The urgent debate about headless client in A3 (and HC general info)

[Chief86 1]

This is all good news to hear. We actually have a member that has an unused steam acct with arma 3 currently on it so that works out well.

Once again thank you so much for the responses and I'm glad I better understand what is going on now.

[lordprimate 159]

This thread is just too disappointing. This is just sad. hopefully in the future we will not have to buy a second copy of the game just to get good performance...

Edited April 22, 2013 by Lordprimate

[Mirudes 1]

The engine simulates itself to death, a rice bag falls 200 miles away and while the player will never see it or hear it, it is still simulated on all localities.

By talking about the bag of rice, I imagine a plane coming from a long distance at the players. Anyway, this entity used to be a human player or a artificial intelligence. The AIs used to be server sided and transmitted (*). Of course, destroyed items used to be transferred to all clients, that's just how a multiplayer mission works. Beside that, if you have players 200 miles away from you in the same MP-mission, you are doing something wrong. The purpose of MP is to play together but not have some Rambos doing the mission in a A-10 all alone. The developers could create a limited gaming zone (like a event horizon) for this purpose, known from other games. In my humble opinion, the example with that "bag of rice" is wrong and is always abused from some flyboys (which are often the server-admins).

I don't want that this situation becomes more worse than it already is. The AIs are just failing in mplayer missions. I have observed a squad of AT-soldiers not attacking tanks at all. I am talking about basic function that was still working in Operation Flashpoint (1). The AT-soldiers didn't attacked tanks in A2. For that I don't need BIS, A2 or A3.

(*) I understand that you could use "sleeping capacities" on other machines for this task.

But I don't want to share my hardware ressources with players on the servers, only that this one server-admin-flyboy can abuse the Headless Client for his own purpose.

We are talking about a non-functioning AI, but not about a sack of rice.

Edited April 16, 2013 by Mirudes

[galzohar 31]

If people already go such long ways to offload AI to other cores/machines/etc, I really don't see why a multi-threaded solution can't work. Sure it might be more difficult (as currently all you have to do is change locality of the units and use standard netcode, rather than re-writing significant amounts of code), but in the end it will make things much easier for the server admin, and possibly even the mission maker. In the end, letting some other process handle AI and send the information through the network isn't all that different (conceptually, as in practice it would still require new code to be written) than letting another thread (or threads) handle the AI.

Slave server that can run on a completely different machine sound nice, but IMO only as an added feature, and not as a replacement for simple multi-threaded AI. And, of course if it's fully supported and doesn't take a player slot (and thus can't actually play), it also should not require a game license nor Steam.

In any case, just the fact that a lot of AI processing completely cripples the server is an issue in itself. There is no reason that messages sent across the network would get stuck simply because the CPU dedicates too much time for AI path finding. Same goes for graphical FPS going down on single player or hosted environments when the server is overloaded with AI.

[zorrobyte 30]

I don't want that this situation becomes more worse than it already is. The AIs are just failing in mplayer missions. I have observed a squad of AT-soldiers not attacking tanks at all. I am talking about basic function that was still working in Operation Flashpoint (1). The AT-soldiers didn't attacked tanks in A2. For that I don't need BIS, A2 or A3.

A possible issue of why it's so hard to dev RV AI is it uses FSM or Finite State Machines for the AI which is quite old school:

http://aigamedev.com/open/article/fsm-age-is-over/

Making changes to FSMs are expensive, time consuming and bug ridden. A new standard is decision trees in which you can read about in this book

Edited May 8, 2013 by zorrobyte

[lordprimate 159]

oops delete, multiple pages open posted in wrong thread.. derp

Edited April 22, 2013 by Lordprimate

[stevos758 10]

I just found this thread after another post I made.

So as of this time we can not run a headless client offline unless we have a second copy of steam?

[james_manring 1]

Has anyone found a solution to having multiple Headless Clients running on the Dedicated Server Machine without running multiple copies of Steam and owning several copies of the license for ArmA3?

@Dwarden: Is it still the plan to not allow multiple clients regardless of being Headless? I remember reading that you said it was pointless to create a Headless .EXE before because the engine only recognizes 2 types, Dedicated and Client. Well now I think you have a good reason. Please create a Headless Client .EXE that is locked to only being a Headless Client, therefore incapable of allowing someone to play as a normal client and is also not bound to Steam so multiple copies can log into a server concurrently. This would not require you to recode the engine to have a new client type, but would greatly improve the lives of us that run servers for large communities.

Barring that can you please put out instructions for how to run multiple copies of Steam to validate multiple licenses on a single host? I very much want to run 3 Headless Clients localhost to the Dedicated Server. Not being able to easily do this with Steam makes purchasing multiple copies a rather unsatisfactory solution.

Edited November 24, 2013 by James_Manring

[Dwarden 1125]

i may have another solution to the HCproblem ... but that needs some testing

[Sphinx111 10]

Say the word when you need some testing done on a workaround, we're already loving the improvements brought by Headless Client. If there's any way to make it better (multiple localhost clients would be fantastic), then we've got 20+ guys who can test, as well as ~6 tech-savvy dudes who can interpret and filter any bugs for reporting upwards.

[james_manring 1]

i may have another solution to the HCproblem ... but that needs some testing

As Sphinx111 says, Task Force Mohegan is at your disposal. Getting NDAs signed should not be a problem if that is needed. Several of our guys have been developers & QA for video games, or worked with VBS in the military. My Skype contact is accurate and you are welcome to use it or pm me if you would like to utilize us.

[omerc 10]

As Sphinx111 says, Task Force Mohegan is at your disposal. Getting NDAs signed should not be a problem if that is needed. Several of our guys have been developers & QA for video games, or worked with VBS in the military. My Skype contact is accurate and you are welcome to use it or pm me if you would like to utilize us.

Woah. Only in ARMA

[spanishsurfer 58]

Our HC keeps getting kicked due to battleye not updating on the HC. How do I fix this?

[Dwarden 1125]

update the files manually from BE website

[spanishsurfer 58]

update the files manually from BE website

yes we know how to fix it manually, I wanted to know how to have this done automatically. sorry I should have specified that .