Arma 3 Engine - What would have been a better option and what can we learn?

[dm 9]

The answer?

Crowdfunding.

Nope, not for a fair few years at least. While it may be an alternative, it is not the answer.

Look at games in development like Star Citizen, the ambition is huge and can only be realized given the funding model they've gone for.

Star Citizen is exactly the example of why crowd funding is a terrible idea (until it matures). Star Citizen is "feature creep: the game". They started with some reasonable goals - multiplayer, missions, content - then they got some money and they went bat shit insane - rolling multiple games into one. While I really want it to succeed, I can only see it failing to deliver on these insane promises they've made. The problem they have now? They've already promised all this shit AND they've taken money for it...

It can only end in tears.

[Harbinger2456 10]

this one is really easy to answer, the purpose of the no-mod policy is to systematically eliminate homebrewn competition to your sales of overpriced DLC of inferior volume and quality and to decrease the average lifecycle of your product so that you can shove the next marginally different major title up the numbed throat of your cheering customership, within 24 month. I would add, that according to this, EAs "reason" must be described as "voraciousness" but the truth is, EA is not a person, its a pretty huge and powerfull corporation which motivations may not be described best within the frame of human reasoning but in the frame of soulless moneymakingmachines submitted to shareholder interessts and dedicated only to suck as much money out of the pockets of teenagers as possible.

you are welcome.

Lol, THIS.

---------- Post added at 19:44 ---------- Previous post was at 19:41 ----------

"What would have been a better option?"

I really don't know.

"What can we learn?"

That a smallish company trying to balance financial constraints and make as much money as possible at the same time (i.e. appeal to the widest possible demographic) is never going to make the MilSim we all want to play.

Look at how many major requests by the community were ignored. I'm sure these were seen as necessary compromises given their monetary, time, personnel (and god knows what else)... etc constraints.

The answer?

Crowdfunding. Look at games in development like Star Citizen, the ambition is huge and can only be realized given the funding model they've gone for. It's the community that makes Arma worth playing. They put in a s**t ton of work for the love of it because they share a passion to play the game we all want to play. Given a decent engine, funds going to the real Arma developers and the Suits out of the way, it could happen. Arma with no compromises... think about it.

Cheers,

Heebiegeebie.

I Agree. Arma has the right idea, they just need a much better engine. To me, it would be CryEngine, and a marriage with DCS. :p

[mamasan8 11]

Lol, THIS.

---------- Post added at 19:44 ---------- Previous post was at 19:41 ----------

I Agree. Arma has the right idea, they just need a much better engine. To me, it would be CryEngine, and a marriage with DCS. :p

Cryengine, how does it handle flight? Seen any game use aerial vehicles? Can it handle it at all? Can it be programmed in and what would be the limitations? Lots of questions instantly which needs answers.

If you use in-house engine like BIS does, they know exactly what it can do and how to add stuff it can't do.

Basically its custom-made for Arma-series.

[Polygon 11]

Cryengine, how does it handle flight? Seen any game use aerial vehicles? Can it handle it at all? Can it be programmed in and what would be the limitations? Lots of questions instantly which needs answers.

If you use in-house engine like BIS does, they know exactly what it can do and how to add stuff it can't do.

Basically its custom-made for Arma-series.

realtime immersive (based on cryengine tech) shows aerial vehicles and their control is possible (at least from their marketing videos). however, creating an actual functional simulation system real-time is a different matter from including in a video. by the way, RTI may be already dead. nobody conquers the niche VBS has taken long ago.

[instagoat 133]

Crowdfunding is terribly risky, and not a solution unless you are fairly sure of your audience.

I think the problems the engine has are a relict of its development heritage, which seems to have been muddled and confusing. BI never licensed the engine out, as far as I know, and so there was no real pressure to provide easy access kit to the outside, which is slowing them down internally even now. I remember the devs talking a lot about improving internal documentation back when arma 3 started to be developed. They didn't even understand how the AI worked on the whole in 2010 because it was undocumented and the original writers were not part of the company anymore.

That DayZ is taking so long is also an indication to me that this engine is either a hell to develop on, or they do not have enough people, or there is some kind of organizational problem that stifles progress. I really don't know, but I'd like to understand why so much content that was shown working ingame in previous demos is not present in the release, and if it is present only partially.

Case in point, there are two identical opfor helmets with different names, half the uniforms do not conform to the colorway they are named of (sage combat uniform is using the normal multicam, black hexcam uniform actually uses the green colorway, broken officer uniforms for redfor and greenfor, effects that seem to be rather half finished on the whole both visually and in sound, etc.), there are tons of missing vehicles and dubious config streamlining that suggests to me an attempt of speeding up development rather than balancing (Such as all vehicles using identical weapon sets.), etc. There is a bug somewhere in the system.

Another thing I doubt other engines could do better is the AI, which actually still is a major problem for me. The performance is still bad, and the AI has stopped doing the taking cover and being prone (because people complained, I guess, don't know why), firing standing up all the time instead. And putting AI into close combat will kill your fps in no time. And the tanks get stuck a lot.

But, aside from untested and unproven concept engines, there are no systems in game technology right now that do what RV does. And I`d be rather opposed to the suggestion of a change, unless somebody else first shows that they have an engine that can do what RV can do, and do it sufficiently better to warrant licensing cost and the cost of changing your staff over to learning the new engine, building libraries, figuring out a new workflow, etc, etc...

[dayglow 2]

Look at the size of the dev teams Ubisoft throws Assasins Creed to have a yearly release.

[big_t 1]

.... BIS need to revamp the whole GUI and reduce the amount of keystrokes needed for playing the game. A good example on this point is Battlefield 3. You can do this actions without using a keystroke: http://battlefield.wikia.com/wiki/Commo_Rose . Ok, i know that we can do more thing in arma 3 than un BF, but the key point is that BIS need to make the interface more user-friendly, we cannot have a 2001 gui on a 2013 game..

This is a very important statement and needs to be addressed. It keeps coming up but gets swept under the table. I think too many people from the good old days are hanging on too tight to old ways of doing thing becuase they are used to it so they think everyone else is used to it. It needs a fresh look from an uninterested source. (only interested in money)

Hire an outside source to revamp the gui in every way. It's archaic and plays like it was designed as an afterthought by a game code programmer, not a gui designer, which I'm sure it was way back in the infancy of OP flashpoint. The problem is: it apparently hasn't changed much since then.

T

[Harbinger2456 10]

Cryengine, how does it handle flight? Seen any game use aerial vehicles? Can it handle it at all? Can it be programmed in and what would be the limitations? Lots of questions instantly which needs answers

Oh yeah, we had mods make a Mustang and an F22? jet ( something like that ) way back in the days of Crysis Wars. They fly about as good as Arma jets ( which isn't much in my opinion ). Vehicles are about as good as Arma as well. The engine is also actually capable of VERY large landscapes, but they have it locked out in the engine ( and never did unlock it ). I don't think they really wanted to mess with large landscapes. They just wanted small islands with a lot of objects and foilage. Engine capable, game team not. There are some pretty good mod tools as well, but a LOT of stuff "disappeared" when the Crysis forums were changed for C2. A lot of modders got pissed off and left. Haven't seen them since. Amazingly, a lot of mods seem to have "disappeared" from the forums as well. Its like Crytek didn't want to acknowledge CryEngine 2 anymore, even though a lot of people thought CE3 was just a gutted console version of it. Money talks. Even Yerli, the owner, who loved to chat with people during Crysis Wars, also quietly disappeared. Now they've changed their forums again, and its a ghost town. Good luck even finding a mod to talk to. The spammers have basically taken the place over. If you want to buy a stove over the internet, Crysis forums is a good place to find it!

[Zatan13th 10]

BF4 with modtools?

yeah, I smell something like C&C3 modtools.

[mmaruda 20]

The latest Cryengine is used to develop a milsim for the US Army (Realtime Immersive). It looks impressive and does have a 3d realtime editor.

My personal choice for an engine would be Outerra http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfo3uGPNLd0

It's pretty much the most impressive piece of software I have seen to date.

[BL1P 35]

this one is really easy to answer, the purpose of the no-mod policy is to systematically eliminate homebrewn competition to your sales of overpriced DLC of inferior volume and quality and to decrease the average lifecycle of your product so that you can shove the next marginally different major title up the numbed throat of your cheering customership, within 24 month. I would add, that according to this, EAs "reason" must be described as "voraciousness" but the truth is, EA is not a person, its a pretty huge and powerfull corporation which motivations may not be described best within the frame of human reasoning but in the frame of soulless moneymakingmachines submitted to shareholder interessts and dedicated only to suck as much money out of the pockets of teenagers as possible.

you are welcome.

+1

Gets my vote for post of the Year.

[Harbinger2456 10]

BF4 with modtools?

yeah, I smell something like C&C3 modtools.

Hopefully, someday EA will release them. I've seen the stats on Frostbite 3 now, and its amazing. Supposedly it can span 8 CPU cores. It was made to work with Mantle. If you have a Radeon GCN card, its going to be awesome. I'm not really a fan of Battlefield, but if we could adapt this engine for large scale simulations...

[FredAirland 14]

Being a pro developer I believe most of the people underestimate the complexity of a game engine such as Arma, I think it has a great potential.

If I were Bistudio I would open up more parts of the engine to allow to create C++ plugins and shaders, not only using scripting, and professionally made mods or full games (such as the take on series).

Given the sheer size of the community they could not only decuplicate their number of developers at no cost and possibly hire the better ones (Unity3d has 2 million users), but also pick and chose the best works to integrate in future releases....

[ShotgunSheamuS 1]

I too have been at this point wondering the same, and I guess it really is more a matter of frustration, but to be honest, to a degree, I am just learning to accept ARMA to be what it is. We will have popping tectures and models, and though it can be dealt with, it will probably depend largely on a modder hacking away on a game, and we will have the horrible mid range texture where most of the ranged contact happens, and we will be stuck with the horrid parralax mapping that we can't disable without forfeiting the landscape geometry and grass rendering distasnce, and there are so many other issues, that made me wish they would do a new engine, but then I just learnt to accept it. Not saying I am happy accepting it, but ARMA really has very little competetion, right now, I think Project reality is pretty much it as far a realistic propper team orientated tactics go.

But that all said, switching to another engine isnt the answer. No other engine is made to do what ARMA does, thats been made clear, so it needs to be inhouse, but instead of rewriting the whole engine at once, maybe do it piece by piece. Like what Infinity ward has done. They had rewritten so much code for Call of Duty, that it no longer runs on Quake 3 engine, it is a completely rewritten engine, and has no traces of the Q3 engine anymore. (So they claim, I cant be sure of it myself but making a point here). So maybe BIS need to rewrite parts of their engine. Focus on the core of it, like hardware utilization etc, and then later the other parts. Ideally in my opinion, they could make seperate franchises or games, or even expansion packs, where there is emphasis on these parts being rewritten and reworked.

So they can do this in two ways, for example, for one, they could make A4, but A4 initial release could be focussed on the core basics, engine and infantry as in depth as possible, then after that they can work on the expansions which will focus on other various portions, like armour, helo's, jets, naval, diving etc. Each one of these will be made to focus on the detailed aspects of each. or option two, they could make seperate games/sims focussed on each individual core aspect, like take TOH for example, and use the code from TOH for the helo portion of the game, maybe even make TOH a module you can load up with ARMA, like you would a mod. This will push sales for these other games, and even though one wouldn't necessarily play TOH itself, they could still reap the rewards and reworked flight model from TOH. Ofcourse this will be a pricey way to go, and incompatability issues will be prevalent, but hey, hardcore fans would do it if it meant better realism right?

Also, I think some technologies can be better improved or even replaced. For example the soft shadows are great but have their downsides, most notably the jaggies on the shadows itself, now I have seen that there's some new feature in DX11 that fixes this, so the devs should look into that, also parralax mapping should be scrapped, replace it with tessalation rather, will do a better job and look better! but at the very least, just allow us to disable parralax mapping. But there are other things that can be improved or replaced by something better, and this will most likely require reworking the engine anyways.

Lastly, open up the engine and game more... Sometimes i see a potentially great idea or mod, but the modder can only do so much mentioning the limitations they have to work with, and hope for a fix from the devs side.

Now, on the other hand, my faith is slowly being restored by the devs, I know they are a small amount of people working on something this big, but when I see things appear in ARMA that I was not expecting (like rainbows and new rain effect), I smile big =) The devs have not given up now that they got ARMA out the door on launch. So I am giving them the benefit of the doubt that there is still much to be done. Also the AI, it appears AI has been improved quite a bit, by no means am I calling it perfect, but I have been in situations where AI were doing the right things, in fact, so well i easily mistook it for human players. but, there are still some occasions where they are superhuman -sigh- but AI is improving, and I am liking that! Also performancewise, definately improving as well. Still not utilizing what I feel it should but frame rates are getting better and closer to acceptable. So it is getting there, and I have decided I will not pass judgement until the devs call quits and officially call it completed.

[nodunit 397]

Being a pro developer I believe most of the people underestimate the complexity of a game engine such as Arma, I think it has a great potential.

So true, I keep hearing about how awesome the cry engine would be or something else, I might have agreed as far as visuals go pre arma 3 but not anymore.. Besides that is also what one can do, not just in the box but out of it, the limits that can be pushed in RV tend to be rather astounding, and its potential only grows the further it goes. Granted it has flaws, what game engine doesn't, all are tailored for their own purposes. I like to think of RV being an old simulator engine in modern day, you can see a few rough edges but it does quite a bit more than most.

Hell even the comparison of vehicles to cry engine aren't fair, granted Arma may not have the best vehicle simulation but it has varying levels of armor thickness that can be penetrated by projectiles pending caliber, you can take the engine out rather than the whole vehicle, kill the occupants inside and even influence its driving. By comparison you can either blow the vehicle up or MAYBE pop the tires off...the closest thing to influencing vehicle turning that I've seen recently would be GTA5 but that has a level of dedication to vehicles specifically.

[aoshi 1]

not theory, not conspiracy ;)

it's pure fact :p http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/global-pc-gaming-hardware-sales-shrug-off-pc-market-decline/

even analytics confirm :cool:

LoL

I fall in it damm...

[noubernou 77]

Almost everything in the engine is good, or good enough, or capable of being improved.

The single biggest drawback right now, in my opinion, is the terrain engine. It is woefully outdated and there is a lot of new technology that BIS could implement into it. I am not saying they should replace it, but they should be looking at what other studios are doing in terms of non-static terrain grids, tessellation, rendering occlusion, etc. so that larger terrains with larger view distances can be brought into the engine.

[aoshi 1]

Almost everything in the engine is good, or good enough, or capable of being improved.

The single biggest drawback right now, in my opinion, is the terrain engine. It is woefully outdated and there is a lot of new technology that BIS could implement into it. I am not saying they should replace it, but they should be looking at what other studios are doing in terms of non-static terrain grids, tessellation, rendering occlusion, etc. so that larger terrains with larger view distances can be brought into the engine.

distance wise, arma is the top fps.

[noubernou 77]

distance wise, arma is the top fps.

It still lacks many features that should be in there though.

You can not have a 40x40km map with good terrain detail because of how the engine handles the terrain system.

[Ranwer135 308]

Easy solution:

If you dont want to play the game then dont buy it. Also, the burning furniture and that other stuff you mentioned is in Minecraft.

But for me, I will stick with the game and its features.

And about the engine "PhysX" and "Frostbite":

The 2 are completely different engines, if you replace "PhysX" with "Frostbite", you will be seeing alot of Crap coming up on your screen (and If it runs, it wont be pretty).

There is also copyright issues with the both of them, BF3 will live on Frostbite while ArmA 3 will live on PhysX.

(BTW: I have heard rumors that there is a mod coming soon that will allow players to shoot out of the vehicle, could be "ACE")

Anyway, so if your not happy with the game, dont buy it. But in my perspective, it is a great game.

Also, give Bohemia Interactive and its game a chance to develope, after all the game has just been released and hopefully these updates will improve it.

Ranwer

[metalcraze 290]

Yes. For starters BIS should at least increase the power of parallax bumpmapping because the close terrain is extremely flat.

And mid-range and distant terrain needs sharper textures with some kind of bumpmapping. It isn't something that an engine cannot do now but will improve the looks drastically.

And same goes for objects in the game too. Why parallax is for ground only? Why not use it on rocks and walls? It will improve the looks greatly at almost no performance cost.

Then there's ambient occlusion which an engine can do but which seems to be broken and not working in ArmA3 despite an option being there. Ambient occlusion too will eliminate a lot of flatness from the terrain.

First person view-body and weapon optics need some tessellation. Obviously tessellation is a no go gameplay-wise if BIS is pushing for DX10 spec minimum but it won't do any harm in 1st person and will eliminate all the ugly edges of your own soldier when freelooking at minimum performance cost.

Edited October 5, 2013 by metalcraze

[FredAirland 14]

Then there's ambient occlusion which an engine can do but which seems to be broken and not working in ArmA3 despite an option being there. Ambient occlusion too will eliminate a lot of flatness from the terrain.

Could you please elaborate more? How does ambient occlusion affects flatness?

[fn_Quiksilver 1636]

Easy solution:

If you dont want to play the game then dont buy it.

Ranwer

It is possible to like something, and also be critical of it.

To love a game does not mean to ignore its shortcomings, refrain from future improvement suggestions or criticize weaknesses.

[Flash Thunder 10]

Almost everything in the engine is good, or good enough, or capable of being improved.

The single biggest drawback right now, in my opinion, is the terrain engine. It is woefully outdated and there is a lot of new technology that BIS could implement into it. I am not saying they should replace it, but they should be looking at what other studios are doing in terms of non-static terrain grids, tessellation, rendering occlusion, etc. so that larger terrains with larger view distances can be brought into the engine.

I agree and second would be for them to implement deferred renderer so we can have many times the light sources and perhaps all light sources colliding with objects.

[nodunit 397]

Could you please elaborate more? How does ambient occlusion affects flatness?

Visual perception, shadows add that extra dimension and with AO grass and other clutter would have a shadow of sorts. It helps distinguish it from the base as well.