TPW MODS: enhanced realism and immersion for Arma 3 SP.

[tpw 2313]

I'd be perfectly fine with suppression affecting heavily my aiming sway (as it already does anyway), in fact i still like how suppression work, but the only problem is when you are suppressed your movements become very slow (maximum fatigue as if you sprinted way too much). Any way to affect just aiming and not movement speed?

I'll just have to experiment with suppression and fatigue, to find a fatigue value that gives a visual indicator without making the player wade through molasses!

[maturin 12]

Maybe you could apply the effect that the AI suffers when shot? The devs say that maximum sway is applied in that case.

[tpw 2313]

I've been experimenting and have settled on fatigue of 0.6 when highly suppressed. This gives plenty of sway, breathing etc, but no severe slowdown.

@maturin if any of us knew how to control sway independently of fatigue then 98% of the fatigue complaint threads would disappear overnight!

[Guest]

New version frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

TPW MODS v20140719



Community Base addons A3

=================================================

We have also "connected" these pages to your account on Armaholic.

This means in the future you will be able to maintain these pages yourself if you wish to do so. Once this new feature is ready we will contact you about it and explain how things work and what options you have.

When you have any questions already feel free to PM or email me!

[OberSchutze 19]

The new download is missing the key file.

[heyvern69 22]

New feature suggestion:

Boats attached to docks at the water's edge.

Just like we have random PARKED cars. How about drivable boats that are RANDOMLY attached to boat docks, thus not all boat docks would get them. But they could come in handy when you're stranded without a vehicle and you're a little far from a town with parked cars.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

Another suggestion, tpw - tying the foggy breath feature to fatigue? Likely to be possible with the new features.

I did this (poorly) back in A2 with a foggy breath script and ACE. :)

[tpw 2313]

TPW MODS 20140720: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/481663/TPW_MODS_20140720.zip

Changes:

[CORE 1.04] Reduced CPU spiking when scanning for habitable houses.

[EBS 1.22] Reduced severity of player suppression - no slow motion movement when suppressed.

[sKIRMISH 1.14] Reduced CPU spiking when spawning groups.

---

I'm very pleased to announce that I have finally managed to track down and largely eliminate the irritating CPU spiking which caused a second or two of stuttering when spawning squads in TPW SKIRMISH.

Some of it was due to the overhead of a particular function in TPW CORE which scanned for habitable houses. This function is called by many TPW MODS scripts and I've made it so that only one instance can be called at a time, and spread the cpu load out with a judicious sleep command. This has led to a noticeable improvement in TPW MODS performance in general.

More importantly I have replaced the (as I discovered) very intensive bis_fnc_spawngroup with my own simplified random group spawning code which has considerably reduced stuttering when groups are spawned. There will always be an engine overhead for spawning AI and assigning waypoints, however you should notice a great improvement, particularly if your computer is a bit long in the tooth like mine!

@MikeJHunter: TPW MODS has never been released with a key, it's an SP mod which is not meant to be installed on a server.

@heyvern69: good idea re parked boats. My original ambient boat script had boats moving from pier to pier, I'll dig that old code up and see what I can come up with.

@CMcD: TPW FOG already ties foggy breath rate with fatigue. Would you like it more pronounced?

Edited July 21, 2014 by tpw

[CameronMcDonald 146]

@CMcD: TPW FOG already ties foggy breath rate with fatigue. Would you like it more pronounced?

Nah mate, I haven't checked it as of yet - I just had the idea before. If you've already tied it in with setFatigue, then that's so much the better.

Thanks for the update!

[sonsalt6 105]

New update available at withSIX. Download now by clicking:

[das attorney 857]

Mr T (pw),

Firstly - good work on the mod - fired it up the other day and really liked playing about in my own little mini-war.

I was really impressed with your old EBS implementation and was gutted when it broke due the the changes in penetration mechanics. I thought it was worth pursuing so I did some investigation and have got a system almost working for you. (if you want to revive it). I can't pretend to be an expert in how the simulation works, but I've managed to fix most of the problems you were experiencing.

New geometry model - Penetration sim in this game is very weird and I'm not convinced it works wholly as intended.... I think some of the issues with deflection was that the .bisurf defers to the model for thickness (definitely maybe) and the Flay geom model (which is still totally good work by Mr Flay) broke and then started to deflect shots all over the place. Also, the new model won't impede the unit firing out of it. :)

Invisible impacts - bullets and hand thrown grenades now don't generate dust clouds when they strike the geometry model. I've still got to sort out blooper rounds and vehicle weapons but I think I'm on the right path to fixing them. There's still an impact sound, but we can either remove it or replace it with something more atmospheric. (Something to compliment the sonic crack or some sort of supression sound effect maybe). Haven't thought this through - just putting it out there.

Also, there was a weird issue with 9mm and 45ACP where they bounced around like buggery, but I managed to fix it with a simple edit.

Explosions allowed - you shouldn't need to do any scripting to switch off the object when an explosion goes off.

Different components - just a little bonus - you could use them to determine how much weight of fire is directed to the unit and where it is coming from easily (might help out with scripting the reactions. Plus I found a couple of nice little tidbits which I'll go into another time.

A round striking multiple "fins" on the same geo-object can be filtered out if undesired, or you could include additional hits to add in a "quality of supressing fire" factor if desirable.

Let me know if you're interested to crowbar it in (got a bit more work to do to fix some odds and ends but it's working pretty nicely so far). The models are basic as I'm really shit at 3d modelling.

Here's some pics:

The objects:

Attached to unit:

Testing multiple objects to demonstrate how much/little it interferes with the flight of the ammo:

Some other variants with 4 fins/6 fins (not as useful imo, but I'll send them all over your way if you prefer them).

Ciao :)

[Guest]

New version frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

TPW MODS v20140720



Community Base addons A3

=================================================

We have also "connected" these pages to your account on Armaholic.

This means in the future you will be able to maintain these pages yourself if you wish to do so. Once this new feature is ready we will contact you about it and explain how things work and what options you have.

When you have any questions already feel free to PM or email me!

[tpw 2313]

Mr T (pw),

Firstly - good work on the mod - fired it up the other day and really liked playing about in my own little mini-war.

I was really impressed with your old EBS implementation and was gutted when it broke due the the changes in penetration mechanics. I thought it was worth pursuing so I did some investigation and have got a system almost working for you. (if you want to revive it). I can't pretend to be an expert in how the simulation works, but I've managed to fix most of the problems you were experiencing.

New geometry model - Penetration sim in this game is very weird and I'm not convinced it works wholly as intended.... I think some of the issues with deflection was that the .bisurf defers to the model for thickness (definitely maybe) and the Flay geom model (which is still totally good work by Mr Flay) broke and then started to deflect shots all over the place. Also, the new model won't impede the unit firing out of it. :)

Invisible impacts - bullets and hand thrown grenades now don't generate dust clouds when they strike the geometry model. I've still got to sort out blooper rounds and vehicle weapons but I think I'm on the right path to fixing them. There's still an impact sound, but we can either remove it or replace it with something more atmospheric. (Something to compliment the sonic crack or some sort of supression sound effect maybe). Haven't thought this through - just putting it out there.

Also, there was a weird issue with 9mm and 45ACP where they bounced around like buggery, but I managed to fix it with a simple edit.

Explosions allowed - you shouldn't need to do any scripting to switch off the object when an explosion goes off.

Different components - just a little bonus - you could use them to determine how much weight of fire is directed to the unit and where it is coming from easily (might help out with scripting the reactions. Plus I found a couple of nice little tidbits which I'll go into another time.

A round striking multiple "fins" on the same geo-object can be filtered out if undesired, or you could include additional hits to add in a "quality of supressing fire" factor if desirable.

Let me know if you're interested to crowbar it in (got a bit more work to do to fix some odds and ends but it's working pretty nicely so far). The models are basic as I'm really shit at 3d modelling.

Here's some pics:

The objects:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101800212/EBS_2.jpg

Attached to unit:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101800212/EBS_4.jpg

Testing multiple objects to demonstrate how much/little it interferes with the flight of the ammo:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101800212/EBS_1.jpg

Some other variants with 4 fins/6 fins (not as useful imo, but I'll send them all over your way if you prefer them).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101800212/EBS_3.jpg

Ciao :)

Wow this is bloody incredible. I was gutted when the original concept went tits up too, and this is some wonderful lateral thinking to overcome the shortcomings. Send the objects through and I'll do some crowbarring immediately.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me go on record as stating that people like Das Attorney are the reason I continue to contribute to this community.

Edited July 21, 2014 by tpw

[gliptal 25]

Wait, since when was EBS broken?

Yay!

[tpw 2313]

Wait, since when was EBS broken?

Yay!

It's not. The original EBS implementation used an invisible "shell" around each AI which registered bullet collisions for suppression. As the alpha progressed the shell concept became more and more problematic, and was replaced with a bullet centric system where each fired bullet checks around itself to see if it has passed near an AI. I'm very keen to get back to the "shell" concept using DA's awesome reimplementation because collision detection is a fundamental optimised low level game engine routine as opposed to the current script based one.

[gliptal 25]

Oh ok, so you are both referring to the older shell method. I thought I missed new issues with the newer bullet centric model.

Yay!

[das attorney 857]

Cool cool - I've worked out some code to transmit the data over the network so it should be MP compatible as well - I know you're not an MP fan but if I slowly and surely keep on at you then one day we'll get you playing online :D

I can't work out how to stop the impact sounds from playing when the geom object is shot though. The sound type is defined in the .bisurf file and then this references the appropriate effect from the CfgAmmo entry. You can set the bisurf entry to "" or "empty" but it still plays richochet sounds. I added a few new entries with dummy sounds under BulletBase and then tried referencing them but it didn't work.

Then I tried (just for the sake of testing) setting it "default" and then setting all the soundDefaultX[] entries under BulletBase to {"", 0, 1, 1}; so no sounds are played but (weirdly) there was still richochet sounds.

I suspect there is some sort of additional stage I've missed, but I went through the all-in-one config and I couldn't find any useful info.

Hand grenades pass through with no fuss and M203 rounds pass through okay, but they trip the dust effect as they go through (no other issues aside from that).

The other bug is cannon rounds. They go through the geo-object, but whatever explosion effects they have are tripped as they pass through. I don't know how much of an issue it would be in game, but it looks silly when you line up 50 geom-obs and fire a tank round through them.

I found the appropriate class (HitEffects) but changing the entries seems to do nothing. There's not much info on the internet, however I did find an old pastebin which shows ACE managed it in Arma 2. However, this does not seem to work in Arma 3 so maybe it is a new bug.

It might be to do with the "simulation" of the ammo as it interacts with the objects. Bullets are fine (which will probably be 95% of all round fired at units) but rounds simulated under "shotShell" seems not to work properly so far. I haven't tried missiles yet (standby for moar bugs there I would imagine).

// BulletBase

simulation = "shotBullet";
class HitEffects {
hit_foliage_dead = "ImpactLeavesDead";
hit_foliage_green = "ImpactLeavesGreen";
hit_foliage_green_big = "ImpactLeavesGreenBig";
hit_foliage_palm = "ImpactLeavesPalm";
hit_foliage_pine = "ImpactLeavesPine";
hitbuilding = "ImpactPlaster";
hitconcrete = "ImpactConcrete";
hitfoliage = "ImpactLeaves";
hitglass = "ImpactGlass";
hitglassarmored = "ImpactGlassThin";
hitgroundhard = "ImpactEffectsHardGround";
hitgroundsoft = "ImpactEffectsSmall";
hitman = "ImpactEffectsBlood";
hitmetal = "ImpactMetal";
hitmetalplate = "ImpactMetal";
hitplastic = "ImpactPlastic";
hitrubber = "ImpactRubber";
hitwater = "ImpactEffectsWater";
hitwood = "ImpactWood";
hitNothing = "ImpactNothing"; // <====== New class works fine!
};

// GrenadeBase

simulation = "shotShell";
class HitEffects {
object = "ImpactConcrete"; // <====== Overwriting existing class does bugger all.
vehicle = "ImpactMetal"; // <====== Overwriting existing class does bugger all.
hitNothing = "ImpactNothing"; // <====== New class does bugger all.
};

// ShellBase

simulation = "shotShell";
class HitEffects {
hitwater = "ImpactEffectsWaterRocket"; // <====== Same behaviour as GrenadeBase.
};

Anyway, I'll sleep on it and see if I can find a solution tomorrow.

Also, what size do you want the geo-obs to be? Currently, they're 2.5m tall in the centre and extend out to 4m from the player. The height at the "tips" is 1m.

Edit: looking at what I typed out, it suggests that it's nothing to do with class HitEffects for launcher grenades and shells. (Shellbase doesn't even have a definition for objects and vehicles so it must be defined somewhere else). Narrows it down I suppose! ;)

Edited July 21, 2014 by Das Attorney

[OberSchutze 19]

TPW MODS 20140720: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/481663/TPW_MODS_20140720.zip

Changes:

[CORE 1.04] Reduced CPU spiking when scanning for habitable houses.

[EBS 1.22] Reduced severity of player suppression - no slow motion movement when suppressed.

[sKIRMISH 1.14] Reduced CPU spiking when spawning groups.

---

I'm very pleased to announce that I have finally managed to track down and largely eliminate the irritating CPU spiking which caused a second or two of stuttering when spawning squads in TPW SKIRMISH.

Some of it was due to the overhead of a particular function in TPW CORE which scanned for habitable houses. This function is called by many TPW MODS scripts and I've made it so that only one instance can be called at a time, and spread the cpu load out with a judicious sleep command. This has led to a noticeable improvement in TPW MODS performance in general.

More importantly I have replaced the (as I discovered) very intensive bis_fnc_spawngroup with my own simplified random group spawning code which has considerably reduced stuttering when groups are spawned. There will always be an engine overhead for spawning AI and assigning waypoints, however you should notice a great improvement, particularly if your computer is a bit long in the tooth like mine!

@MikeJHunter: TPW MODS has never been released with a key, it's an SP mod which is not meant to be installed on a server.

@heyvern69: good idea re parked boats. My original ambient boat script had boats moving from pier to pier, I'll dig that old code up and see what I can come up with.

@CMcD: TPW FOG already ties foggy breath rate with fatigue. Would you like it more pronounced?

My first version I downloaded had a key on it that was TPW.bikey

[das attorney 857]

I think I've managed to sort out the explosive issue - wrote a little script to iterate through cfgAmmo so I can see what's what.

Need to test it properly, but it looks promising so far.

Will be in touch soon ;)

[SavageCDN 231]

Ladies and gentlemen, let me go on record as stating that people like Das Attorney are the reason I continue to contribute to this community.

**slow clap**

[gliptal 25]

I may have an idea to minimize troubleshooting and help mew users understand how to configure and use the pack. Some sort of automatic installer/unpacker and guided first configuration.

I'll start working on it as soon as I'm finished with this freaking Uni term.

Yay!

[tpw 2313]

I may have an idea to minimize troubleshooting and help mew users understand how to configure and use the pack. Some sort of automatic installer/unpacker and guided first configuration.

I'll start working on it as soon as I'm finished with this freaking Uni term.

Yay!

Great idea Gliptal. LEt me know what you need to make it happen. Good luck with Uni!

[heyvern69 22]

I'm still fairly confused on how to best bring my settings from old versions of TPW, to new versions of TPW. New versions of TPW have new options in the config file. So I manually re-do all my TPW settings every time, because a cut-and-paste of config data doesn't always work. Gliptal's java utility helps a lot, but it would be great if an auto-installer could check for a config file, grab my previous settings, and pass that on to the newest version.

-V

[gliptal 25]

You can easily do so if you always stay up to date: at every update my post has instructions on which lines to add where in the config file.

Yay!

[heyvern69 22]

Between all the new features, improvements, bug fixes, and installer advancements I just can't say it enough, you guys are frickin' AWESOME ! ! ! !:bounce3::yay: