Thread: PB Fix?

This might help people with frequent pb errors.

Reduce the Number of Punkbuster Checks: Punkbuster, as you probably know, is the anti cheating software which comes bundled with BF2 and is required to play on all ranked servers and most public servers. Punkbuster scans your hard-drive for problems every 20 seconds. As you may have guessed, this causes a lot of lag. What we are going to do in this fix is to increase the amount of time in between punkbuster checks to 500 seconds (the maximum amount so don't try anything higher lol). By the way, in case you were worried, this is 100% safe with punkbuster, and will NOT cause any problems with Punkbuster thinking you are a cheater. Punkbuster even recommends this fix on their website. To do this you need to:

1. Join any BF2 online server which is running punkbuster, preferably a ranked one.
2. Once you are in, and respawned somewhere, press the `~(Tilda) key. This key is located on most keyboards above the tab key and to the left of the 1 key.
3. A large white box should drop down with a load of text in it. Type pb_sleep500 and hit the enter key.
4. Once you have done this, make sure the box is still up and type pb_writecfg to save your settings.

http://www.secretsofbattlefield.com/hardware1.html


You might actually have to play around with it to work though.

Originally Posted by WileECyte

It's actually milliseconds, not seconds.

It is really seconds. Evenbalance says so, and I know so (when the PR server was being set up to check MD5 hashes, no one else could stay connected for more than 20 seconds or so; I could stay on for ~8.3 minutes, because that's 500 seconds).

It doesn't really cause much lag unless you have an old bucket of bolts for a computer because while playing it only monitors certain key files.

That depends heavily on how extensive the checking is set up to be. pb_sleep affects how often the MD5 hasher checks a random file as well, and that check can be up to the first 2MB of a file (and one, in vanilla anyway, which is packed in a .zip file). Any and all files in your game folder could be set up for MD5 hashing, depending on the server.

The real checks happen during map load time.

That's the game's internal checks, not PB (and those are hardly fault-proof, either). The PB client isn't instantiated until after map load.

Draco