General Discussion (dev branch)

[antoineflemming 14]

I want to express how awesome my arma 3 experience is becoming in the dev build. Night time is beautiful. Performance is getting so much better. It might have something small to do with me moving all my arma files to the outer edge of my HDD... but regardless. Im on an old laptop and I was getting almost unplayable framerates on all low around launch. These days it runs very smooth on much farther view and obj distances and most settings on high to standard. Beautiful work bis! Dont know yet why people complain it runs like crap... maybe ill know soon as I decided to upgrade my old laptop.

That's because the game runs better on older computers than it does on newer computers. I don't really understand why, but that's the case. If your game currently runs pretty well with your old laptop, then I'd say don't upgrade, because you may in fact experience worse performance.

[EricM 0]

It works flawlessly here on a fairly recent I7 tower with GTX680 with everything on high.

So It also works very well on "newer computers", just not all combination of hardware as it seems. Mobile hardware is also a compounding factor as it is usually more geared toward power efficiency than performance, and sometimes "power saving" mechanism can get in the way and mess it all (it happened to me once).

[purepassion 22]

PurePassion it should be the Good, the Bad and the UGLY! :cool:

Good point :p

Outstanding post PurePassion, thanks for the time and work put in!

Question for you. In some of those images you linked to, you are seeing proper building lighting out in the distance, like the airport or firing range, not sure what buildings those are. What GPU are you using? As I am still unable to see ANY structural lighting on my AMD 5870 2GB card. I wonder if maybe it's a driver issue?

I am using a 7870XT @ 1170MHz Core, 1650MHz Memory with dynamic lights at Ultra

@SQB-SMA, Good observations! Some problems could indeed be related to mods such as MidTex.

[lordprimate 159]

The pictures that Purepassion posted of the stars being to bright. I had the same issue. However, It was a mod that was causing the problem (badbenson's mid textures). Once i removed that the game was back to its regular beautiful Arma 3 self.

[purepassion 22]

In case you're wondering what the fog is all about, here's a quick video Dslyexci threw together to showcase the new fog rendering techniques

Edited April 20, 2013 by PurePassion

[Tonci87 163]

Nightime is pretty broken for me. The ammount of ambient light seems to be a little bit exagerated. Streetlamps glow a little bit but don´t illuminate anything. I can´t see the red dot in my holosights. HD5850 without mods

[Simas 12]

Nightime is pretty broken for me. The ammount of ambient light seems to be a little bit exagerated. Streetlamps glow a little bit but don´t illuminate anything. I can´t see the red dot in my holosights. HD5850 without mods

Same. Dynamic lights don't seem to work at all for me (except the campfire). I am on GeForce GTX 460.

[sqb-sma 66]

The pictures that Purepassion posted of the stars being to bright. I had the same issue. However, It was a mod that was causing the problem (badbenson's mid textures). Once i removed that the game was back to its regular beautiful Arma 3 self.

Except not so beautiful because midtex is amazing. The new mid tex from BIS is NOWHERE near good enough. Can't wait til that's updated to work again.

[chrisb 196]

I’ve got no complaints about performance or how it looks, run it on mostly ultra settings on my old a2 pc. My only complaint is the ai, or ‘a’ as I like to call them now.

In a2 it was fine, great ai made possible via great ai mods. Here in a3 its woeful, can’t play a proper mission really, just too annoying. So I just test and hope, well not all the time, I slip back over to a2 for some proper combat every now and then.;).

I'm using many terrains in a3 at the mo, great lighting really re-news many of the old terrains, even the arma ones, plus of course the clouds help. However that’s all a waste of time if the ai, sorry ‘a’, isn’t sorted, give it the ‘i’ and lets get cracking...

What are the chances of that happening....:rolleyes:..:(

[bad benson 1733]

The pictures that Purepassion posted of the stars being to bright. I had the same issue. However, It was a mod that was causing the problem (badbenson's mid textures). Once i removed that the game was back to its regular beautiful Arma 3 self.

yea that was caused by me using the whole stratis config instead of just replacing the texture path. i already updated the addon. please test it and report back so i can be sure it worked. works fine for me so far.

[artemas 1]

The fog is fucking fantastic.

[purepassion 22]

yea that was caused by me using the whole stratis config instead of just replacing the texture path. i already updated the addon. please test it and report back so i can be sure it worked. works fine for me so far.

yeah again confirmed :blush: No fault on BIS side

[smiley_ie 7]

In case you're wondering what the fog is all about, here's a quick video Dslyexci threw together to showcase the new fog rendering techniques

I never even looked at the fog in Arma 3 but that's really cool hopefully its gonna be used in more MP missions.

[Maxzy 12]

Can't wait for new stable patch - fog is pure awesomeness.

[Zorg_DK 10]

yeah, the fog is looking real nice.

now, bi, please make light sources cast a strong illumination. it'll make night missions look awesome.

[Varanon 892]

Does the new fog affect AI perception, too ?

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

As cool as the fog is, it's not enough to warrant running the dev builds for me at this time. Until the lighting bugs are worked out I'll be sitting on the regular builds with Steam set to not update Arma 3.

I just don't get what their goal is in tweaking those lighting changes. They were so lifelike before, and needed no improvements.

[old_painless 182]

Does the new fog affect AI perception, too ?

That was my thought, too. Very good question, Varanon!

-OP

[kremator 1065]

If people do not test dev builds the game will not progress as fast I'm afraid.

It is an alpha for a reason .... to TEST!

[metalcraze 290]

It would've been better if dev builds were enforced without so called "stable". Jumping between builds to play MP is meh.

What's the point in "stable" when people will just find old bugs there and each new "stable" patch breaks missions made with a previous one anyway?

[St. Jimmy 272]

I hope that the blue color that is in view distance and in that fog will be more to light blue/white than what we have now. It's too lilac right now and now you can see it easily with that new fog.

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

I hope that the blue color that is in view distance and in that fog will be more to light blue/white than what we have now. It's too lilac right now and now you can see it easily with that new fog.

The whole new night time color scheme is just silly. Before I felt like I was in a gritty realistic simulator. Now I feel like I'm in a fantasy land and I half expect elves to jump me with big pointy ears...

[dnk 13]

Yeah, the fog shouldn't be colored. The actual fog needs to have a very neutral gray color.

[ddeo 10]

The whole new night time color scheme is just silly. Before I felt like I was in a gritty realistic simulator. Now I feel like I'm in a fantasy land and I half expect elves to jump me with big pointy ears...

Right now it depends on moon lighting, before night was just dark black. I think it is nice improvement, but sky color needs to be fixed, it is too blue. Also if you want to have dark black night you can still have it in your mission, just set proper time of the year. Point is, it is still work in progress, no need to hate it. BIS made huge improvement to the lighting system, but now they need to tweak it to make it look correctly. I think you're too conservative, just let them do their job. :) And no, old lighting system was not better at all.

[chortles 263]

By "old lighting system" I believe that DaRkL3AD3R was referring to a previous and very recent Arma 3 dev build and not Arma 2...