naink

So i finally got Battlefield Bad Company to work reliably as clock work. There are several things that should be done to get this game and Punkbuster to work well. My problem ended up being a bunch of stuff. It mainly all revolved around my virus scanner, and Punkbuster having many instances of its self spread through my computer.

These are the steps i took to make the game work from the get go:

1) Open required ports in router:
For my home network, i run Endian on an old Pentium 4 Media Centre PC. Endian is a great firewall/router. However for gamers it can be a slight pain since it by default blocks everything, and it doesnt support uPnP. Its easy enough to add outgoing firewall exceptions for it though. Ive allowed these ports through:

You dont need to port forward these ports. Just open them up. If you have a basic Belkin, Linksys, Netgear etc then the you probably wont have to do any of this since they usually let anything through!
2) Add exceptions to Virus scanner:

This was the tricky part. Open a search dialog on your computer, and search for these items:

• PnkBstrA.exe
• PnkBstrB.exe
• Directories named pb and punkbuster

For me, PnkBstrA and PnkBstrB where located in about 4 locations on my computer. So i added all 4 of them to the exception list of my virus scanner. I run Emsisofts Anti-Malware. So in my case i added all instances of both PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe to the whitelist. I found PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe in system32, sysWOW64, C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalPunkBusterBC2 and Steamsteamappscommonbattlefield bad company 2pb.

I found that there is a pb directory in the game’s directory and at “C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalPunkBusterBC2″. So i also added both of these directorys to my virus scanners whitelist.

I also added the directory “Steamsteamappscommonbattlefield bad company 2″ to the whitelist.

Emsisoft Anti-Malware also has a feature called Surf Protection. Which stops any application that looks “sus” connecting to the internet. So i added these rules to the Surf Protections exclusion list:

• EA.COM
• MASTER1.EVENBALANCE.COM to MASTER8.EVENBALANCE.COM
• BC21.EVENBALANCE.COM
• BC22.EVENBALANCE.COM

This list will vary from game to game that uses Punkbuster. If you go to the pb directory in the games install location, and open pbsec.htm it will have a list of the hosts its going to try connect to.

3) Allow Punkbuster through your firewall:

Punkbuster will try allow itself through the Windows Firewall but sometimes wont work. So i recommend that you check PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe are allowed.

4) Fixing annoying respawn delay after you click “ENTER” in the game:

This is a bug/poor programming in the game. Whenever you click “ENTER” to respawn in the game, it reads the files located in this directory:

C:UsersUSERNAMEDocumentsBFBC2

If you have a virus scanner that has scans any file that is read/written/executed (Real Time Protection) then you will most likely experience this delay.

In Emsisoft Anti-Malware i had to turn off the onAccess virus scanning feature, i set it to onExecution instead. For other virus scanners, you need to add this directory to its exception list so files within the directory dont get scanned. Its a big oversight by the game developers, that good beta testing would have picked up!

I hope this helps someone, because it was a massive pain in the ass to get working! But now that it is working, I’m enjoying the game alot .

Cheers

Chris!