The trouble with getting people into Arma

[LeeManatee 4]

not only the UI, which is something most would agree with. (plus, ui related as well - no more hidden cfg settings, no more switches for power users).

The game needs to be playable from version 1.0. That means no more quirks and game-breaking bugs.

With A2, there were plenty of issues that have been patched along the way in A1 that made a re-appearance in 1.0 version of A2. That shit shouldn't happen anymore. The game needs to be in a playable state in order to attract and keep then close to this iteration.

just my 2 euro cents anyhow

can't disagree with that. there were 1.02, 1.05, 1.08, 1.10 patches for arma1. some of em were like 800 mb or something this way, and you had to download it from site. game should be playable when it will be relised. + some autoupdater will be great addition

and ai.. yup.. not fun when ai see you thru the trees and you can't see a dam thing

[iratus 71]

To get new players into the game Arma needs a good and working campaign. Most people I know even play at least some singleplayer in a game even if they bought it primarilly for multiplayer. Some of them do so in order to get "the hang" of the game before they throw themselves into multiplayer battles. Others just like to play singleplayer. If the campaign works (oposed to buggy Harvest Red :mad:) and has a good story, chances are greater that those players will try multiplayer as well.

And i think most of us agree that ArmA 3 needs tutorials in some form, since the Arma series is verry complex. In my eyes a good campaign is the best tutorial. You don't get everything thrown at you from the start, instead you get things step by step. It allso does not feel as boring as playing a "real" tutorial, since it has not this "i have to finish this tutorial before i begin to play"-feel. And if you crash your first chopper after 10 seconds you just load the last savegame/restart the mission instead of wrecking the whole game for ten or so players ad getting blamed as a noob for it.

[JellBro 0]

@ Iratus

Exactly after some single player stuff start on the multiplayer.

The campaign was great for OFP:CWC and Red Hammer and Resistance, and that first demo-mission is one you can still play any time, because it's allways different.

[max power 21]

I think these articles are relevent to this topic -

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/29/uk-ministry-of-defence-finds-modern-shooters-more-realistic-than

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/28/ministry-defence-war-games-xbox

Perhaps you can illuminate the point of this post?

[djfluffwug 10]

what do you mean by optimization? Lower polycount for geometry, lower sized textures and overall numbers? Yes, the game is quite demanding, especially on the HDD transfer rates and CPU cylces needed. But then again you have nothing to compare it with...

Well my opinion of optimising it is:

Balancing the texture resolutions. Why do things like leaves in a garden have pretty decent resolution when 99.9% of the time, the playing wont be focusing on a garden leaf. Then, the road textures have a pretty low resolution when you would be using them quite a bit. If you were to balance the textures out a little more, I think you could get a small fps increase.

Also, if they were limit the amount of draw calls going on, you would get a better framerate (Obviously). So, if they were to implement PROPER occlusion culling that takes into account the depth of objects and others overlapping the geometry, you would get a much better framerate. Using something like UMBRA would really boost the FPS of the game. (I know, I mention umbra alot)

Anyways, there are lots of other small methods that could be used to increase the performance of the game but I won't go on.

[katipo66 94]

Maybe just get them into the editor straight away, it's obvious to us what it (editor) is but maybe not to someone who's never played the game or been on these forums, the campaign or MP may scare them off but the editor may hook them for life... If that happens then they will be forgiving of any other small quirks of the game, if there are any by A3.

[jblackrupert 14]

emm.. atleast make it look a bit more realistic like they were made of somewhat else then rag. like more heavy and less flexible

soldiers loosing all bones / skeleton after being shot?..

Like the light weight cargo containers, the settings are not tweaked

and Bohemia likely left them like they are in the video so the physx and

ragdoll effects are more visible.

[LANCERZz 10]

Well we all saw what happened when a game tries to cater to CoD fans and sim fans at the same time: a red river of failure. BIS needs to just keep doing their thing. I've had the same problem with getting people to play arma. Out of the 4 friends I've introduced to it, 1 actually enjoys it as much as, if not more than, I do

. It boils down to the amount of patience and the lack of instant gratification in ARMa. When you get a kill in call of duty, you hear a little noise, an x pops up on your screen along with +50 points. In arma, you're lucky to be able to see the people shooting at you, and you need to be close or recognize the preset death anims to even know if you killed the guy. But at the same time, arms replaces that short burst of instant gratification with a lot more rewarding sense of accomplishment when a plan comes together on an open, unscripted mission

[igneous01 19]

arma shines not as an fps solely, but as a pseudo tactical - rts - fps game. What makes it rewarding is that the primary goal is not getting kills, its about carrying your buddy in mp that got shot while the rest of your team cover you. Its when priority changes from "Heh im gonna try to take out all these guys here by myself and that tank too" to "I have to keep giving covering fire, otherwise my teammate who is dragging that other guy will be killed"

Or if your into high command like me, your priority is about the positioning of your units, and reaction to enemy response, telling these teams to offer cover fire, while other teams advance.

As has been said so many times: this game does not gratify spontaneously, and it shouldn't either: real life doesn't gratify you either, the priorities are similar too. Arma has always forced the player to think about the big picture, not the small component of the amount of kills you got.

[SeaVee 10]

...bending the game to fit the expectations of retards will not work.

This ^ ^

[metalcraze 290]

Well my opinion of optimising it is:

Balancing the texture resolutions. Why do things like leaves in a garden have pretty decent resolution when 99.9% of the time, the playing wont be focusing on a garden leaf. Then, the road textures have a pretty low resolution when you would be using them quite a bit. If you were to balance the textures out a little more, I think you could get a small fps increase.

Normal or V. High texture settings don't change FPS for me even a slightest bit (and that's on Chernarus) while game looks better at v. high

And I have a 896 MBs GTX 260

ArmA's main bottleneck is CPU and only then videocard. And all hardware has limits. It isn't like ArmA is unoptimized. There's a big chance CryEngine/UE3/IdTech will crash and burn when you will force them to handle 30 AIs at least half as advanced as what's in ArmA at once - and in ArmA you can have 100 of them and it still will be playable.

There's a reason why games on those engines above rarely have more than 10 simplistic bots at any one time.

BIS does optimize things. Compare the performance with the same amount of AIs in ArmA1 1.0 and ArmA2 1.60 (and for comparison to be fair you can run it on Sahrani which is available in ArmA2 through CAA1). The difference is impressive. Same goes for ArmA2 1.0

---------- Post added at 14:26 ---------- Previous post was at 14:10 ----------

okay. i got core i7 2600, gtx 580 3gb vram and 8gb ram, but arma2 still lags on maximized. seriously, wtf?

So what? ArmA2 maximum settings were made for systems that will be able to handle them in the future. Your system isn't there yet.

If BIS just limited VD to 2 km it would've worked at 60 FPS on your system and then it would've been optimized lawl?

Edited January 2, 2012 by metalcraze

[Bee8190 10]

Normal or V. High texture settings don't change FPS for me even a slightest bit (and that's on Chernarus) while game looks better at v. high

And I have a 896 MBs GTX 260

ArmA's main bottleneck is CPU and only then videocard. And all hardware has limits. It isn't like ArmA is unoptimized. There's a big chance CryEngine/UE3/IdTech will crash and burn when you will force them to handle 30 AIs at least half as advanced as what's in ArmA at once - and in ArmA you can have 100 of them and it still will be playable.

There's a reason why games on those engines above rarely have more than 10 simplistic bots at any one time.

BIS does optimize things. Compare the performance with the same amount of AIs in ArmA1 1.0 and ArmA2 1.60 (and for comparison to be fair you can run it on Sahrani which is available in ArmA2 through CAA1). The difference is impressive. Same goes for ArmA2 1.0

I think what ppl are trying to point at is not optimize per say, as rather; take full advantage of CPU...

Arma 2 would run great on most CPU's IF it took advantage from all 2+ cores

[metalcraze 290]

And it doesn't?

I guess I just imagined the 50% FPS increase from switching my CPU from 2 core to 4 core mode.

Edited January 2, 2012 by metalcraze

[PuFu 4600]

And it doesn't?

no it doesn't. I have 2 CPUs (4c/8t and 6c/12t), and it does NOT take full advantage of them. 2 core works well, 4 cores okish, everything above it, including the virtual cores (threads) doesn't.

I even had the pleasure to run the game on a workstation at work (2x Xeon 5650 - 6c/12t 24gb ram, gtx570) and it run worse than on any of my i7s....You can check the CPU load when running A2/OA, you'll see that it doesn't use all the cores threads no matter of the -exThreads parameter

I guess I just imagined the 50% FPS increase from switching my CPU from 2 core to 4 core mode.

The increase for such a CPU intensive game should be more than 50%, especially when the GPU is not bottle-necking the system.

Again, i am talking about the 8core cpus, or more, which are available today on the market

Edited January 2, 2012 by PuFu

[metalcraze 290]

Out of interest:

What is "full advantage" in your meaning with examples?

And why a game should run better on server CPUs which devs probably don't even take into account?

As I've said I get 50% more FPS when going from 2c/2t to 4c/4t

[PuFu 4600]

Out of interest:

What is "full advantage" in your meaning with examples?

And why a game should run better on server CPUs which devs probably don't even take into account?

the xeon5650 are workstation CPUs, not server CPUs. There is a huge difference there in terms of architecture, and the scope those were build for - high demanding CPU applications

My point is that A2 does not take into account corectly more than 4 cores at this very moment.

For a rig that has 12 cores and 24 threads to run worse than a 4 core, it means there is no real scalling above the 4core...

If you believe a game is designed to work only on specific CPUs and tested only on those ones, you are dead wrong. If i were to follow your (flawed) logic that case, an older game (read game not architecture) shouldn't even run on newer CPUs...

Let me give you another example. Both my CPUs are clocked @4GHz. I have tested A2 using the same GFX card (6970) on both. There is NO difference between the newer architecture i7 2600k and the older one but with more cores i7 970. The FPS exactly the same (+/- 1fps). There should be a difference, especially in AI heavy missions. There isn't one.

As I've said I get 50% more FPS when going from 2c/2t to 4c/4t

Then again, 4 cores are the lower limit in terms of gaming PCs at this market moment. The future for Intel is virtual cores (threads) and for AMD is more cores (FX line) - 8+ so called real cores...

This thread is about A3 in the end, not A2. I would expect A3 to take advantage of the existing CPU power opposed to A2

[Bee8190 10]

Out of interest:

What is "full advantage" in your meaning with examples?

And why a game should run better on server CPUs which devs probably don't even take into account?

As I've said I get 50% more FPS when going from 2c/2t to 4c/4t

Yes but thats the way it goes :) you would see the same 50% increase from 9550 quad to 2600K, both quad cores but newer tech inside those CPU is what makes the miracles

---------- Post added at 03:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:02 PM ----------

This thread is about A3 in the end, not A2. I would expect A3 to take advantage of the existing CPU power opposed to A2

Amen to that^^

[Flash Thunder 10]

Well my opinion of optimizing it is:

Balancing the texture resolutions. Why do things like leaves in a garden have pretty decent resolution when 99.9% of the time, the playing wont be focusing on a garden leaf. Then, the road textures have a pretty low resolution when you would be using them quite a bit. If you were to balance the textures out a little more, I think you could get a small fps increase.

I ask myself this question all the time in games, BIS seems to really over do themselves on foliage in general. They even have a special software to do all the trees in their games called LINDA.

I wish the guns and stuff had high resolutions its tacky when the thing taking up most the space on the screen looks low resolution, most of the guns in Arma 2 are plain ugly even model wise.

Ground textures could be more diverse, Roads and runways like you said could look a ton better especially runways. *shudders*

Foliage isn't too important most of us aren't really paying attention to the intricate detail in the trees, if anything make the grass better and more diverse.

[Joe98 92]

....when I need to take my attention off the screen and look at the keyboard to get the right number for the orders, then back up to the screen again, then back down again to find the next number etc.

Why take your eyes off the screen?

I have a programmable keyboard Logitech G110.

This has 12 extra keys down the left side. The keys are numbered G1 – G12.

And there are 3 sets of menus so that in effect I have 36 extra keys.

I can use some of the keys without taking my eyes off the screen.

The top left key: Select Team Red

The top right key: Select Team Blue

The bottom left key:

Go Prone

Steal mode

Diamond Formation

The bottom right key:

Go prone

Line formation

Weapons free

To use the other 10 keys I (mostly) have to take my eyes off the screen. These have orders such as:

All clear-Stand up-staggered formation

And the other keys have various other orders

Imagine, in-game if the right hand side of the screen had 3 columns of buttons grouped in groups of 6.

Each button can be programmed by the player as he sees fit.

Then with one press of an on screen button a player can order:

Team Red

Go prone

Form Line

Suppression fire

Mortar team

Fire “thereâ€

Team Blue

Move to the left

Thats one mouse click without taking the eyes off the screen.

.

.

[Slyder73 10]

Biggest way to get players into Arma3..... MORE servers running PvP, that involves human vs. human.

[crazyjake56 10]

Why take your eyes off the screen?

I have a programmable keyboard Logitech G110.

.

.

Just because you have a specific keyboard doesn't mean something shouldn't be changed. If I have the best graphics card (absolutely don't) that doesn't mean a game shouldn't be optimized (I'm not necessarily referring to Arma but from what I've heard...)

[Joe98 92]

Just because you have a specific keyboard doesn't mean something shouldn't be changed.

And I then went on to suggest a change.

How do you feel about that change.

.

[katipo66 94]

Biggest way to get players into Arma3..... MORE servers running PvP, that involves human vs. human.

AGREED

[james2464 177]

agreed

agreed +1

[rye1 21]

And the biggest way to get more people into PvP missions is to fix........

*countless list here*