General Discussion (dev branch)

[DnA 5156]

Curious to know what this is about:

Our designers are trying to use the Zeus (Curator) camera outside of Zeus and have stumbled across some issues that are being solved.

[SePiko 0]

 

Hello,

 

could you please provide me more details on missing animations you mentioned? Some more exact case would allow me to review it. Thanks for your feedback.

 

The main ones I notice are the static gunner and quad death animations. I am also having terrible time with sounds and music: they are repeating when I pause the game and music is stopping whenever I save.

[andersson 285]

You won't even give us back wounded crawling cause it slows down gameplay too much for some people.

Maybe it's a workaround for the AI medics who often is not very keen to heal wounded soldiers?

[Roach_ 52]

The main ones I notice are the static gunner and quad death animations. I am also having terrible time with sounds and music: they are repeating when I pause the game and music is stopping whenever I save.

Can confirm on the music, usually on pausing the game/saving, the music starts over and sometimes stops randomly, or doesn't even start. Also, the animations, this set from "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_1" to "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_7" doesn't seem to play anymore for me. Glad to see it's not just me at least.

[Kydoimos 916]

 

Can confirm on the music, usually on pausing the game/saving, the music starts over and sometimes stops randomly, or doesn't even start. Also, the animations, this set from "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_1" to "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_7" doesn't seem to play anymore for me. Glad to see it's not just me at least.

 

Yeah, me too. Having a hard time with the music at present. Cuts out every mission - I did start a ticket on the feedback tracker and it got 'assigned' a few months back, so hopefully, we'll know more soon! :)

[BIS_Adam 24]

Yeah, me too. Having a hard time with the music at present. Cuts out every mission - I did start a ticket on the feedback tracker and it got 'assigned' a few months back, so hopefully, we'll know more soon! :)

 

Will be fixed on devbranch. Soonâ„¢

[h a w a i i a n 511]

Aloha, may we please get access to the Night Vision Goggle's strap? maybe add them to the tools sample pack? I'm having trouble obtaining one for a ported hat and it would be nice to have the straps available so we can modify the mesh to fit on ported/modeled hats, modify/re-size  them because of major clipping issues only.

 

edit: I need the straps for a hat I ported and also need them for my own NVGs I am using for my addon.

[boss00521 27]

Just checked those AI FFV in offroad and this is just AWESOME and very fun to play with :) . Thank you BIS! Is it possible to reach same behavior from AI in building positions?

[Kydoimos 916]

 

Will be fixed on devbranch. Soonâ„¢

 

That's awesome news! Thanks for the update! :D

[bad benson 1733]

can GetMousePosition please be moved to stable? i don't know the details of it but shouldn't it be easy since it's jsut a simple "get" UI command? anyways. would be much appreciated.

[twisted 128]

.....

 

EDIT 2: I'm not convinced that the gradual erosion of Arma's fabled realism aspects in search of accessibility and a wider user base is such a great thing. There are numerous accessible and cinematic military shooters, but only one consumer grade military simulator. It runs the risk of alienating the long term fanbase who have supported, evangelised and enhanced Arma for years, in favour of the shooter crowd who will just move on to something newer and shinier after a couple of months. If you strip away the realism from Arma, you're just left with a large map sandbox shooter which is pretty much totally outclassed in terms of presentation/animations/audio/visuals/framerate/multiplayer by the latest generation of shooters. And with these AAA military titles, presentation/animations/audio/visuals/framerate/multiplayer seem to be what attracts users. All just my opinion of course.   

I've been thinking about what you posted for a bit now.

 

I can understand why BIS wants to attract a wider audience - aka money!!!!!. and money is good to have. But you make a very good point that 'accesibility' isn't necessarily the best way to go about it.

 

I'm not a game dev but i am in marketing and advertising. A brand needs to stand for something unique and the truer it realises that thing the greater its differentiation from the market and the greater is chance of success -  if it is offering what people want. I think Arma 3 definitely has market appeal. tons.

 

But there is, as you say, a need to refine the sexy bits that do catch peoples eyes, like visuals (dx 12, environment effects, dust), animation (please!), great audio (capturing the hugeness and complexity of sounds better), more fluid control (especially when indoors, ), more believable systems (like wounding), a kick ass multiplayer mode that is much easier to join (some mad holy grail I know),  etc.

 

that is time well spent for BIS. Making Arma 3 true to its philosophy. There are a few other games starting to see the potential here in open world or realism but no can touch Arma 3. Yet... Bis might be smartest to further the head start they have. Or if they really want to go to the dark side - to spend shitloads more money and time on bringing the aspects of the game up you mention to par with the games they want to be like. and they'd still need a kick ass multiplayer mode.

[SilentSpike 84]

Our designers are trying to use the Zeus (Curator) camera outside of Zeus and have stumbled across some issues that are being solved.

 

I thought this might be the case, assuming I understand what that entails exactly: Will the zeus camera be available for 3rd parties to use outside of zeus also?

[burkhar 47]

... Also, the animations, this set from "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_1" to "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_7" doesn't seem to play anymore for me. Glad to see it's not just me at least.

Hello!

I can confirm that player playMove "Acts_NATOCommanderArrival_Larkin_X" (X stands for 1 .. 7) is not working ATM. I will have to check it (by the way, I am working on review of all cutscenes in-game). Some cutscenes are not supposed to be used other way than via switchMove command - simply because there are no plausible transitions to these cutscene states. Yes we can interpolate to them from some fitting states, but as you would agree, it does not look good in certain cases. This is also part of my review - to decide, which animations would have the possibility to be played by playMove command and then configure them accordingly, so animations you mentioned would be also the case. I will have to do some research on that.

Thank you for your feedback and stay tuned.

[neokika 62]

I thought this might be the case, assuming I understand what that entails exactly: Will the zeus camera be available for 3rd parties to use outside of zeus also?

 

Totally! And you always could.

When creating the camera, instead off passing "camera", pass "curatorCam", in camCreate command.

[ericfr 0]

Missing audio Radio voices

 

[Roach_ 52]

Missing audio Radio voices

I've seen this one as well, and if I'm not mistaken, it mostly happens when the player isn't the team leader, right?

 

EDIT:

Never mind, it seems to happen the whole time.

[ericfr 0]

Still true with today patch

 

Simple repro, CR sit (5,5) you can hear only the first number

[zukov 490]

Added: Military Tablet

is an animated device tool?


 

[Kydoimos 916]

 

• Fixed: Conversations and music would repeat if the player saved the game (http://feedback.arma...ew.php?id=24456) 
• Fixed: playMusic could reset on alt-Tab (http://feedback.arma...ew.php?id=24584) 

 

Brilliant news! I'm so super happy to see this! :D Thanks, devs!

[roberthammer 582]

Nice that you added that Grenade model into those GL animations

 

but that 3GL reload animation is wrong > https://youtu.be/I39uOx-Kero?t=66

 

it should load like a M203 instead of GP25/30 front style

 

also ABR's reload animation is still way too fast

[Roach_ 52]

Nice that you added that Grenade model into those GL animations

 

but that 3GL reload animation is wrong > https://youtu.be/I39uOx-Kero?t=66

 

it should load like a M203 instead of GP25/30 front style

 

also ABR's reload animation is still way too fast

Arma 3 canon AK confirmed?

[R3vo 2654]

 

• Fixed: Conversations and music would repeat if the player saved the game (http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=24456) 
• Fixed: playMusic could reset on alt-Tab (http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=24584)
• Tweaked: Enabled UGL grenade reload animations
• Tweaked: TAVOR UGL animation

 

 

 

 

Awesome job, you even managed to get a grenade round animated even though you said it would be difficult ;)

[en3x 209]

UGL animations look so good now we a need a model of the grenade moving in and moving out of the GL while reloading. Cheers!

 

 

We've been considering this, but there are some technical concerns about performance impact (more draw calls). So we'll probably prototype that to investigate possibilities and evaluate plausibility. No promises or ETA, though, and please note it's more likely not happening.

 

 

Why not be consistent with other BI weapons in the game? Considering Zubr has 6 individually modeled and animated bullets that makes this explanation seems contradictory. Besides, detailed grenade in the Pilot LOD, less detailed one in the other resolution LODs is not going to be the end of the world, is it?

 

 

the 6 individual bullets may be part of the main body texture, in that case they wouldn't cause additional draw calls.

Maybe have it just for first person view/ in pilot view LOD but not for other soldiers ?

 

 

True , one GL nade won't make a dramatic FPS loss - unless the GL nade would have like 50k tris in the model heh

 

 

It's not that much about number of animations (although those should be considered, too). One thing is to mind the poly count with adding stuff to a gun's model. More importantly, I mentioned the draw calls. If we just add a grenade with a new texture, we also add a draw call just for the grenade's sake, which has a negative impact on performance. So a better idea is to include the grenade's texture to the gun's one, but that means adjusting the guns model, as well, which obviously takes some time. (You noted Zubr, which was made with all that in mind, contrary to the guns with UGLs.)

 

 

 

It's the additional draw call for the new grenade _CO, _SMDI, _NOHQ and _AS textures (i.e. adding an additional section to the models with UGL) that will have the performance impact - it's not to do with poly count. Basically there's no room to fit textures for a grenade on any of the existing UV layouts so it'd have to be added as a separate texture/UV set or do a whole bunch or rearranging.

 

^Locklear already said it^

 

The UGL rifles already have more sections than the standard rifles, owing to them having the red-dot quadrant sight that requires a texture for itself and a separate _CA alpha texture for the reticle and lens.

 

If I was BIS I'd consider making making a new 2048*1024 texture with a3\weapons_f\data\gl_holo_co.paa taking up one half (1024*1024) and adding the 40mm grenade textures to the other half. Then simply load the models up in O2, scale the quadrant sight's UV's by 0.5 in the U axis with the transformation centre set to the [0,0] UV coordinate, apply the new combined texture and UV map the grenade to the other half.

 

That way, the section count remains the same since all the GLs use the quadrant sight and already have that additional texture. Texel resolution remains the same for the weapons and the quadrant sight since you're not really doing any major UV-fuckery. And the only performance hit is that the texture file sizes are larger by a few MB - owing to that they're now a 2048*1024 rectangle instead of a 1024*1024 square - but this is still smaller than the standard 2048*2048 panels used for most assets in the game.

 

Obviously keep the old a3\weapons_f\data\gl_holo_co.paa texture set, since some addons might be using it and you wouldn't want to cause their UVs to stop matching the texture.

 

 

@da12thMonkey

You are right but still that nade don't need to be super detailed in the texture or having a special own textures

 

like you said pasting it into gl_holo_co.paa would work fine

 

 

Thanks for expanding further, I already had understanding of the technicalities of it. :) And yeah, I get that it takes some time, and that doing disproportional amount of work for a smaller detail like that is unrealistic, no doubt about it. :)

 

Zubr was probably a bad example, as it was probably done fairly late in the process, it was the first thing that came to mind with visible projectiles. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure we can dig out numerous assets that have an unnecessary amount of sections, and let's not even talk about assets coming from mods, people nuking the FPS with inconsiderate scripts and the amount of draw calls you can generate by merely having more of unique stuff in the scene.

 

Fretting over a single selection in the context of all that can seem insignificant, as you can take from my first post, but I understand your reasoning. Especially considering there are people who go wild over single FPS loss/gain. Apologies if I sounded harsh.

 

 

No offense taken, sir. :) I just wanted to point out that there's more to such decision than "let's do it boiz cuz it's cool". ;) We'll see what can be done.

 

 

I haven't tested it, but it might also be feasible to make a 2048x2048 texture from two 1024 textures and leave the lower half blank. Big solid blocks of one color take barely any memory whatsoever with .paa (.dds) / DXT compression.

 

Btw - for those who are scratching their heads what importance draw calls/ sections have - i made a Biki entry for it. If anyone has further input for the entry feel free to edit it, or contact me. I think sections/draw calls are propably the most overlooked factor by many modders

 

I'm glad to see that we hopefully got GL round animated.

 

MX UGL reload animates bolt open on the gun.Or if UGL is empty.

[R3vo 2654]

The radio chatter seems to be completely broken.

 

Here's a quick and dirty video:

 

https://youtu.be/tBlcxY-xO_U

[2nd ranger 282]

Nice that you added that Grenade model into those GL animations

 

but that 3GL reload animation is wrong > https://youtu.be/I39uOx-Kero?t=66

 

it should load like a M203 instead of GP25/30 front style

 

 

I remember a dev saying there was some sort of issue with animating the 3GL. Don't see why it's any different from the others, though. Nice work anyway, BIS.