NEW CLIENT version R4
Yep, another client is heading your way on auto update (within the next 15 minutes) and Steam (in about 1 hour when Valve presses the button when they get into the office). This will be the LAST update before the Beta closes on the 25th and any issues found in here will still be taken and looked at to be fixed on the retail version of the game.

Here is the usual changelog from Kalms (I'm sure some of you will be happy with this one )



Quote:

    * Likely fix for "5-minute disconnects". Try it out, and say whether it helps or if you are still getting booted (if so: after how long? and always after the same amount of time?)

What happened on some machines was this:
When you are logged in, your game client has TCP connections to two of EA's master servers. During a game, there isn't much traffic on all those connections. Therefore, the master servers send dummy transactions every 150s. This is so your game client knows that the connection hasn't been broken. Well, guess what? It seems that they don't send dummy transactions to all players. Why not? Nobody knows. So what the R4 client does, is that when it has seen 160s of idleness on a connection, it sends a dummy transaction. This was enough to get rid of the disconnects on the test machines.


Oh, and: when the nearest known problem location is in Poland, the master servers are in the US, and you have no direct access to either machine... then debugging is a convoluted process.

    * Workaround for speaker setups. If one of your speakers has lower volume (or is totally silent), try with one of the following lines in your Settings.ini:
          o SpeakerCount=2
          o SpeakerCount=4
          o SpeakerCount=6

Again, let us know if it doesn't help.

Rather few changes this time around - it's getting more and more difficult to "lift" changes from the retail version into the closed beta version.

Also, you may have read about people being able to crash others' machines with long clantags and nasty chat messages? There is server-side filtering in Server R8, and RSPs begun rolling those out a few hours ago.