[0.860] Unzooming Binoculars Causes VoIP Hiccup

[Raptor007]

This is a tiny, non-critical bug, hardly worth mentioning, but I decided to anyway in case there's an easy fix.

When you unzoom the binoculars while someone is speaking over VoIP, it has a slight hiccup (the last half-second or so of voice gets repeated). It is consistent; I tried this several times while squadmates were speaking, and heard it every time.

This does not occur when you put the binoculars up to your face, only when bringing them down. It doesn't happen with iron-sight weapons, but I haven't tested with scoped weapons.

Anyway, if it's not a quick fix, it's probably not worth doing anything. It never caused any real problems, since I could still understand the person speaking.

[snooggums]

I used to have that same skipping issue and it was even more noticeable with tank zoom on Quinling, what changed for me was going from a video card with 256 Megs of video memory to 1 Gig of video memory. There was no longer a delay on the zoom in and out and the audio no longer stuttered. Not sure how it is related exactly but i have not had it since the video change (video card was the only hardware change).

[nicaragua700]

are you sure its not just your machine? I use scopes/binoculars so much+VOip and i have never dealt with this issue.

[waldo_ii]

What is happening is when you switch zooming levels, your field of view is narrowed from, say, 90 degrees to 30 degrees. When you narrow your FOV, you are really displaying less on your screen, and your video card is thinking less. When you zoom back out, your video card has to re-load 60 degrees worth of land, objects, textures, bump maps, etc. Since BF2 uses DX9 instead of DX10, the CPU has to assist in all of these loadings. When you reload all of those textures and models and stuff, your CPU is temporarily overloaded, too busy to process VOIP.

That is why it happens when you change levels of zoom on tanks, binoculars, weapon-mounted optics, etc. You might not encounter this on every type of FOV change, but the reasons behind them all are the same.


Solutions include only hardware updates. Faster GPUs will make the CPU overload time much quicker, even unnoticeable. Faster RAM can also do the same, and a CPU upgrade can help for obvious reasons.

[Raptor007]

Ah, that makes sense. My specs are somewhat dated:

• AMD Opteron 280 (dual-core 2.4GHz)
• 2GB DDR-400
• 8800GT 512MB

One of these days I'll think of an excuse to upgrade. Unfortunately, the VoIP hiccup probably isn't a good enough reason.