All characters change to identical on other players machine in network play

[rinehart]

In playing over a network, I've had a problem with the characters appearing different on the other computers. I believe that on each person's computer, their character has appeared the way it should but on the other computers, that's not the case. At times on another machine, all characters are identical. Kinda hard to know who is who when everyone is the same! When my son plays with me, I've seen him on my screen as my own character til I shot him, then he changed to the correct appearance. Anyway, it's a strange problem and I'm sure not the way network play is intended to work. Has anyone experienced the same problem and figured out what's going on?

[Darth_Merc]

Did you check to see if one of the computers has the option "force models" (under game options i think) turned on ? It makes all characters appear the same as the one you selected to improve performance by minimizing the number of models it has to load. That would explain why all apear the same, but why they would switch back briefly while dead, I am not sure why that would happen. Hope this helps.

[bar-bar mandrel]

Its an intended feature. Rather than have each model load as the player joins, the game defers loading the model until you die OR you hit the scoreboard key, whichever comes first.

 

That way, you get no "hitches" in the game as the hard drive spins up, and the game allocates extra memory (etc.) for the new model.

 

On the flip side, some people interperate the "lag" as they die as the reason they died and get mad at the game, but the game sees you have died, then loads all the models it has been waiting to load.

[teleguy]

You can turn it off in the gameoptions.

[rinehart]

I was able to "turn off" the problem after I understood what it was doing. No more duplicate characters anymore! Thanks everyone.

[bar-bar mandrel]

No problem, Just remember later that if you get into a big game online with lots of joiners, and you find the game stuttering and hitching at all the wrong moments, you should turn it back on!