Rumor: Call of Duty 2 patch out within a month
After we had commented on Infinity Ward’s mysterious post on Xbox forums stating that a patch for Call of Duty 2’s unique problems was in the works, someone else on those forums now claims he has received confirmation that the patch will certainly be out within four weeks.
I rung Activision support and had a HUGE rant about paying money and getting lag blah blah blah
The guy got his superviser because i would not leave and he said the patch would most definately be out within 4 weeks.
Infinity Ward itself has been awfully quiet recently and it would be quite surprising if this is the first caller they failed their we know nothing strategy on after consistent full radio silence ever since the game’s launch. So is it true? Perhaps. Maybe it will be part of the big update. Who knows? Only time will tell as long as both Microsoft and Infinity Ward are keeping their mouths shut tight.
Here’s my two pennies… I’ll take a patch, even if I have to wear it on my arm to stop the pain of withdrawal from my favorite passtime.
I am a Ghost recon lover, and am waiting for GR to come out and i KNOW it will lag I havent even played it yet and Im already upset because I KNOW GR WILL LAG. But, in the mean time i have been playing COD2 on 360 since early December because its the only xboxlive game i can tolerate. The lag is certainly a HUGE problem. (i dont think i suck as much as i think i suck because im lagging a little all the time so my ranking scores are abyssmal on COD2) could it be a software problem?, or a larger one that may have to do with the integration of high resolution Hd 3-d environments that take 50+ times more processing power to generate in realtime than a regular xbox? if so how does Microsoft and the InfinityWard solve the integration problem? Do all xbox 360’s run at HD resolution even though half the kids playing it online are using regular resolution tv’s? is the gaming information that flows over the xbox live network universal? (hidef code vs low res code) I wonder about this…could the problem with lag come from translation protocols? i also wonder about bandwidth stability, more and more people are using DSL and Cable modems than ever before. are the web surfers stuffing cottage cheese into the tubes? Personally i think general internet connections were faster a couple of years ago. Another thing that im confused about is why did MS segment the xbox worldwide live regions? in the past I regularly play people from Japan, Asia and Australia in the morning, Irish and Northern Europeans including Italy, Germany and France in the afternoons and most of America at night depending on who was awake at any given time. Now its all USA East Coast and the Southern usa 24/7, I have to believe xboxlive is not worldwide anymore. (sarcastically i say, “maybe they don’t really have xbox360 outside the USA”) It maybe a sad thing but I could see the idea of live online gaming becoming more problematic and maybe ending as bandwidth becomes scarce and games get much more complicated and detailed. Just imagine the information that in the past that needs to be shared to process and trigger one gun shot sound across 8 computers/players in an xboxlive match, it used to be audio left audio right, visual indicator on heads up direction command based on players location. Now its all 10x that, one gunshot has to be processed in dolby surround sound up to 8 speaker audio triggers instead of 2, multiply that by the 8 players in a match and we see the rate of information exchange increases more than exponentially. I didnt even add in the information needed to process the heads up visual indicators. 16 bits is now 128 bits or more. thats just one gunshot and still The band width hasnt changed. Maybe microsoft can install custom centralized worldwide servers for xbox live players. Something better faster bigger meaner and a little greener. Or maybe implement a permanently connected wireless xboxlive network connected by an exclusive gaming satellite sextet engineered with the help of Steve Jobs and Boeing now that he has more money than God.
Gotta love comments larger than the original post
As a programmer by the way: the HD stuff has no influence whatsoever on the speed of networked games. Thankfully no image data is transmitted via Xbox Live, that would require everyone to have 1Gbit collection, and would be rather pointless since you’d be sending data to a machine that’s perfectly capable of rendering it himself.
No, the only thing being transmitted is game data. So where are the players, in what position are they, what environmental effects (explosions etc.) are happening. Based on this all clients in an online game will synchronize their own copy of the game world to “look and act identical” on all involved machines, just with a different “viewport” ie. your player. The biggest enemy of online gaming is as such not bandwidth, but ping.
Ping is not a problem on Xbox Live, and neither is bandwidth. Perfect Dark Zero runs perfectly smooth with 32 players, as will BF2 with 24 and Ghost Recon with 16 or more.
CoD2 lagging all the time with less than 8 players is just a crap excuse for a game. They didn’t even bother picking the available server with the lowest ping, or allowing the player to pick, the code just selects the first server it finds as your server, no matter whether it’s located in Hawaii or Bejing. If it doesn’t find a server, you are made the server, no matter if you have a satellite uplink with 650ms lag standard, a 28.8k dial-up connection or a 10Mbit ADSL monster.
The CoD2 multiplayer code is just crap, and they can patch it. Rest assured they will, because this ’shortcut’ has given them so much bad publicity I’m honestly in doubt whether people are ever going to forgive them. They are going to feel this mistake in Xbox 360 CoD3 sales for sure.
Good news, there is still hope.
thanks for the explanations.
I hope my last post made someone laugh BTW.
- woolly
well they better fix it soon because this is getting ridiculos. talk about sorry excueses for games though…have you tried madden 06 for xbox 360? i’d rather play madden 95 it had better game play. when is that patch coming out?
Hmmmm. Is it not a little harsh to blame Activision and I.W. entirely? From what i have heard, the COD 2 and DOA 4 glitches are caused by a last minute dashboard update that was added via live after both games had finished development, and this is what causes the lag for some reason. Curry is right about how Xbox live works - there is no way any online game would bother wasting bandwidth on things it can generate itself, the only data sent is player postions, if their firing etc….dynamic things that change ever second, and the server takes this and figures out what has happened and THIS then goes to all the clients. As the average UK upload is 256k, if were were sending 5.1 Dolby data through the net, every game would lag so bad you wouldnt even get the game started.
Microsoft has had a lot of problems with the 360, and their attitude of ‘rush it out, patch it later’ will cause them alot of problems in the long run - all the casual gamers will keep away if they are worried about this sort of thing. Still, unlike sony MS and is partners seem to ADMIT their mistakes, and try to fix them so hopefully these bugs will all get ironed out by the next update, or subsequent ones.
I really hope they focus on fixing some of that danged BC code soon as well, its ridiculous how poorly some Xbox games play atm.