Emergency Compatibility Break: Discord Game Overlay may silently conflict.
While it is very close to the end of 2042's Free Pass for BF6, and to the launch of BF6 itself, it has been discovered that the Discord Game Overlay, the way it interacts with at least AMD drivers but possibly also others, and how it interacts with Battlefield 2042 may cause a severe breakdown within Battlefield 2042.
What this breakdown appears to manifest as within Battlefield 2042 is the following symptoms:
1. Textures and shaders taking too long to load (A few to Tens of minutes/most of the match, as opposed to just 1 to a few minutes at most. SSDs mask this problem with their Asynchronous I/O support and higher I/O activity potential, but do not outright stop it.).
2. Shaders not loading correctly or with full detail, even after tens of minutes of gameplay.
3. Specular effects on player outfit materials not appearing consistently or at all when actually in a map.
4. Soldier outfits/uniforms and bodies sometimes only having the Mud material applied to all of it, as a consequence of shader material layering breaking down.
If you wish to avoid this problem for now, going into Discord's Game Overlay settings and turning off the Messages and Go Live notification setting may help for now, or even turning it off outright for Battlefield 2042 may also help. This is not a complete solution, however, as few players will ever want to set those manually in practice.
A real compatibility fix may require one of the following:
1. Adding explicit exceptions for the Discord Game overlay and its DLL injection mechanism within EA Anticheat. One of the first places the Discord Overlay will like to display and render is in anti-cheat windows, as seen with Easy Anti-Cheat. This may have to be accounted for here also.
2. Adding explicit exceptions for the Steam Overlay and its injection mechanism if not already accounted for. It likes to hang the game a little whenever it is invoked and rendered for the first time compared to the EA App Overlay, and I wonder why that is.
3. Releasing a hotfix for Battlefield 2042 to better account for this source of interference.
This is also mentioned because it has likely been an issue for at least 1 year, and since it may or may not also affect BF6 a little to a lesser extent. I will have to retest BF6 when it launches, but for now, see if this nets anything worthwhile.
