To Clarify:BIS, is the 'new' ARMA3 engine as is?

[ric 1]

No they can't just flip a switch. But they have been constantly been improving the performance of the engine. But as I said there are diminishing returns to the amount of work required.

typo...I meant "can't flip a switch" diminishing returns? agreed we should have a true! alpha on our hands right now, imagine what one could do with full quad core support or at the very least the ability to max out duel cores. You just cant look or call something "next gen" when it does not even take advantage of current tech...we have 4,6,8,...12 core chips now...thats alot of power tobe had and our FPS would probably double if the engine would just fully utilize 2 cores.

I have been selling selling selling ARMA3 to all my friends to the point of getting annoying...because i saw soooo much in all the video's and I knew how versatile and modable the game is...the worst part is the let down..I/we could make soooo many mod's/mission's scenarios that would be incredible in depth and variation only tobe unplayable because the engine is not up to the task.

[10t 12]

I would just like some honesty from a company I've paid money to, really.

My issue is with this line from the OP. Buddy (actually, all of you who are crying because they have some sense of entitlement - you know who you are) it's not just an Alpha, it's a FREE Alpha.

If you chose to pay for it, rather than suck it up and wait for a few days to try it for free (there's a thread full of people trying to hand out their Lite invitations), then YOU CHOSE to take the risk.

If these posts were along the lines of "I had higher hopes for Arma 3, and am disappointed that it isn't what I expected. I hope it improves. If it does not, I will choose not to buy it" then I would have no problem. To say (and I paraphrase) "Wah. BI owes me" doesn't make sympathetic in the least.

[bad benson 1733]

^give this guy a medal!

[AbortedMan 1]

probably double if the engine would just fully utilize 2 cores.

Please, just quit talking about CPU utilization. This sentence proves you have absolutely no knowledge on the subject.

[Oshi7 1]

It is quite concerning that the same problems from ArmA2 persist to ArmaA3. I've spoken with lots of well known youtubers (and other people none of you guys give a shit about) and we've all said that if ArmA 3 could run at a decent frame rate then we'd never play another game again until ArmA 4 came out. Sadly it seems like the same old issues are cropping up, which I can only hope they fix in the coming months. Frame rate is a particularly huge issue (perhaps the most pervasive), considering proper recoil control and target tracking can't be done when you're getting ~20fps. Doesn't help when changing your graphical settings around either, High or Low results in the same FPS, like their is some invisible barrier on what you're allowed to achieve. Although I did join a Wasteland server that had no grass at all and my frame rate sky rockets to 60+ whilst streaming. Was a bit mental, but felt so bloody good.

Although I think BI know they're onto a winner and that script-heavy game modes, like Wasteland, are what is drawing in such huge sales numbers they'll work on doing something with scripting so that it doesn't have such a huge impact on drawing the frames.

[dm 9]

So what I'm getting from this thread is a few tech-buzzword humping "know-it-alls" screaming "MOAR MULTITHREADS PLZZZ!!!" and "HIT THE OPTIMIZE BUTTON DEVS, WTF?!?!!!" aren't happy with how the game runs on their 2nd and 3rd gen hardware.

If multithreading was the fix-all for gaming, don't you think it'd be plastered all over every piece of software that game studios produced? Do you really think its that easy?

On that note, if I see one more kid make a post excitedly throwing around the word "optimization" and non-stop calling for aforementioned magical "optimization" like they've just discovered masturbation, I'm going to have a miscarriage...and I'm a dude....yeah.

My issue is with this line from the OP. Buddy (actually, all of you who are crying because they have some sense of entitlement - you know who you are) it's not just an Alpha, it's a FREE Alpha.

If you chose to pay for it, rather than suck it up and wait for a few days to try it for free (there's a thread full of people trying to hand out their Lite invitations), then YOU CHOSE to take the risk.

If these posts were along the lines of "I had higher hopes for Arma 3, and am disappointed that it isn't what I expected. I hope it improves. If it does not, I will choose not to buy it" then I would have no problem. To say (and I paraphrase) "Wah. BI owes me" doesn't make sympathetic in the least.

you two are my 2 new heroes.

Logic and sense in a thread full of retardation....

[[frl]myke 14]

I guess none of the "my CPU is underutilized" guys has read this: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

[Defunkt 431]

Myke;2338707']I guess none of the "my CPU is underutilized" guys has read this: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

I've read it and I don't buy it. The Frostbite engine team at DICE doesn't buy it either (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18459152).

Should it mean for instance that ArmA 4, 5 & 6 have no hope of more-fully utilising multiple cores either? It was a major problem in 2009 when ArmA 2 was released and it's very disappointing to see that little has been done to improve on matters over the last four years. If we accept that devlog post at face value and declare it an un-fixable problem it'll be an issue again in 2017. Eventually everybody will lose patience.

[Flash Thunder 10]

The word "optimize" is now banned from usage on this forum.

Penalty: Instant ban hammer.

Man would these forums be cleared of clutter.

Thoughts Placebo? :D

[hatbuster 1]

FALSE.

'Watch Dogs' is running on a brand new game engine called 'Disrupt'

http://www.examiner.com/article/watch-dogs-is-running-on-a-brand-new-game-engine-called-disrupt

Hahahaha. oh wow.

Just because they call it new doesn't mean it's new.

I bet they worked a lot on it, sure. But you don't get the word "new".

By no means is the Disrupt engine built from the ground. It branches from the AC engine.

How do I know that? It's easy.

A.) It shares a look and feel with AC. Movement works in much the same way, clothing reacts in a similar way, collision is the same, pedestrians act much as they do in AC.

B.) The game is close to AC in what it does. It would be a colossal waste of money to build a new engine from the ground up to do almost the same thing.

C.) Developing a completely new engine with a feature set this large would take way more time. If they had done that, you probably wouldn't even see any footage of the game yet.

Sure, they overhauled the renderer amongst other things.

But it's not completely new. They recycled old stuff to make this. And that's good. Because doing it any other way would take far too long and be far too expensive.

[[frl]myke 14]

Well, the Frostbite Engine isn't designed to handle huge amount of AI. Parallelizing eye-candy producing special effects threads isn't really voodoo. The RV Engine on the other hand is designed to calculate real AI which does have significant effect on the gameplay. A lot of things rely on each other, making threads wait (idling) for calculation results of other threads. Result: CPU is "utilized" at ~50 or so.

And do not forget (i know, the argument is almost overused but yet still relevant): It's Alpha. Features are added and made functional, Optimization comes later, first it has to work. It is a assumption since i'm not a developer but i made some quite large script suits in the past and that's exactly how i worked: first, it has to work, later i can do optimizations.

[Flash Thunder 10]

@HatBuster No you're wrong see they threw away the hundreds of thousands of lines of code just to please some people on the internet.

Because the internet is serious business.

Can you see the overwhelming logic going on here????

[Touch Off 10]

My issue is with this line from the OP. Buddy (actually, all of you who are crying because they have some sense of entitlement - you know who you are) it's not just an Alpha, it's a FREE Alpha.

If you chose to pay for it, rather than suck it up and wait for a few days to try it for free (there's a thread full of people trying to hand out their Lite invitations), then YOU CHOSE to take the risk.

If these posts were along the lines of "I had higher hopes for Arma 3, and am disappointed that it isn't what I expected. I hope it improves. If it does not, I will choose not to buy it" then I would have no problem. To say (and I paraphrase) "Wah. BI owes me" doesn't make sympathetic in the least.

As long as your moral compass is ok, I'm good with that.

But if you learnt to read properly, I stated the reasons why I wanted that honesty. It wasn't necessarily to do with spending 20 quid. I bought the game with a high percentage of my intentions given to the fact I am loyal to purchasing games from BIS as a sign of support. It's not a huge amount of money but nonetheless it depends how you look at it.

I've bought flashy twice, ARMA twice, ARMA2 twice and it's DLCs and I bought this game because I do enjoy it and the future it will hopefully have. When one pays money for a product and they have concerns for how it functions, that customer has a right to have a say. Sorry you don't feel like that. Good luck to you. It is free to my friends who I'll be sending invites to, but not to me. I made the choice to pay money for a title I believed would be enjoyable because I wanted the benefits of the non lite version. Can you understand that?

In your world where everything that costs has a risk, although feel unable to justify any demands for a resolution if needed, it must get tough when something breaks or isn't fit for purpose or sold as advertised? Maybe this is why there are so many exploitative businesses and services out there because the consumer is just a voiceless cash dispenser. Certain people never feel like they can complain because, well, it's embarrassing or awkward or they just don't know why they should. I always try to make my feelings clear to any service I pay money for if I'm dissatisfied with the outcome. That way I achieve piece of mind knowing that I'm not someone who just keeps getting taken for a ride. Maybe that's not you, though and I digress.

My point here is that I have, or possibly had high hopes for this title given the amount of time BIS have had at their disposal to rectify certain issues with the series. It is possible that it may well be the case that for all the eye candy and fairly shallow improvements to the game, there are still some rather outstanding faults that are now seemingly unlikely to be addressed. For me it's a concern but, not one that is held without understanding of the current alpha situation. More to the point, it is clarity and ownership of a given situation that every customer of a service should feel like they can expect.

On the contrary, sometimes a forum can be an arena for people with some strange appropriation toward a pseudo moral high ground stance of defending a business no matter what happens, or what doesn't. Conversely, showing signs of critical thinking and higher expectations so that the money customers spend and the support they offer isn't taken for granted is of far greater importance to a business that wants to be successful. The feedback tracker is a symbol of this intention and it is why there is a growing significance that they reply to the many questions and concerns in a more specific and thorough manner that many of their customers are voicing.

I'm not here to promote the game for BIS nor discredit their endeavour. I would like, if at all possible, for the developers to acknowledge these issues as repairable or fixable, or whether they don't believe there's a problem with how the game currently functions at a root level.

Thanks, buddy.

@ Myke. That makes sense to me and hopefully will be the case. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate as I object to the dismissive comments from members who feel they have to defend what isn't necessarily in question. Make your own minds up as to what I mean by that, as you will.

I have a decent rig and can get the game running at around 60-100 fps on whatever settings I chose, fine, and when starting a mission with 20-30 AI I'll drop to the mid 30s-70s in the more detailed areas. Game looks decent and the feel is adequate for me. I personally can't accept the game play when around mid 20fps and this can occur when adding another few squads each side, pushing the 50+ AI count. Lowering all graphics settings with 50+ up to 100 AI and seeing my system struggle with that is what I'd hoped wouldn't have such an impact, but I guess that the overhaul of the AI is to do with this and subsequently could be polished at a later date in order to allow performance to benefit. We'll see, I suppose and I can accept this but I'd like to think there can be improvements made, especially as currently I see only small difference with how the AI behave compared to ARMA2.

I'll be patient and look toward seeing the progression with the performance side of things along with the rest of the features as they come.

My main gripe is really to do with the AI walking through walls when constructing a base in the editor, among other stupid things the AI do, I'm disappointed that this still happens.

Edited March 15, 2013 by Touch Off

[hatbuster 1]

@Flash Thunder I have a feeling it's closer to millions of lines!

Back to the topic, however:

The reason "alpha" is not an excuse for the piss-poor performance is because of they reason behind it: Poor Threading.

Threading is hard. But it is core engine work. Modifying the engine gets harder and harder the more stuff you add to it, since you have to redo more code.

Thus, this kind of work has to be done sooner and not later. One might even argue that you'd want the prototype to have better threading than we have currently.

Blatantly stupid AI? That's fine, that's something you can fix later.

Game constantly crashing in MP? Sure, they'll find the cause with the thousands of reports.

Indestructible windows? Surely just not implemented yet.

But the underlying technology being unable to cope with the scale of the game? No. That's something that should have been addressed earlier. And now we whine about it. Because the more people whine (aka upvote the issue on the tracker), the more pressure we put on BIS to actually do something about it.

[dmarkwick 261]

I don't think I've read a thread that kicked off with such a disgusting amount of self-entitlement disguised as concern for a product. I don't think you've fully understood what exactly you've actually bought here, or the purpose of you buying it at this stage.

[Defunkt 431]

Myke;2338733']Well' date=' the Frostbite Engine isn't designed to handle huge amount of AI. Parallelizing eye-candy producing special effects threads isn't really voodoo. The RV Engine on the other hand is designed to calculate real AI which does have significant effect on the gameplay. A lot of things rely on each other, making threads wait (idling) for calculation results of other threads. Result: CPU is "utilized" at ~50 or so.[/quote']

Meh, you're just inventing excuses. As I've said, you put 64 players and zero AI on Shapur, a like-for-like scenario with BF3, and you're still going to have a turgid multiplayer experience.

I'd have said the game's AI is near as damn tailor-made for multi-threading. Every entity in the game gets its own simulation and decision making threads, shared around all the non-renderer cores and you can even have a whole other core arbitrate the interactions between them. The rendering thread should never be waiting on that stuff, just saying, what's the next object, what's its state and where do I draw it.

Look at the headless client amendments, okay it's effectively using TCP/IP as some sort of inter-process communication so not a great state of affairs, but why the hell can't the game launch the equivalent thing in the background so we can see the benefits when we're using the editor?

[Minoza 11]

I'm running with an i5 2500K at stock clock, GTX670 (OC'd 1872Mhz memory, 1135Mhz GPU boost clock, nothing big) 8GB corsair vengeance RAM, ArmA3 and Windows 8 installed on a Corsair Force GT SSD.

I run the game on max settings, ATOC disabled, SMAA ultra high, 8x AA, at 1080p and average 50-60fps (vsync is always on) unless the server starts bogging down, for some reason things get slow to about 30fps...I'm assuming there's a correlation between server performance and client performance, not sure, though.

All in all, A3 runs great and well beyond my expectations...I mean look at the damn thing.

Is it the same for you in MP? What view distance and what is your object render distance? I ask because I have same GPU, but i7 3770K CPU (OC @4.4GHz) and 16GB of ram and I can't get anywhere near "max" settings and retain playable fps. I even had to lower terrain and object detail and disable AA, this doesn't seem right after reading this...

[[frl]myke 14]

As I've said, you put 64 players and zero AI on Shapur, a like-for-like scenario with BF3, and you're still going to have a turgid multiplayer experience.

You are comparing a engine that is exactly designed for this kind of scenario with a engine that isn't designed for this kind of scenario? It is like asking why nobody uses a Ferrari for a Rallye since they are really fast cars and they must own everything else.

Look at the headless client amendments, okay it's effectively using TCP/IP as some sort of inter-process communication so not a great state of affairs, but why the hell can't the game launch the equivalent thing in the background so we can see the benefits when we're using the editor?

Because this is a optional tech which would blow up Dualcore Users CPU if made default? Honestly, i don't know.

[Touch Off 10]

I don't think I've read a thread that kicked off with such a disgusting amount of self-entitlement disguised as concern for a product. I don't think you've fully understood what exactly you've actually bought here, or the purpose of you buying it at this stage.

No, you don't understand.

[ProfTournesol 956]

Well, a topic about how unoptimized an alpha built is could have some sense somehow, if it wasn't "hey, i thought there was a brand new engine", or "drop that engine and do something else".

[simon1279 53]

Can I say it? Go on, can I?

IT'S AN ALPHA!

Yes right it's an alpha but don't expect better in the Final regarding performance, basically A2CO is the real A3 alpha about engine and brand new video options, and CPU matters (performance), i believe most of people was expecting from this A3 a miracle, it's the usual same dear RV engine guys, you'll never have full 60 FPS on a non corridor style game with an entire world to manage

[tet5uo 4]

Stop using the defense of "Well gee-willakers, just look how much this game is DOING compared to anything else!"

That's exactly our fricken point.

Why should a game that has so much crap to calculate NOT be able to use the most possible resources it has available?

[dmarkwick 261]

Stop using the defense of "Well gee-willakers, just look how much this game is DOING compared to anything else!"

That's exactly our fricken point.

Why should a game that has so much crap to calculate NOT be able to use the most possible resources it has available?

I guess the answer would be either not understood or not believed. People who run a first-release alpha build, then count their FPS, and then stare at their Task Manager performance window and come to a conclusion that the developers owe them an explanation are not really to be taken entirely seriously. IMO natch.

But, good luck demanding the developers explain this to you.

[dm 9]

I don't think I've read a thread that kicked off with such a disgusting amount of self-entitlement disguised as concern for a product. I don't think you've fully understood what exactly you've actually bought here, or the purpose of you buying it at this stage.

Quoted for truth.

[Touch Off 10]

I guess the answer would be either not understood or not believed. People who run a first-release alpha build, then count their FPS, and then stare at their Task Manager performance window and come to a conclusion that the developers owe them an explanation are not really to be taken entirely seriously. IMO natch.

But, good luck demanding the developers explain this to you.

Yes, good faith and good customer support. Or they just rely on know-it alls to do their dirty work for free?

The others issues that I've spoken about that were in ARMA2 and never resolved, they're not important to you, right?

Guess they can count on your cash for future upgrades?