Battlezone II Patch 1.3.7.1 Public Beta

Battlezone II patch 1.3.7.1 Public Beta has arrived. The 1.3 patch series has been in development since fall 2001, headed by two programmers who had worked on the original Battlezone II team: Ken 'Ultraken' Miller & Nathan 'GSH' Mates.

The 1.3.7.1 Public Beta patch is a cumulative patch for Battlezone II that includes a number of fixes and new features, such as Windows XP/Vista/7/8 compatibility, DirectX 9 graphics, networking moved from Gamespy (where support has been terminated) to RakNet, integrated voice chat in multiplayer games, over 140 maps for multiplayer installed with the patch, stability improvements, and a lot of other fixes and features. If you wish to download it, see the following set of links:

Explanation of the above links

The patch download link above is a .zip'd patch installer, which will upgrade any previously installed version of Battlezone II to 1.3.7.1 public beta. Note that this is only a patch installer -- it requires that you have BZ2 previously installed from CD before it will install. Note - if the .zip file has errors opening, please ensure that your download is complete and/or try downloading again. If you use Windows Explorer to view the properties of it on disk, the .zip file should be 105,549,247 bytes, and the .zip should contain a 105,859,584 byte executable file. (Size on disk varies, and is not an accurate judge). You may want to try using a download manager if you have issues.

The Battlezone II Music pack has been graciously contributed by Carey Chico, who was both the art director and composer of Battlezone II's music. From his archives at www.careyjamesmusic.com, he's found various pieces of music that was composed for Battlezone II. Not all of his compositions could fit on the Battlezone II CD, so many had to be left out. The music pack contains 176MB of .mp3 files from Carey Chico's archives. If you wish to see what the music pack contains, you can view the release notes in RTF format or PDF format. This is a completely optional download, and not needed with any Battlezone II 1.3.* build.

Patch Readme

• View the Battlezone II 1.3.7.1 Public Beta readme in RTF format
• View the Battlezone II 1.3.7.1 Public Beta readme in PDF format (PDF viewer required; preferred reader)

Legal disclaimer

The Battlezone II 1.3 patch comes with no warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the package "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose and the accuracy of the information contained within it. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the package is with you.

The 1.3 patch has been in development since September/October 2001, headed by two programmers who had worked on the original Battlezone II team: Ken Miller & Nathan Mates. In January 2009, Ken Miller moved to Armature Studio; in November 2009, Nathan Mates left Pandemic Studios (acquired by Electronic Arts in early 2008) for Total Immersion Software, which as renamed itself to Intific, Inc, and in November 2013 Nathan moved to Certain Affinity. Pandemic Studios's offices were closed in November 2009. Ken and Nathan are working on other titles as our day jobs; Battlezone II patches are done in our spare time.

Additional downloads from this page

These additional downloads are useful mainly for modders only. If you don't have a program that handles .7z files, I recommend 7-Zip, a 100% free program that handles .7z files and many other compressed file formats.

• modder_data_b131.7z This contains the raw models (.xsi) and textures (.bmp, .pic, .png, .tga, etc), which are not distributed by the 1.3.7.1 installer. This is only of interest to modders.
• BZ2_1.3.7.1_DLLSource.7z This contains the source code for the Deathmatch (DM), Instant Action (IA), Multiplayer Instant Action (MPI), Strategy & Strategy Capture The Flag DLLs. Knowledge of C++ is recommended if you want to poke at the DLL source code; this source code is designed to be compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (including the Express Edition.)
• BZ2DXTGen_v32.7z. This converts textures to the .dxtbz2 format used by BZ2. This is an updated version of what was shipped in the past, and has several important new features for BZ2 1.3.5+, especially the ability to convert 640x480 shell backdrops to DX9-optimized larger, square textures. Also has a new .cfg file full of options for high-quality upscaling, etc.

For the paranoid, the md5sum checksums on the files are

And the sha256sum checksums are: