philjksn

Has anyone else found that the terrible desync and rubber banding has returned? I hadn't played for a few days since the last update when everything was perfect, but in the hour or so that i've been trying to play today, I've just been faced with terrible lag and lost sessions! Are these issues server side?

It's either suspicious, or he was stood punching me for about 30 seconds whilst my character was still joining the server or something. I'm not even that annoyed about losing my m4 and pistol, it's the bikers jacket I'm gonna struggle to replace :(

I'm more concerned by the fact he was running faster than Usain Bolt and his fist managed to smash through my helmet and destroy my skull, but yeah, a freshie hit my head.

So either I just got killed by a hacker with one single punch to the face or I'm somehow the most unlucky person ever... Spent the past 2 hours looting on a random server with a friend, got session lost just outside Elektro in one of those barns, so my friend leaves and I join another full-ish server (30/40ish). I spawn, assess my surroundings and take two steps out of the barn, when a newspawn looking guy comes running towards me at what seems like a ridiculous pace, and with a single punch to my head (upon which I'm wearing a pristine biker helmet), he manages to kill me before I can draw my pistol. Now I've been knocked out before from a punch to the head, but never with a pristine helmet on and never been killed immediately... hacks? Can't even spawn anywhere near Elektro to try and retrieve my stuff. tl;dr I died.

Yeah I just lost my character after a session lost timer too. Joined another server to find myself freshly spawned on the coast. It's fine, yaknow, I'd only spent the last 3 hours heading through the mainland from east to west gearing myself up along the way, not like that was a complete waste of time or anything.

Hardly a subjective opinion when I spent 3 years studying the subject, but okay. And that review doesn't really comment on how well the "5.1" aspect of the headphones work, it just says they are a good pair of headphones, which I imagine they may well be, but can they reproduce real 3D sound better than a pair of stereo headphones? nope. You obviously really like your excessively expensive "surround sound" headphones, and have been sucked in by the placebo effect of knowing the headphones have more speakers which obviously means they are better, so I'm just gonna leave you to it.

I don't, but what I do have is an actual understanding of how your ears perceive sound. One of my coursemates conducted his dissertation on surround sound headphones (specifically relating to anechoic audio) and in blind tests found subjects genuinely couldn't hear a difference between stereo headphones and "surround sound" headphones. It's as much a con as gold plated HDMI cables are.

It doesn't matter how many speakers are built into a pair of headphones, or how they are positioned, with all of the sound sources within an inch of your ear, it's still going to be perceived as stereo. And listening to the surround sound tests which tell you which speaker or direction you are hearing (front left, rear right etc.) introduced such an enormous placebo. In a blind test with sound coming from "front left" and "rear left", you would honestly struggle to hear any difference at all. Without trying to sound like a pretentious knob; trust me, I have a degree in audio engineering. If there's one thing that annoys me more than anything else, it's misinformation regarding sound. /offtopic

Firstly, anyone saying you need to buy 7.1 headphones should be ignored. Surround sound headphones are a gimmick and a con. You have two ears, it doesnt matter how many speakers are in either side of a pair of headphones, that doesn't change the fact your brain calculates the location of the source of a sound through the time delay of a sound hitting either ear. go figure. As far as how easy/hard it is to pinpoint where gunfire is coming from.. if it's constant gunfire, ie. some kind of standoff between two people with m4s or something, it's incredibly easy to work out which direction it's coming from by just spinning around. However if you're trying to pinpoint the location of a single shot, it's obviously gonna be incredibly difficult... without multiple shots to confirm you're looking in the right/wrong direction, it's all pretty much guess work. That isn't an issue with the headphones you're using, or even the sound engine of the game, it's just the nature of hearing sounds from two sound sources (two speakers/headphones). The only real solution is a proper surround sound speaker set up but I don't even know if the game supports that.

I for one thoroughly enjoy the real threat that infected now pose. They are aggressive, cause real damage and cause more of a problem, which in reality feels more true to what the game is supposed to be; a survival game. I've not really experienced zombies spawning directly in front of me like others claimed to have experienced, and It's definitely not an issue dealing with multiple zombies with an axe (I found it fairly easy to kill a group of 5 zombies just by running in circles and swinging), if you have one, and the fact they can run faster than you isn't a problem if you zig-zag... There's definitely work to be done though, ie. zombie wall clipping, spawning and probably mixing it up between super-agro infected and more docile infected, but the latest patch has definitely created a genuine fear for them, which I really like. It was far too easy, prior to the latest updates, to just run past a group of them without any concern, whereas now you have to be far more careful, skirting around towns to lure any infected out to kill rather than leaving yourself vulnerable in the middle of a street.

Signed up just so I could echo the praise for this exp. update. It feels like a completely different game, managed to run from electro to svet along the coast, checking houses and killing zombies along the way and I experienced absolutely no lag, no desync, no rubber banding. The game itself definitely felt like its running smoother performance wise too! The only issue I had was that aside from the axe I managed to find immediately after spawning, I found absolutely ZERO loot right the way up the coast, meaning I died of starvation soon after reaching svet. Oh well! Hopefully with this issue *fingers crossed* fixed, the survival/content updates should begin to roll in far smoother!