Official Statement from the DEVs

[Warri0r91]

Just wanted to post this in case people are wondering why some vehicles were removed from certain maps.

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Rhino

Hey all.

Many of you seem to think that the choppers where removed from Qwai, Al Basrah etc just for a change of gameplay or w/e.

This is not true, the main reason for them being removed was in fact because of the annoying "Sound Bug" problems experienced in previous releases.

[R-DEV]Jaymz did lots of work on finding the cause of the sound bug and eventually found out that it was caused by the maps view distance (VD) being lower than the vehicles engine sound distance. As such, when the vehicle hit the edge of the players VD at the time, the sound would simply stick on the edge of that VD until that aircraft came back into the players view or the vehicle was destroyed.

As such, the choices we had where to either increase the maps VD (which for most maps is not an option due to performance reasons) or to remove the vehicle off the map, or to lower the vehicles sound distance.

For Qwai and Al Basrah, the VD could not be increased without huge performance impact, as such, the vehicles where removed off of them. On Qwai the VD was soo low that even the Type 98 (Chinese Tank) was even triggering the sound bug thou it was a rare occurrence compared to the choppers, and as such that also went.

Cheers.

[dapriest]

Thanks for the heads up. Good to know.

[Nic700]

ooooooooo so the choppers and other assets are the cause of sound bug

[zephoid]

sound, not squad, but it seems so. If the bug was so much of a problem, why not reduce the SOUND DISATANCE, not increase the viewing distance. It doesnt seem that difficult and without choppers some of these maps are getting really stale....

[Zynk]

Originally Posted by zephoid

...why not reduce the SOUND DISATANCE,...

Because then we get the classical vanilla rape where the vehicle swoops in and lights your ass up before you see or hear it coming. (w00t for wake island 2007 carrier rape )

[zephoid]

no, you would just hear tanks from only 300m away instead of 500. Not that big of a difference on a map where you can barely see 100m most times.

[Poi_Medic]

Didn't they win the new game engine from the MOD2008? Why are they not using it......

[Nic700]

wow.... man i wonder what those devs do.....

[Cl1ffman]

Originally Posted by Poi_Medic

Didn't they win the new game engine from the MOD2008? Why are they not using it......

If they won the new game engine, I wish they would hurry up and use it. I would burst with sunshine if PR would move off of the bf2 engine and have its own.

[BandAid3030]

Originally Posted by Cl1ffman

I would burst with sunshine if PR would move off of the bf2 engine and have its own.

Hey! You live in San Francisco... I think Bravo lives near SF too...

But seriously, I don't know what the dev team was thinking...

They could switch to the new engine, they could have tinkered and made the visual distance a little greater and the sound distance a little smaller, or they could have just accepted the bug as being part of the game (I know we all had).

Ironically, they changed the gameplay rather intensely for some maps just to fix the sound bug, and yet, it appears that they took no measures to fix the squad bug...