart due to network card lockup is directly related to the NIC's chipset, rather than Windows XP in general.

[alleylee 0]

i think yr should be patched up so it can run on IP addresses.. that's what most games use these days..

[mjrkane 0]

I can't understand why some people have problems running RA2/TS on XP - I have never had any problems.

 

Look again... and where that Xwis you talk about , I'll go check this out right away

[Cygnus X-1 12]

Mine work fine without compatability. I tried running them without it just to see what would happen. Apparently, nothing did.

[chickendippers 1]

I can't understand why some people have problems running RA2/TS on XP - I have never had any problems.

and where that Xwis you talk about , I'll go check this out right away

http://www.xwis.net.

We have a section about it on CnCWorld: http://www.cncworld.org/?page=online/about