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krazikilla

Priority of Bugfixing and features of BIS

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Customer service. I understand that it's not something people who deal with video game companies are used to.

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This entitlement attitude with many members has to stop. You are 1 customer out of perhaps hundreds of thousands. Why do you think you're entitled to anything more than the game + updates?
Ages back (prior to the alpha), Java support was stated by the devs as one of the features of ArmA 3; it is still not in. Seeing as there has been no recent information released on the subject, I'd say he's damn well entitled to ask what's up.

I've simply resorted to cautioning everybody I know against purchasing the game, despite the fact that many of us have well over 1000 hours logged on the previous titles.

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And I'm not even asking for Java support. I'm asking if the developers still plan on implementing it or not. All it takes is a yes or a no. Which is the same kind of thing this thread is asking for. Just for BIS to be a little bit more engaged with the community.

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I'd say he's damn well entitled to ask what's up.
No, he's not (damn well!) entitled to a personal answer from the devs. Lots of things get nixed during the course of development (of anything ever), or they get pushed back to another date. That's life. Expecting working professionals to spend significant amounts of their days answering angry forum posts by random, anonymous ranters is fantasy. You have a job with real pressures? You want to constantly take time off and stop working on those important things just to deal with the whining, implacable bs that fills a lot of these complaint threads, knowing 100% that all you'll get in reply is even greater and more heated whining because you can't give any solid response that people will accept? Yeah, devs don't want to either.

Let's be clear: the game is what the game is. It may grow somewhat with features over the next year, but it's mostly finished now, bugs aside (which if you've got 100000 hours of playtime in previous titles, you know many will never get fixed or will be replaced by new bugs when they are). If devs don't hand-deliver personal replies to your queries, it's probably because your desired feature is on a backburner and there's nothing really more to say other than "release TBA". That's how a lot of game studios work with releases nowadays, "TBA". You should be used to it by now.

I've simply resorted to cautioning everybody I know against purchasing the game, despite the fact that many of us have well over 1000 hours logged on the previous titles.
Why? SP is fairly rock-solid, and most people play SP. The campaign is also getting released finally, and there's a decent stock of missions already available, but no, the community thanks you for your "support".
And I'm not even asking for Java support. I'm asking if the developers still plan on implementing it or not. All it takes is a yes or a no. Which is the same kind of thing this thread is asking for. Just for BIS to be a little bit more engaged with the community.
How's "maybe" sound? The second they start giving you their expectations (which any developer knows is a very rough guess), then they get held up to those as though they were set in stone on Mount Sinai. Probably this is not a core priority, and as such no one's paying much attention to it or it's still be considered but hasn't been fully committed to yet.

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Pretty sure you're the angriest person in this thread, dude.

And "maybe" would sound real good if it came from anyone in an official position.

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How's "maybe" sound? The second they start giving you their expectations (which any developer knows is a very rough guess), then they get held up to those as though they were set in stone on Mount Sinai. Probably this is not a core priority, and as such no one's paying much attention to it or it's still be considered but hasn't been fully committed to yet.
The devs have already learned their lesson not to even forecast these things, considering that they've sometimes managed to miss their own forecasts (can you say the campaign?), and devs have already done "less-than-maybes" (because of a fear that even a "maybe" will be stretched into "yes" by people :rolleyes: ) about... well, a bunch of things that people complained about.

Hell, there's no way that the devs haven't learned "don't forecast anything" from watching DayZ standalone PR and Rocket's travails.

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They've already forecasted a ton of features that aren't in the game. How is not clarifying their intentions helping anything?

I would also like to clarify that I am not mad, just confused as to what the overall strategy is here.

Edited by roshnak

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Why? SP is fairly rock-solid, and most people play SP. The campaign is also getting released finally, and there's a decent stock of missions already available, but no, the community thanks you for your "support".
If the developers ship a game without a promised feature, and then fail to provide any status on that feature, then I am absolutely going to do my best to dissuade people from purchasing it.

BI could have either

a) Not promised features

b) Provided the features they promised

or

c) Given solid feedback as to why those features aren't in

Doing anything else is a flagrantly dishonest tactic to boost sales. It is scummy, and should be called out.

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If the developers ship a game without a promised feature, and then fail to provide any status on that feature, then I am absolutely going to do my best to dissuade people from purchasing it.

BI could have either

a) Not promised features

b) Provided the features they promised

or

c) Given solid feedback as to why those features aren't in

Doing anything else is a flagrantly dishonest tactic to boost sales. It is scummy, and should be called out.

Read chortles' post:

The devs have already learned their lesson not to even forecast these things, considering that they've sometimes managed to miss their own forecasts (can you say the campaign?), and devs have already done "less-than-maybes" (because of a fear that even a "maybe" will be stretched into "yes" by people :rolleyes: ) about... well, a bunch of things that people complained about.

Hell, there's no way that the devs haven't learned "don't forecast anything" from watching DayZ standalone PR and Rocket's travails.

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Devs are already on record as regretting even saying as ambiguous as "oh <insert here> would be nice to have" in the past.

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Wouldn't it be prudent of them to simply add "This is not a planned feature" to that statement? Seems like that would solve any issue with anyone taking their statements the wrong way. Which is not what this thread is about.

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If the developers ship a game without a promised feature, and then fail to provide any status on that feature, then I am absolutely going to do my best to dissuade people from purchasing it.

BI could have either

a) Not promised features

b) Provided the features they promised

or

c) Given solid feedback as to why those features aren't in

Doing anything else is a flagrantly dishonest tactic to boost sales. It is scummy, and should be called out.

So you're punishing the company for being more open (and liberal) about their plans than other companies at the outset, basically. Let them buy from DICE, since they're so much more open. Daily development updates, weekly SPOTREPS, monthly SITREPS, constant dev interaction with the community (though not what you, personally demand, it's there)... I mean, that's not worth anything because my personal minor feature has been ignored and no one's talking personally to me and my issue.

Also, the lack of Java support is such an issue that you're turning casual gamers away from the game - right... I'm sure that was included by marketing just to attract the 0.01% of gamers who actually were on the fence over that specific issue. devious bastards!

And, yes, I'm angry. I'm angry because this development studio is one of the best and most open I've ever seen for a game (outside of 1-man indie teams who have to be so open to get funding, and even then BI beats a lot of those hands-down), and all a large part of the community can do is bitch and moan that they aren't perfectly, in some idealized sense of the word, open, or that their small dev studio can't deliver a AAA-quality game for 1/500th the cost of an actual AAA-quality game with every possible feature of simulated reality every forum-goer could think up over the last year and make a ticket for.

Entitlement and completely unrealistic expectations. People can't just appreciate the amazing game and studio they have, because they want the connection of a 3-man indie team with the results of a $1-billion corporate studio.

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This thread is not about a personal minor feature or issue. This thread is asking a very broad question about the development process in general. You might want to go back and reread the OP. It was very politely written by a person who I am given to believe is a longtime customer and fan who has some experience in the software development field.

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DNK the series only survived because of modding.

The modding community expects and deserves keep being informed.

Otherwise people will just leave - bad strategy for the company..

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;2558860']DNK the series only survived because of modding.

The modding community expects and deserves keep being informed.

Otherwise people will just leave - bad strategy for the company..

+1 5char

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It was very politely written by a person who I am given to believe is a longtime customer and fan who has some experience in the software development field.

That somehow makes it take less time for BI to answer it? It somehow makes it better than someone who's only been around for a few months asking the same question?

Its a choice between 2-3 hours a day per dev answering these sorts of questions on the forum, and 2-3 hours a day of the devs fixing bugs. Choice is yours, I know which I'd rather have...

;2558860']DNK the series only survived because of modding.

The modding community expects and deserves keep being informed.

And modding survived because back then when it started the modders wanted to learn' date=' to experiment, to push the boundaries. Now it seems like the vast majority just want to be spoon fed so that they can soak up the glory for releasing M4/AK pack #235232134

;2558860']Otherwise people will just leave

And some just keep on coming back...

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And modding survived because back then when it started the modders wanted to learn, to experiment, to push the boundaries. Now it seems like the vast majority just want to be spoon fed so that they can soak up the glory for releasing M4/AK pack #235232134
Or people are just tired of being forced to write atrocious hacks based on ill-documented features, in a language that gracefully combines the expressiveness of C with the readability of Perl.

Want an example? Look at the CCIP implementation done by the ACE guys for ArmA 2. It's a brilliant hack, but the fact that they had to jump through the hoops they did is a very sorry state of affairs.

For that matter, I would love to see somebody attempt a readable, short RK4 implementation in SQF. What should be about 20 lines of readable code instead turns into a mess, largely due to the fact that the SQF syntax for manipulating arrays is awful. Every project I have seen (including the ACE CCIP pipper) simply resorts to using Euler integration, despite the fact that an RK4 implementation would be significantly more performant. The other option is to just keep the vector components all stored in separate locals, but that's hardly better (a1_x a2_x a3_x a4_x v1_x v2_x v3_x... etc etc etc).

For comparison, the following is an F# RK4 implementation, adapted from a Python implementation here (untested, as this is just an example):

type Vector3(x:float, y:float, z:float) = 
   member this.x = x
   member this.y = y
   member this.z = z
   member this.mag = sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z)
   static member (+) (a:Vector3, b: Vector3) = Vector3(a.x + b.x, a.y + b.y, a.z + b.z)
   static member (*) (a:Vector3, b: float) = Vector3(a.x * b, a.y * b, a.z * b)
   static member (*) (a:float, b:Vector3) = Vector3(b.x * a, b.y * a, b.z * a)
   override this.ToString() = sprintf "(%.2f %.2f %.2f)" x y z

type Position = Vector3
type Velocity = Vector3
type Acceleration = Vector3
type Time = float
type AccelFn = Position -> Velocity -> Time -> Acceleration

let private step (pos: Position) (vel: Velocity) (accel: Acceleration) (accelFn: AccelFn) (delta: Time) (stepFrac: float)=
   let pos' = pos + stepFrac * vel * delta
   let vel' = vel + stepFrac * accel * delta
   let accel' = accelFn pos' vel' (delta * stepFrac)
   (pos', vel', accel')

let rk4 (pos: Position) (vel: Velocity) (accelFn: AccelFn) (delta: Time) =
   let p1 = pos
   let v1 = vel
   let a1 = accelFn p1 v1 0.0

   let (p2, v2, a2) = step p1 v1 a1 accelFn delta 0.5
   let (p3, v3, a3) = step p2 v2 a2 accelFn delta 0.5
   let (p4, v4, a4) = step p3 v3 a3 accelFn delta 1.0

   let pos' = pos + (delta / 6.0) * (v1 + 2.0*v2 + 2.0*v3 + v4)
   let vel' = vel + (delta / 6.0) * (a1 + 2.0*a2 + 2.0*a3 + a4)

   (pos', vel')

That's about 20 lines of actual code, and 20 lines to define reusable types that would have applications well beyond just RK4 integration. Consider the fact that I'm a complete amateur at writing F# (I only started last week), and that an experienced F# developer could probably implement the entire thing more readably, generalized to types beyond just 3D vectors, and in fewer lines of code. Given that, it becomes obvious just how cumbersome SQF is.

There would, of course, be an equivalent Scala (JVM-based) implementation, but I don't have Scala installed at the moment.

I should point out that not only is the above code shorter and easier to read than an equivalent SQF implementation, but it is also statically typed.

e: why RK4 you might ask?

Well, ages back I had written a

. ArmA 2 came out, and I was getting around to adding some features (sheaf selection, radio dialogue based on FM 6-40, realistic charge selection for 155mm guns), and removing some old hacks, namely the fact that I was coercing the shell path into to a purely parabolic curve (IE no drag, which grossly exaggerates the effective range of guns, and makes it impossible to differentiate between base-bleed and non-base-bleed shells).

Well, fixing the latter requires doing numerical integration in order to calculate the impact position. I needed this to be fast, since multiple paths would have to be calculated to converge on a solution, and I would need further calculations to get realistic range-probable-error and deflection-probable-error dispersion (likely with some lookup tables to speed things along). This meant that I would be best served by RK4. I prototyped the function in Python, and then started to implement the actual solution in SQF. I got about a third of the way through before I could just no longer tolerate what an awful language SQF is. The entire project had been contorted to try to render SQF into something readable, and I was just sick of looking at it.

But lo and behold, I hear that ArmA 3 is going to support Java (and through that, less verbose languages such as Scala). I could finally get back to writing a decently realistic artillery implementation, without hating every single second I spent working on the thing. I could probably even bear to get it into an acceptable state for releasing to the community. That is why the lack of Java irks me.

I can even understand the numerous reasons why JVM support would be difficult to implement. In order to get a decent implementation, BI would have to write wrapper classes for the arguments and return types of just about every single function available in SQF. SQF scripting is likely tightly integrated with the game logic, and modifying that to support the JVM would be an enormous undertaking. I'm not even sure how they would add an equivalent to spawn{}, without introducing horrible concurrency issues. Add to the above the fact that JNI is a terribly clunky interface requiring an ungodly amount of boilerplate, and I'm perfectly understanding that they would either abandon or indefinitely postpone the project.

What I am unhappy about is the complete lack of feedback on the status of JVM support.

Edited by jaemn

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That somehow makes it take less time for BI to answer it? It somehow makes it better than someone who's only been around for a few months asking the same question?

Its a choice between 2-3 hours a day per dev answering these sorts of questions on the forum, and 2-3 hours a day of the devs fixing bugs. Choice is yours, I know which I'd rather have...

Why are those the only choices? It's not like the devs aren't already posting on the forums.

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Why are those the only choices? It's not like the devs aren't already posting on the forums.

They answer randomly, without preference or favouritism. They answer one of these whiny "why don't the devs like me answer my questions" posts, then the next one crops up with "you answered that guy, why don't you like me won't you answer me" and then they are lost in a spiral of having to answer every little self-entitled thread that pops up.

And I'd rather they spent what little man-hours time they have on actually developing, instead of making johnny self-entitled nobody happy by answering his every little question.

Now, if BI were to actually hire a community manager, who's job it would be to police the forums answering said questions, then I'd have nothing against that. But the devs should continue to do what they do now - answering threads when they peak their interest, rather than giving in to demands of the vocal and having to spend endless hours in the forums.

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Now, if BI were to actually hire a community manager, who's job it would be to police the forums answering said questions, then I'd have nothing against that. But the devs should continue to do what they do now - answering threads when they peak their interest, rather than giving in to demands of the vocal and having to spend endless hours in the forums.
Answering a question regarding a feature that was (originally) promised to be in the release is not 'giving in to demands of the vocal and having to spend endless hours in the forums'. It is basic diligence with regards to the failure of the developers to actually release their product in the state that they said they were going to release it. As I said above, doing anything less is completely scummy - it is lying, and it should be reacted to by not purchasing future products, and by encouraging other to do the same.

I also enjoy that you failed to respond to my above post that addressed your gross misrepresentation of modders' dissatisfaction with the current mod tools as a demand for spoon feeding.

edit:

I would love to point out that my previous job had me working as a developer for a fairly small company, supporting a significant number of clients (other companies in the industrial sector). If, for whatever reason, we couldn't deliver a feature or update that we had previously promised, then we (the developers) were required to articulate the reasons to our HR people, who would then forward these reasons to the customers.

Edited by jaemn

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I also enjoy that you failed to respond to my above post that addressed your gross misrepresentation of modders' dissatisfaction with the current mod tools as a demand for spoon feeding.

All I see is some offtopic ramblings about RK4.

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All I see is some offtopic ramblings about RK4.
Good lord. You write off modders as 'spoonfed babies', and then fail to actually read a post that provides a clear use-case example describing why people want better tools. Read the entire thing, you lazy git.

For some reason I suspect you have never written any substantial amount of code with the current BI offerings. With them, once you get to 10k+ lines, writing maintainable code that isn't a mess of hacks becomes very tedious. Even before that point, SQF still leads to verbose solutions that are awful to read. The ACE guys effectively implemented their own namespace system with macros, and still needed to use horrific (brilliant, but horrific) hacks to accomplish what should be basic functionality.

Edited by jaemn

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Good lord, you write off modders as 'spoonfed babies'

Not all, just some.

and then fail to actually read a post that provides a clear use-case example describing why people want better tools. Read the entire thing, you lazy ass.

1. I did read the entire thing, even after the edits.

2. Its just a thinly veiled request for further Java support.

3. Its wildly off topic

For some reason I suspect you have never written any substantial amount of code with the current BI offerings.

emoticon-00143-smirk.gif

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2. Its just a thinly veiled request for further Java support.
No, actually, it's not. If you had actually read the last two paragraphs, you would understand that.

So either you didn't read the post, or you didn't understand it, and are now trying to cover by trolling.

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I agree with the OP here. I honestly think BI should completely stop campaign/DLC development if needed, just to fix some critical things like object collision (ie. indoors), movement, animations clipping through things, being able to switch weapons while moving (instead of requiring a mod to do it), possibly put more furniture in houses, etc.

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