After The Storm, The Patching

So, most of the season's biggest games have landed on our hard drives by now, which means two things will follow in their wake:

1) A torrent of finely-detailed complaints about this, that and the other feature. With maybe the occasional compliment thrown in for good measure.
2) Patches!

There tends to be this weird two-sided coin for PC versions of big games - on the hand they often don't receive quite as much spit'n'polish as the console versions, which is at least partly because there's no Microsoft or Sony certification hoops to jump through. On the other, that lack of certification means fixing up minor holes can happen a lot more quickly. Case in point - in the last couple of days, two very recent biggies have already seen their first patches: Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2.

Let's start with the former, because the details are dulldulldull:

Fixed occasional crashes when exiting the game or using Alt F4 to exit.
Fixed crashes when using Alt-Tab while binks or credits were playing.
The game now restarts properly after title updates finish installing.

Which is important stuff even if it's not fun to talk about, and hopefully suggests Bethesda should be pretty on the ball about sorting out further bugs. Have you lot any particular requests? Oh - you can grab the 6.59Mb patch from here .

FC2's sounds a bit more significant, sorting out a whole bunch of stuff in both single and multiplayer, as well as adding 5.1 sound support and a benchmark mode. There's also a list of other issues currently being nosed at here. Full patch notes below, and again, what bugs/failings d'you reckon especially needs a fix sharpish?

Multiplayer

- Server's IP address now displays in lobby, beside the match’s name (for direct IP join to work)
- Dedicated Server can now be launched in command line.
- Improved match start conditions. Ranked games can now also start if the player max is attained and everybody but the host is ready.
- Fixed a bug causing random crashes when joining a game.
- Ranked matches in progress will no longer display in the match list.
- Fixed players with same name by using identifiers instead of names.
- Fixed crash when creating a LAN game without a network cable.
- The diamond pool is now always validated after class upgrades, reset or rank up to avoid getting more diamonds than you are supposed to for your rank.
- When creating a dedicated server with PunkBuster enabled, then close it to create another but this time with PunkBuster disabled, PunkBuster will still be considered ON, on this new server.
- Fixed a problem where a player could get stuck (and couldn’t get killed) after pressing the interaction key while wounded and getting rescued by a teammate at the same time.
- Fixed players getting disconnected if they have too many user maps and try to enter the map rotation menu in a Player or Ranked match.
- Vehicles will now always respawn even if they are never used.
- Fixed users not being able to see a match if the host switched match mode after a rank.
- Fixed a glitch that could make a player invisible to another.
- Fixed incorrect check for negative values when adjusting diamond count.
- Fixed a problem where a player would render through objects if healing a wounded playing while being wounded at the same time.
- Fixed reload not being interrupted on the host when a client picks a weapon while reloading.
- Fixed Field Manuals not unlocking after game mode change.

Singleplayer

- Fixed health not changing with the difficulty level.
- Keyboard controls remapping in single mode now carry into multiplayer mode.
-A buddy will no longer get stuck when healing him while player is receiving damage.
- Stats of favourite weapon are now properly reset between loaded save games.
- The mortar will no longer move the player through wall.
- Mission objectives markers are now show properly after loading a save game.

General

- Fixed glider key remapping.
- Game will now minimize in order to show the website when clicking on ubi.com.
- Dolby 5.1 is now supported for most sound cards.
- Fixed a random crash that could happen when pressing ESC to cancel a Benchmark run.
- Added CPU Intensive benchmark test run.
- Fixed Jackal Tapes and Partner Tapes pages.

Map editor

- Fixed crash in editor when deleting many objects in very rapid succession.
- Fixed crash in editor during parsing of the map headers.