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iOGC_Broadsword

AI and player numbers in A3 compared with A2.

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AI and player numbers in A3 compared with A2.

One of the main things that drew me to the ArmA series was the huge battles both with Ai and human players. I read on Reddit a rather disconcerting comment from Dean Hall that A3 will support less human and ai players than A2? Have Bi sacrificed a huge play field and huge battles simply for a pretty game?

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Whats the general feeling on Hall's comments here?

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You could just have tried it ingame. :rolleyes:

ArmA3 has higher required specs than ArmA2, but there is still no hard limit. You can plonk down as many units as you want, however you need a better PC to get equal performance. Considering ArmA2 is nearly 4 years old that is not something to be suprised about, not many people have the same PC as 4 years ago.

DayZ supports more, but sacrifices in other areas, its better designed to do DayZ(which required more of a rewrite), while ArmA3 is better designed to do ArmA3.

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It would be nice to see somebody from BI confirm the actual numbers the game supports. I'd hate to see game features watered down to add eye candy tbh.

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Sorry, but pushing game new features hard on old architecture, trying to achieve at first perfection but later cutting on features - i's like it is. It would require rewrite of the engine - and 64 bit architecture isn't some future - it is as modern as few years ago it hit the market.

BTW Is there anybody that play A3 on Celeron or Pentium II?

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It would be nice to see somebody from BI confirm the actual numbers the game supports. I'd hate to see game features watered down to add eye candy tbh.

144 group's with infinite number of units.

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144 group's with infinite number of units.

144 groups per side. :)

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I wonder if there's any PC that will be capable of handling such amount of units... Arguably numbers are the same but probably more AI - more FPS drops compared to A2, so or RV4 is showing its age or it is multi-core and architecture thing?

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In singleplayer, my old big ArmA2 SP missions work as good if not even better (they seem to work better) when played with AiA-mod in ArmA3. The new ArmA3 vehicles are (at least currently) more performance heavy (especially choppers), but as amount of AI, things look as good as before for me.

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You could just have tried it ingame. :rolleyes:

ArmA3 has higher required specs than ArmA2, but there is still no hard limit. You can plonk down as many units as you want, however you need a better PC to get equal performance. Considering ArmA2 is nearly 4 years old that is not something to be suprised about, not many people have the same PC as 4 years ago.

DayZ supports more, but sacrifices in other areas, its better designed to do DayZ(which required more of a rewrite), while ArmA3 is better designed to do ArmA3.

The problem is that higher specs has become a horizontal or diagonal measurement rather than a straight vertical measurement in terms of CPU performance. It's not about the ghz or raw speed as much as it's about the amount of cores and how efficiently you can use those cores. It seems that ArmA is still trying to follow a vertical, higher speed over more cores approach rather than taking into account how technology is moving away from single core and even dual core cpu's.

With that in mind, I fully agree with Rockets statement that ArmA 3 supports less AI and less human players. It only takes 2+ players and a few AI squads for performance to start dropping dramatically. You say that ArmA 3 is better designed to do what ArmA 3 does, what exactly is that? Doesn't that require multiple players and multiple AI entities? I don't think ArmA is a scenic simulator where the point is to just walk around as a single entity and observe the landscape. I would say DayZ and ArmA 3 share the same fundamental and technical requirements, but on different levels.

To say that ArmA 3 is better designed to do what ArmA 3 needs to do is something of a fallacy unless you consider it to be a scenic simulator where the number of simultaneous entities and players has no impact on the game.

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NeMeSiS, what I can run on my machine and what others can is not what I am asking, apart from that I would expect with A3 that control of ai would be directed more towards the server load than individual machines. So adding a shed load of ai to my editor would prove nothing, as to what a server is able to handle before it drops bellow 5 FPS! that's another question.

"ArmA3 is better designed to do ArmA3" that just makes no sense at all. I was asking for what the general feeling on what Hall's comments indicate to the playability of A3, not what I can or cannot do on my own :rolleyes:

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Maybe there are some bigger changes to DayZ standalone than to ArmA 3, maybe not but I think that Rocket forgot the both are still in development.

While DayZ is 2.5 and doesn't have such eye candy visual fidelity as A3 have - it's been optimized to handle more AI and players - meaning it is possible to do on A3 engine too. Making the engine more friendly for multi-core and 64 bit is another argument to go.

Question is not if BIS would want to make such drastic changes to the engine but if they have time and resources. Honestly, BIS is supporting their games after release, I would wait for many features and fixes years after the release - even such big as this one, even if this means re-downloading the whole game off Steam.

But then RV5 would be ready to go in next 5-6 years.

Edited by fragmachine
typo

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Maybe there are some bigger changes to DayZ standalone than to ArmA 3, maybe not but I think that Rocket forgot the both are still in development.

While DayZ is 2.5 and doesn't have such eye candy visual fidelity as A3 have - it's been optimized to handle more AI and players - meaning it is possible to do on A3 engine too. Making the engine more friendly for multi-core and 64 bit is another argument to go.

Question is not if BIS would want to make such drastic changes to the engine but if they have time and resources. Honestly, BIS is supporting their games after release, I would wait for many features and fixes years after the release - even such big as this one, even if this means re-downloading the whole game off Steam.

But then RV5 would be ready to go in next 5-6 years.

it hasn't been "optimised" at all, every thing that matters is now server side.

its no longer ARMA at all, its a MMO that lloks like ARMA

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Ahh, you're right - my bad! Im not really into DayZ. But I still hope that devs will make changes and improve the engine alot.

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the Dayz solution is the ultimate for BIS in anti hacker, the client can't change anything except the postion and actions of its player.

but by that same reason the game becomes absolutely unmodable, since the difference between a mod and a hack is the intent

i hope the cap on players dosn't drop below 130 odd (at which point the servers crash if any player desyncs), because i love the shacktac vids :D

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If any of the readers of this thread can please point to promises made by Bohemia regarding any corresponding improvements to the netcode (in parallel with the great graphics) for the full release of Arma 3 then please post them up here.

The [Alpha/etc/hope]/care package disclaimer out of the way; do you really think they can up the performance of this game by full release? Or will it always be smallish scale skirmishes situated somewhere or another on a huge and fantastically realised environment?

Always hoped this combined arms type game would've come to fruition about now. As one of our community members pointed out - most of us would gladly accept the ability to pitch far more units/players onto the field at the cost of having the same graphics as A2.

DH was most certainly not disparaging Arma 3 btw. But it's quite telling what he said; and it has confirmed what many posters have asked.. but ofc they've been shot down by the unquestioning elements you get with any game. Anybody remember WarZ?

Edited by SaL_iOGC

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the intergration with steamworks should help abit on the stability front

Paradox did the same thing, and aprently some of the stuff steam offers improves netcode (something to do with a single build in use etc)

its not the graphics that are the problem, thats all handled client side, its all the stuff the server does (and the bandwidth it needs)

for example Planetside 2 has more players. BUT they use a MMO setup on their own custom created servers.

ARMA runs on dedicated servers, in a similar way to games that normally only have at the most 64 players, and no AI (which in ARMA the server handles)

i suspect that much like BF3, the reason player count will drop is going to be PHYSX (or in BF3's case destructible terrain).

Things like Headless client, running in LAN with the sever, but on a seprate computer, can help, but at the end of the day the sever has to be able to do all it needs to plus talk to potential 130 PC's at the same time

until server techs increase in power for reasonble cost, along with bandwidth, the game itself is probally not going to get much larger

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I would be interested to hear a comment from someone official within Bi on what Hall has said. Either a confirmation or denial that A3 will support less ai or players than every previous version of ArmA. Although I doubt there will be as his comments pretty much say A3 is not as good as A2 for doing what everyone wants it to do, support many players and have lots of things to shoot at. Pretty damning comments from an employee.

With regard to dedi box specs we have a pretty good setup, albeit we had to go to Germany to get it, nobody in the UK could match spec for price. We have tinkered with headless client and I am hoping that Bi have been looking into integration into the game properly rather than using it as a dirty fix to a very important issue, lots of things to shoot at :cool:

Edited by iOGC_Broadsword

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Very good question indeed. I don't want a BI employee to tell us what is hardcoded, but rather what is "realistic".

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