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Fixes:
Crashes to Desktop
Fig. 1. A look out of the F/A-18 CockpitSo what has been fixed in the patch? According to the readme, the patch fixes several Crashes to Desktop(CTD) bugs. The only one I can confirm are the walleye CTD. This CTD would happen to me consistently. Once I released the last walleye the game would CTD. This no longer happens. I have found F18 to be an extremely stable game. I have not experienced any other CTDs with this game, under any conditions. Another problem with the walleye was that the last weapon dropped could not be steered. I never found this bug because I would always CTD whenever I released the final walleye. I was able to successfully release and steer the final walleye in the patched version. Some that frequent the F18 forum have reported that their CTD problems have gone away, others have reported new ones. My suggestion would be to make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card and your sound card. A clean install of the game and the patch (after a scandisk and defrag) might go along way in taking care of some of these problems. The next thing to do would be to make sure windows is managing the swap file and to bring down some of the graphic settings, especially those that have the greatest affect on frame rates (like the cockpit and the volumetric clouds and explosions).
Multi-Player Fixes
Fig. 2. Wingman breaks leftOne of the areas where this sim really needed improvement was in the multi-play. One of the most annoying bugs was the "spontaneous combustion" bug. I remember once at one of my LAN meets sitting on the runway behind flight lead, waiting for others to land so we can take off as a group. One of our other pilots was making his attack run on the target and was shot down. As soon as his plane hit the ground and exploded, both flight lead and I also blew up while just sitting there on the runway! This bug manifested itself many times during our meet. Very annoying. I'm happy to see, so far, that this problem has been corrected. Another major problem was the fact that you could not rearm/refuel on the carrier. Once you landed, you were taxied and parked, and that was it. I was pleased to see my plane taxied to the catapult after a successful trap. This means that all of you mission designers won't have to add all those divert airfields in order to rearm/refuel, and us players can enjoy the thrill of multiple traps/catapults while playing online. Another problem was the microwarping (bouncing effect). The patch readme says this has been "reduced". You can see the affect of this bug when you fly online and look at other player's aircraft from internal or external views. What you see is the plane's nose bouncing up and down repeatedly. I flew a multiplayer mission online at JCN with one other player to test this anomaly. I found that the up and down pitching of the nose was gone. I did still notice some warping though. As I got closer to the other player, his plane would not stay steady. It would jump forward and backward rapidly, which still makes formation flying rather difficult. Note that I was only connected at 28.8 at the time and I haven't tested this on my 100 megabit LAN. Hopefully this is a connection speed problem and will go away as you connect at higher speeds.
