BF Vietnam Stuffs

From elsewhere:
Ok, thought I'd post this after a good amount of fooling around with BF Vietnam and to help you all get started with a minimal amount of complaining.
The following assumes that \bfv is your Battlefield Vietnam Root Directory (eg, program files\ea games\battlefield vietnam/..etc..)

INITIAL SETUP THINGS TO DO
Once you have the game installed, make sure you delete the \bfv\movies directory first, to save you about 30 seconds of startup time.

Once that's done, head to \bfv\Mods\BfVietnam\settings and open videodefault.con with notepad or wordpad, and change "renderer.allowallrefreshrates 0" to "renderer.allowallrefreshrates 1" so you don't run into any "I can't open BFV" situations.

You'll notice there is a folder in \bfv called "my music" which you can drag and drop your own mp3's in there. The game has music abilities via the radio in most vehicles, however it doesnt stream music to your teammates so if you drop an Eminem track in there, all the stock soundtrack songs will disappear, and your teammates will hear one of those in-game that usually fills slot 1, not your custom track. Just FYI there. I decided not to put my own mp3's in there, since the game songs fit perfectly in a lot of situations. When in a vehicle, the radio is accessed by pushing the default key of 0.

So now go and load her up. You should go set all your key commands the way you like them. Now for video, it's going to be a bit of a personal preference. At first, with my 9800Pro, I had set all things to high at 1280x960, which caused horrible lag when viewing long distances such as with binoculars or scopes, and just wasn't that playable for me. What I did do was leave the resolution the same, and drop all 3 graphics sliders to "medium" which instantly put me back to 85FPS in most situations, and I have shadows and lightmaps on.

The odd thing is that changing the sliders down didn't seem to cause me any loss of visual quality AT ALL, so I'm a bit baffled there, but hey, it runs much smoother now. For sound, if you notice a lot of graphics jump/skip while playing, turn some channels down or disable high-quality sound.

INGAME THINGS TO KNOW

First, there is a lot of new vehicles, and by far the biggest questions so far are how to use the shovels, the big crates, and the helo pickup feature.
You can pickup most vehicles with the Huey or the Chinook, the chinook can lift heavier things like Tanks without affecting the handling too much, whereas a Huey with a tank below it barely stays airborne. The Tank/Jeep/APC your carrying can have people in it as well.
To pick something up, hold alt-fire as the pilot to drop the tow rope, then slowly fly over the object until you see the bar rush up and the light lock green. At this point you can release alt-fire and fly around. Real sudden/extreme rudder or turn movements will break the line, as will hitting the object below you into a building or tree. The biggest thing is to try and go SLOWLY over the object and due to the view of the pilot, you usually have to go over it a bit more than you think so it's really underneath you. 3rd Person view might help you with this.

As the good guys, you will find big crates with an eye-hook on top on some maps, which are spawn points. Simply pick it up, fly it out on the field, drop it in a good location (alt-fire as the pilot to release a hooked object) and your teammates can spawn there. Hide it well, since the object can be destroyed, and takes a bit to re-spawn at it's original location for re-deployment into the battle.

The Charlies have the same sort of idea, a mobile spawn, however to use this you have to spawn at or find a hole with a shovel in the ground, (usually indicated on the map as a spawn point with no flag for it) and then PICK it up like a kit. To pick up the tunnel spawn you must be the second Engineer class on the VC side, which has a shovel that is "blank" until you pick up a valid spawn point.
Once you have picked up a shovel point, you can then select the shovel and go around until you find a place you want to deploy it, and then simply use the shovel to dig in the new point. It must be in the dirt, it doesnt work in a hanger or inside a med building for example. It can be destroyed with a couple grens or an expack quite easily, and will respawn back at it's original location after a few minutes as well.

So, with picking up things and the mobile spawns covered, there are only a few other tips. The VC's second Anti-Armor class has a shoulder fired missle (NOT RPG) that heat seeks. For helos, just fire near it at a reasonable distance and it should find the target. Planes, being faster, are a bit trickier and require you to shoot up the tailpipeso watch the plane fly over and then quickly 180 and fire. The crosshairs will blink if you score a hit. Usually 2 hits for a plane are needed, and 1 for a helo.

Most of the maps are REALLY well done, lots of good places to fight and tons of things to cause big battles. For capping flags, you will now see a counter which indicates how long you have until the flag is capped. The more people on your team that are with you, the more quickly the timer will count down, and it makes a big difference! If you are the only guy near the flag, and the enemy has 2, it usually won't be possible to capture the flag, as they will stop the clock/turn it back on you due to their numbers. The great thing is that the flag capture zones are much smaller, so some guy hiding in the corner of some building 100 yards away can't keep a flag grey by himself while the entire other team looks for him.

There are little green boxes that are mines that the Americans carry, small and hard to see when dropped, they pack the same power as an ordinary landmine.

There is also timed C4, normal C4 (requires a detonator), bouncing betties for the VC (place on the ground and when a troop walks by, boom), and caltrops (look like jacks on the ground and work like super deadly barbed wire.

One of the cooler VC things is the BoobyTrap, which is done via the engineer classes wire cutters. (not available to the good guys). Just walk up to a vehicle, and fire with the wire cutters to place a small bomb on the outside of it. Get creative with placement if you like. When someone goes to get in it...BOOM, they get ripped apart. We have noticed that boobytrapping your own vehicles will cause teammates to die on entry, and as of now we have not found any way to remove a boobytrap other than blow up the vehicle.

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE found to be boobytrapping friendly assets will be insta-banned. If you'd like to "test" it out, create your own local game, since those excuses will not be enough to result in the ban being removed. I'll say that again, DO NOT boobytrap your OWN assets.

That's about it, each side has different strengths and weaknesses, so have fun, and we'll see you on the Battlefield once the server has been switched. Cheers ladies.