[bf1942] OT: PB screenshots

[Forrest Thiessen]

My experience is that the screen shot feature basically doesn't
work--being charitable, I guess you could say that it works a little
bit, maybe 5-10% of the time if you're exceptionally lucky, but
regardless, it doesn't work enough to be useful--because of it's
near-perfect failure rate, you can't, for example, ask for a screen shot
of a suspicious player and have any expectation that you will actually
receive it.

There's been lots of discussion on the PB-related forums about this
(check out punksbusted.com and pbbans.com)--it's a problem that seems to
effect everyone.  If you look at the relevant log file on your system,
you'll probably see that the pb_sv_getss command (and it's automatic,
timed counterpart) doesn't fail outright--it just times out most of the
time, presumably because the heavy CPU load and bandwidth requirements
of BF1942/BFV cause the screen shots to take longer to process and send
than PB is prepared to wait.

I've seen in those forums that this will be tuned/fixed by Even Balance
over time. . . but don't recall if that was someone official from EB who
said that.

--Woodrow
  thiessen at cyberscapearena.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Latham [mailto:leeprivate at cgmlarson.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 2:12 PM
To: bf1942 at icculus.org
Subject: [bf1942] OT: PB screenshots

Okay I know this isn't appropriate for this list but it is related, and 
I've been trying to get onto the PB mailing list for several days
without 
success (the form on their website gives an error whenever I tried
it--if 
you know another way of subscribing I'd be grateful if you could send it
to 
me).

It seems like the automated screenshots fail over half the time.  It
seems 
like this has a strong tendency to happen with players with outrageous 
kill/death ratios.  Anybody else have this experience?  Anybody have
good 
strategies for getting useful screenshots?

Also, is there a way to tell PB to keep trying if it fails, and kick a 
player after a certain number of tries?

Lee
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lee M. Latham
Vice Field Marshall Admiral Imperator Generalissimo of Sales and Support

(muy importante)
+1 (713) 977-4177 x.103
lee at cgmlarson.com
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