Real Armor Mod

[olds 15]

Real Armor Mod v0.1.1

>>Ongoing Documentation (Post)<< :deal:

 

RAM v0.1.1

Download Mega

Download Dropbox

Requirements

• CBA

Important

• Clear your @RAM\Addons folder when updating

Changelog

• Removed Bohemia vehicle and weapon config edits

---

 

An update on RAM, RHS and the many months of research that's been concluded.

 

We set out to improve armor and researched everything about and related to it, what we've found is shocking:

1. Penetration values are wrong. Stock 9mm bullets can penetrate almost 10mm RHA while anti tank warheads rely on splash damage with no penetration potential.
2. Armor values are very wrong. Be it a flimsy metal shed that provides 20mm RHAe protection or the +600mm RHAe side armor on a Merkava (Slammer) tank, it's all completely bonkers.
3. Vehicle hitpoints, wtf. This is by far the worst thing we've discovered. It seems that no current employee of Bohemia has any idea how it should be set up and to make matters worse mod makers simply follow their example. Olds typed up an entire wiki page on the subject https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3_Damage_Description
4. Infantry special case. For reasons infantry use a separate armor process and cannot rely on regular object armor protection. They rely on HP buffs as an arcade and crude attempt to simulate increased protection.
5. Damage inconsistency. Due to the inconsistent nature of object armor and health weapons have been configured to do damage against specific targets without much regards for cross compatibility between soft and armored targets.

The frustrating thing is that the RV engine has proven that it's capable of doing it all and more. We used information gathered from experiments and other sources to create a set of formulas for damage and penetration values. Armed with the formulas we proved that the RV engine is extremely consistent and much easier to configure than previously thought, the reason why it's such a pain to configure anything is because of the extreme inconsistency across assets.

 

We were able to fix or work around some of these issues with the ongoing work in RHS and the work done by Spartan, however fixing only half of something means that it's still broken. We've hit the wall and the rest is up to Bohemia.

What does it not do?

• Destroy your FPS - the performance impact is minimal!
• No changes to soldier damage
• No changes to air or sea vehicles (not yet anyway)
• WARNING: does not play well with modded Missiles/Rockets - these need to integrated into RAM in order to work decently.

 

License

• See Documentation post.--applies to RAM config changes only.
• CBA & Bakerman's contributions (all scripts) are subject to their own licensing terms(!)
• I recommend you PM me for assistance if anything is unclear in the documentation.

Support our bug list :) Please click on these links & upvote them if you agree!

• Missile & Rocket ammo breaks when you try to use submunitions.
• You should be able to set the speed of ShotDeploy ammo.
• Missiles & rockets don't use caliber for penetration like other ammo types.

Edited December 3, 2015 by olds

[roberthammer 582]

Oh excellent , i did wish BIS did something similar

[x3kj 1247]

Very Nice!

How compatible is it to modded vehicles and weapons? / What do you have to do in order for your vehicles and weapons to have the same behaviour?

[enex 11]

Love your last line.You had made me laugh, thank you |":"D

[olds 15]

Very Nice!

How compatible is it to modded vehicles and weapons? / What do you have to do in order for your vehicles and weapons to have the same behaviour?

Thank you Fennek. You know, that's a great question. Because I am editing weapon & vehicle config files, I suspect that it will have no effect (either good or ill) on other mods. New vehicles--which undoubtedly use BIS's config files as templates--will not benefit from the improvements. New weapons will benefit from this mod inversely proportional to their caliber size--cannons & ATGM's based on BIS values will benefit the least and continue to essentially ignore armor thickness.

On the up side, I am planning to participate in the Community Upgrade Project for Arma 2 content--because I am a supporter of 'open-source' modding. And if/when I'm comfortable that all the kinks can be worked out, I will publish a guide to vehicle and weapon modders as to how to bring their content into line with this system. (Basically it involves using real-world values, so it's not particularly arbitrary). The system is not tested well enough for me to make overly concrete suggestions yet though.

Hope that is at least partially helpful. If a modder wants to try the system out now and is looking for preliminary guidance, PM me and I'll be glad to help out.

[in general, I would encourage anyone working on vehicles to pay close attention to real world RHAe thicknesses when developing their Fire Geometry models. This system is (in part) only as good as your vehicle armor is realistic.]

Edited January 15, 2014 by Olds

[JamesSaga 1]

Just anther page I will be checking every day :)

How I hope you are able to do air assets as well so they are not like tissue paper against small arms.

[Hartmann_E 10]

Awesome !

[Sindrio2 11]

Sounds fantastic! It is indeed weird that BI took the hit-point model instead of real penetration. Just waiting for a release and this mod will be on my computer in no time!

[shiftysean 21]

Yey another mod to improve upon the armor combat ^^ Looking forward to this (imo tanks should be hard to kill). Would be intresting to hear from a BIS dev as to why they chose to go with the hitpoint system when they have such an elaborate armor penetration under the hood. Balancing issues?

[zimms 22]

So many good stuff coming out. I feel like 2014 will be huge for Arma.

[nomisum 129]

this is awesome. all these great ideas to improve the game make me dream of the holy grail, one mod to fix it all and in the darkness bind them (also known as ACE3).

[tempestriser 10]

Thank god... finally we will use some realistic heavy armor on our tanks...

[kremator 1065]

I still think the Iron Front armour penetration system is wonderful. Anything that gets us a step closer to that is great in my books.

[Bouben 3]

I wonder what is the reason for BIS not to do this themselves.

I believe they have good reasons for this, so...?

[kremator 1065]

I'd LOVE to hear the good reason from BIS Devs. Perhaps they have something up their collective sleeves ... oh I can dream.

In the meantime I await goodies from this thread :)

[HJohnson 16]

Hopefully this does lead to a soldier version in the future.

[kuIoodporny 45]

I'd LOVE to hear the good reason from BIS Devs

Arma 3 tanks config guidelines

I ate my wisdom tooth on it. Is that good enough reason?

[olds 15]

Arma 3 tanks config guidelines

I ate my wisdom tooth on it. Is that good enough reason?

Development note: I will not be eating any teeth to develop this mod. If anyone needs that level of commitment, I will forward their requests to zGuba.:cc:

On a serious note, I'd guess it has something to do with Arma's genesis as primarily a soldier-oriented FPS rather than an armor sim. That being said, the only reason my mod works is b/c BIS put so much work into the ballistics simulation. So let's make sure to give credit where it is due. Sure, Arma could be more sim-y and I wish it were. But it's far and away the best show in town and--in this age of endless remakes and casual games--we should all be thankful for what they've managed to pull off!:icon_hug:

Edited January 20, 2014 by Olds

[kuIoodporny 45]

Olds, I hope you will deliver us something I cannot for various reasons ;) thumbs up!

[mordeaniischaos 3]

Any chance this will impact how collisions are handled in the game? They are pretty silly at the moment. This looks awesome, I am really disappointed with how Armor feels and I'd love to see all vehicles get some love in terms of how they take damage.

[olds 15]

Any chance this will impact how collisions are handled in the game? They are pretty silly at the moment.

Sorry no, completely non-overlapping system. I think that is mostly a PhysX thing. PhysX could certainly do with some tweaking but who knows whether changing the configs there will help much or if we're just dealing with inherent limitations of the PhysX code...

[adanteh 58]

I'm glad you're doing this Olds. I was looking at it myself and didn't have any luck getting things up and running. Another thing that might be interesting to do is changing wheel damage values for MRAPs and so. Right now wheels are basically untouched and then at 99% damage they work like flat tires, but this almost never happens. The configs allow you to set 2 different damage values and the wheel radius that should be connected to either of those values. I'd like to see wheels be fully destroyed slower, but instead have flat tires simulated by lowering the radius on the old damage value.

Sent from my MI 2S using Tapatalk

[VKing 12]

Hey Olds, good job on the release.

I haven't tested the effects in-game yet, but I've browsed through the configs and found a pretty big boo-boo:

You've included the entire config for every vehicle you've modified, which is pretty useless and can affect other mods that are changing different things on the vehicle.

You should clean up your configs so they only include the items you are actually changing.

Keep it up.

[Tyl3r99 41]

Olds, I hope you will deliver us something I cannot for various reasons ;) thumbs up!

I like this reply... hehe go olds go

[olds 15]

Hey Olds, good job on the release.

I haven't tested the effects in-game yet, but I've browsed through the configs and found a pretty big boo-boo:

You've included the entire config for every vehicle you've modified, which is pretty useless and can affect other mods that are changing different things on the vehicle.

You should clean up your configs so they only include the items you are actually changing.

Keep it up.

Oooops!:o Thanks VKing, I was kind of wondering how that worked... I will fix this today.

---Update---

Make that "fix this in a couple of days." :j:

Edited January 21, 2014 by Olds