Disabling the Intro Movies
The introductory movies to BF2, although fun to watch the first couple of times, fast become quite annoying, adding to the start-up times for the game, as well as the memory usage (the main movie is 135MB in size). To disable them permanently, I don't recommend deleting the movie files - this may cause problems with verification of client information on certain servers and/or with Punkbuster.
Instead, simply rename the relevant files in your \Program Files\EA Games\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\Movies\ directory to something else (e.g. rename the Intro.bik to Intro.backup). The files to rename are: Dice.bik, EA.bik, Intro.bik, Legal.bik and Welcome.bik. This will mean the intro movies are all skipped as BF2 starts to load. If you find the movies playing in the background of the Login screen and Settings screens annoying, you can also rename the menu.bik and menu_loggedin.bik to something else as well.
If you've also renamed/removed the menu.bik and menu_loggedin.bik movies, and don't want a dull grey background in the in-game menus, then download this small BF2 Menu Movies .zip file, and extract the contents to your \Movies directory. These small files (100KB each) show the BF2 logo in the background, and look much nicer. Thanks to EdisLeado for preparing and hosting this file.
Removing all the original movies from the game can save over 250MB of data being loaded up during the start of the game and being placed into memory - this will help smooth your gameplay particularly for those with less RAM. If for any reason you experience any problems with the game after renaming the movies, simply rename them back to their original names.
I renamed all mine to .backup and the game starts 10 times faster now
The introductory movies to BF2, although fun to watch the first couple of times, fast become quite annoying, adding to the start-up times for the game, as well as the memory usage (the main movie is 135MB in size). To disable them permanently, I don't recommend deleting the movie files - this may cause problems with verification of client information on certain servers and/or with Punkbuster.
Instead, simply rename the relevant files in your \Program Files\EA Games\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\Movies\ directory to something else (e.g. rename the Intro.bik to Intro.backup). The files to rename are: Dice.bik, EA.bik, Intro.bik, Legal.bik and Welcome.bik. This will mean the intro movies are all skipped as BF2 starts to load. If you find the movies playing in the background of the Login screen and Settings screens annoying, you can also rename the menu.bik and menu_loggedin.bik to something else as well.
If you've also renamed/removed the menu.bik and menu_loggedin.bik movies, and don't want a dull grey background in the in-game menus, then download this small BF2 Menu Movies .zip file, and extract the contents to your \Movies directory. These small files (100KB each) show the BF2 logo in the background, and look much nicer. Thanks to EdisLeado for preparing and hosting this file.
Removing all the original movies from the game can save over 250MB of data being loaded up during the start of the game and being placed into memory - this will help smooth your gameplay particularly for those with less RAM. If for any reason you experience any problems with the game after renaming the movies, simply rename them back to their original names.
I renamed all mine to .backup and the game starts 10 times faster now