NWO MP Test Issues

June 3, 2002 12:53 PM

The New World Order multiplayer test finally came out a few days ago, and the reception it got around here was less than warm with all kinds of people complaining about crashes and bugs etc. So much so that I didnt even bother to install it myself. Well Jim Malmros from Termite has some response to the uh.. response. He says these are the 5 major bugs that are causing 90% of the troubles: (Thanks Blue)

1) Compatibility. You need all the latest drivers (as NWO uses features that are only in the very latest drivers). You also need a 32-meg 3D card and some AGP memory allocated (it normally is all automatically, 16-32 megs). Due to a memory leak you also need at least 256 megs of memory, the more the
better.

2) There is a huge bug, with clients leaving a game crashing the server!! This one is pure evil. Basically holds us all back from playing the game properly. I have gone through a lot of coreErr.txt files from users, when they have experienced a crashed server - and they all have a deleted client at the end of the file, at the crash. Our servers at the office can handle deleting clients just fine for some reason.

3) The mini-gun can crash the game when reloading. Also a really nasty one as it is kind of hard to get people to not use the mini.

4) Hosting a server on Win98 is no fun. This is because networking priority boosts are reversed on Win98 compared to Win2K/WinXP. This causes severe lag under Win98. I know a lot of people use Win98 as their gaming OS for the extra fps.

5) Controls setup causes a lot of games to crash.

Steve Gibson

Steve Gibson is the cofounder of Shacknews.com. Originally known as sCary's Quakeholio back in 1996, Steve is now President of Gearbox Publishing after selling Shacknews to GameFly in 2009.