Can Our Squad Make the Switch?

[GReeves 10]

A few of our members are very excited about moving onto ARMA3 in the near future. However, I'm a bit concerned about the whole thing. Is there anything we should be aware of before leaving ARMA2 and stepping into this game? We aren't a milsim group, but we always have a focus on teamwork and tactical gameplay. We are hoping to run a server with an MSO or the ALIVE mod, since we like the ongoing mission type stuff. I've seen some threads with alarming titles like "Multiplayer is Unplayable," but is any of this true? To sum up my question, are there any major differences or drawbacks in ARMA3 that would make a switch a waste of our time?

Maybe the best option for us is to simply try it out and see if it fits us before making any decisions.

[terox 316]

There is an issue with MP performance, however, this is only seen when large numbers of players are present. There seems to be a threshold somewhere between 20 and 30 players when running 150 + AI that causes the server FPS to drop very low.

We currently run Patrol ops which is probably the best mission out there that dynamically creates tasks. This is very well optimised and runs better than anything else. We currently roll with around 20 players per session

Add headless client to this and you should be able to support well over 30 players with it.

A3 is a different beast to A2. I woudn't go back, the anims are great, the scenery and island terrain are great, its a vast improvement on A2.

That being said, it still has a long way to go before it achieves the performance that A2 has. As always with B.I game engine releases, they always take time to get the game running well. 6 months to a year typically.

Its very playable but if you are a large community, it may cause issues for you.

The DEV branch is soon to get some debugging tools and there are steps being taken to try and identify the performance hog....... its just a matter of time.

I havent tried the alive addon yet. Having read up a little on it, i would suspect their AI caching system would alleviate a lot of the problems.

Edited December 5, 2013 by Terox

[GReeves 10]

Alright, thanks for the info. We are a small group right now, so I'm sure the performance issues will be resolved by the time our player counts get to that problematic level.

[brightcandle 114]

Arma 3 is a much better game but with 35 players we are struggling with client side performance. Its limited by the CPU and there isn't a whole lot we can seem to do about it. Its not scripts or anything else, its just a real mission as it goes on has reducing FPS (client side). After an hour it'll be down to 25 fps or below depending on your CPU, some of our moderate CPUs are more like 15 fps. The Graphics card is barely used.

Arma is still playable at 25 fps (just), but its far from a great experience. We did last week get the diag_captureFrame profiling enabled and the devs now have traces made from real games so hopefully they can work out what is causing the problem and get the FPS fixed. But right now performance is pretty poor and will decline as a game goes on. That doesn't mean its completely unplayable of course, its still a lot of fun and we have been playing arma 3 since the first day of Alpha, its just not as smooth FPS wise as it needs to be and there is nothing you can do about it. If you are playing small missions with like 10 guys you'll probably be OK, but 15 and onwards with 50+ AI is going to start to become a problem and 35 player games are a big issue.

[ratszo 17]

Can try out TacBF mod:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?169645-Tactical-Battlefield-A-PvP-Modification