Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
sayjimwoo

Bohemia Interactive's ambitions are always set too high.

Recommended Posts

I start to feel that the only way to focus BIS attention on the obvious problems is to deny them any further income until some progress is made.

At this point, pretty much yea.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
I start to feel that the only way to focus BIS attention on the obvious problems is to deny them any further income until some progress is made.
At this point, pretty much yea.

1. This is a bit like cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

2. At this stage, a mass boycott would simply mean the death of the Arma franchise: DayZ makes them plenty of money, Arma makes them less money. DayZ needs less effort, Arma needs lots of effort. People (leaders, like Marek) are burnt out working on Arma, DayZ is "fresh". From a purely business PoV, it seems much more sensible to me to drop Arma (and its demanding fans) and just go with DayZ (and its fans who are willing to pay $0.99 for additional beans or ammo...). A massive drop in sales would do nothing but validate that opinion.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1. This is a bit like cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

2. At this stage, a mass boycott would simply mean the death of the Arma franchise: DayZ makes them plenty of money, Arma makes them less money. DayZ needs less effort, Arma needs lots of effort. People (leaders, like Marek) are burnt out working on Arma, DayZ is "fresh". From a purely business PoV, it seems much more sensible to me to drop Arma (and its demanding fans) and just go with DayZ (and its fans who are willing to pay $0.99 for additional beans or ammo...). A massive drop in sales would do nothing but validate that opinion.

These are totally fair points, but at the same time there's no incentive to change anything if we just keep throwing money at the series regardless of what happens.

Basically, we are in kind of a bad situation here, where we can keep giving money to BIS and hope for the best or we can stop giving money to BIS and hope for the best.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2. At this stage, a mass boycott would simply mean the death of the Arma franchise: DayZ makes them plenty of money, Arma makes them less money. DayZ needs less effort, Arma needs lots of effort. People (leaders, like Marek) are burnt out working on Arma, DayZ is "fresh". From a purely business PoV, it seems much more sensible to me to drop Arma (and its demanding fans) and just go with DayZ (and its fans who are willing to pay $0.99 for additional beans or ammo...). A massive drop in sales would do nothing but validate that opinion.

Agreed fully. I don't think a boycott ever did anything good. If at all, people must complain. It has shown in the past that with enough complaints, especially organized complaints, things get done. By organized I don't mean like petitions or something like this. I mean good, solid, argumentative reasoning. "The game is broken" doesn't help. What needs to happen is enough people saying "I have paid for it, now please fix it", and for the trolls to finally NOT disrupt a critical discussion.

This topic is a good example of this. Someone brings up a topic, and immediately troll from both sides of the extremists camps jump on it. There's one faction crying "The engine is perfect and everyone who says otherwise is a whiner", and the other faction yelling "The engine is broken, all is lost, use Frostbyte. BIS sucks BTW". We need the middle way. Finally let a discussion evolve without bullshit from all sides. If you want to say something, use arguments instead of insults.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

whats next a petition?

i do agree though its nearly a year already... taken nearly a year for someone to look into the MP optimization.

plus taken valuable arma assets away for dayz

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

- Map sizes: The scenes rendered by BF4 are comparable (in size) to what A3 does with a single city

- Calculations: Games like BF4 are and always be different from games like A3 in the amount of calculations (read CPU-sided)

--- A3 AIs are somewhat "dynamic" and unscripted, they do react to the situation and try (sadly most of the time fail :P ) to adapt and overcome

--- BF4 AIs are scripted. Replay the same missions and you'll always get the same situations, eventually with slight differences if you kill that specific AI later than you did before

--- Bullet drop in games like BF4 is just a set of numbers that define where the "laser beam" being your shot will land

--- Bullet drop in A3 is calculated over a (not sure how much) realistic set of factors, where even the bullet itself is an object and not just a client-side texture (hence more shit to calc)

--- More examples on the same path as the previous ones

It's not about the complexity of calculations in ArmA, it's about not doing the calculations in proper, multicore, multithreaded way. Some can be done WAY, WAY FASTER on the GPU, AI included. We all get poor performance NOT because we don't have the hardware, but because the code is not efficient.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Agreed fully. I don't think a boycott ever did anything good. If at all, people must complain. It has shown in the past that with enough complaints, especially organized complaints, things get done. By organized I don't mean like petitions or something like this. I mean good, solid, argumentative reasoning. "The game is broken" doesn't help. What needs to happen is enough people saying "I have paid for it, now please fix it", and for the trolls to finally NOT disrupt a critical discussion.

This topic is a good example of this. Someone brings up a topic, and immediately troll from both sides of the extremists camps jump on it. There's one faction crying "The engine is perfect and everyone who says otherwise is a whiner", and the other faction yelling "The engine is broken, all is lost, use Frostbyte. BIS sucks BTW". We need the middle way. Finally let a discussion evolve without bullshit from all sides. If you want to say something, use arguments instead of insults.

All the discussion or complaining in the world won't matter unless BI themselves actually do something about it. If complaining doesn't do it, then maybe loss of funds would. It's like saying if you gave EA a trillion dollars and mass complained about BF they would change it all of a sudden. They're focused on the money, you're complaints mean nothing if they have your money and it's like that with any business, even with BI. I think BI does care about the community, but I think that care has to stop at some "business point" where the potential for profit outweighs the cares and criticisms of the community that's still going to support them even if they ignore those cares and criticisms.

It's the last thing I want to do, to say don't support BI, but it may be something that has to happen. I would hope that BI wouldn't let it get to a point where community action would be the downfall of the franchise but if that's the extent of their "community support" then so be it. You can't change a business by throwing money at them for doing something wrong and expecting them to change when they make money doing the wrong in the first place. You can't positively reinforce something negative and expect that negative to magically change into a positive. There's no incentive and no reason to do so, you have to introduce a reason to do so. I would hope discussion like this, seeing the community reacting to problems like this, in this way, would show them that they are at a critical point.

Edited by Windies

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
plus taken valuable arma assets away for dayz

Just in my case, A2 will win out, its got so many great terrains, I just haven't got to explore every part of each of them, need a lifetime probably. I would not boycott, I like terrains so if any new ones come along I will invest or download and where appropriate donate.

I'm recently playing on Sauerland, I downloaded even though it was made for Dayz, now I'm not a dayz player but the terrain is a testament to how an island maker with a vision can make something great and perform really well (in my case).

625 sq km 25x25 full of fantastic landscape, Cherno fans would love. Large cities x4, not like Cherno where a city was really a town size, but actual city sizes plus good performance in those cities. Meticulous detail in and around the cities, towns and villages x30. A great rail network, highway etc, plus large industrial areas, forests, rolling hills, good roads/lanes, river and lake, which is going to have a waterfall in the next update I believe, possibly with a cave behind the waterfall.

It’s a vision the maker has, for his preferred game ‘Dayz’, but it also keeps interest in A2 alive and very hard to beat, for me anyway, dayz has its cons, but there are some interesting things coming out of it, that can be used in A2, or I suppose in A3 (performance depending of course). A real war torn type feel in the cities too, bomb damaged buildings etc, of course aimed to look a little apocalyptic but looks more war torn than anything else, which is great.

To make such a large terrain so detailed and one which I would describe as ‘heavy’ yet run really well, some nice things coming from the dayz side.

I don't think BI are too ambitious, just that they should have waited, dumped the underwater thing and released at a later date ‘with a full game intact’ and performing for the many that it doesn't mp wise..

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
whats next a petition?

Project Reality 2 (on Cry Engine incidentally).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Project Reality 2 (on Cry Engine incidentally).

But they aren't releasing with vehicles as I recall, and are only having 2x2km maps

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Just in my case, A2 will win out, its got so many great terrains [...]

I don't think BI are too ambitious, just that they should have waited, dumped the underwater thing and released at a later date ‘with a full game intact’ and performing for the many that it doesn't mp wise..

you do realize that you can play all of those maps in arma 3 (AiA and others), right? just making sure :p

about the diving: i personally think that it was less work than we might think to make it work. afterall it's just an expansion of swimming with a new direction (down) and some improvements to the look of terrain underwater, which are not mind blowing. just the anims for diving is something i expect these days from a game where water is that prominent as a default.

so to me personally it seems like the problem is that they made such a fuzz about underwater in their promo when there's actually not much to it and it's a logical expansion and not a real new feature since there's not real use made of it.

not as grave but similar is the thing with animated hands on steering wheels. although in this case the fact it was part of promo is a bit embarrassing. having static hands in a game that has vehciles as a core feature over the course of 3 titles is not something to brag about. probably every game out there that features internal view for vehicles has that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1. This is a bit like cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

2. At this stage, a mass boycott would simply mean the death of the Arma franchise: DayZ makes them plenty of money, Arma makes them less money. DayZ needs less effort, Arma needs lots of effort. People (leaders, like Marek) are burnt out working on Arma, DayZ is "fresh". From a purely business PoV, it seems much more sensible to me to drop Arma (and its demanding fans) and just go with DayZ (and its fans who are willing to pay $0.99 for additional beans or ammo...). A massive drop in sales would do nothing but validate that opinion.

I totally understand those points but seriously what else can we do? I´ve been patient, even optimistic for three quarters of a year. I and many others have tried to voice constructive criticism. Sometimes a Dev picks it up and works on it, even discusses possible approaches and problems, but this is very rare. I´ve seen so many good Ideas, valid and constructive criticism and suggestions go unanswered. And if we are honest then we have to admit that the game hasn´t moved forward very much since the Alpha release and is in parts still inferior to Arma 2 (mainly ammount of unique content and broken sound engine).

So how can we motivate BIS to allocate more ressources to Arma 3? Because that is the main problem to me. There simply aren´t enough people working on this game and more and more get transfered to other projects.

I doubt that Arma 3 has paid off yet and therefore BIS has DLC plans for sure. They aren´t going to abandon the game if we tell them that they have to do some serious work first before getting more of our money.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Dan;2610499']But they aren't releasing with vehicles as I recall' date=' and are only having 2x2km maps[/quote']

Yes I think that's the case initially, they're building it 'infantry-up' so to speak. But Project Reality (the BF2 incarnation) has always had an extensive array of transport and combat vehicles and I don't think there's any reason to suppose that they won't work toward the same thing.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Sadly what can be seen from Project Reality 2 doenst look very stunning graphic wise=(

The environments look like a half life mod=(

But theoretically PR 2 is a great project! Hopefully they improve.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
I totally understand those points but seriously what else can we do? I´ve been patient, even optimistic for three quarters of a year. I and many others have tried to voice constructive criticism. Sometimes a Dev picks it up and works on it, even discusses possible approaches and problems, but this is very rare. I´ve seen so many good Ideas, valid and constructive criticism and suggestions go unanswered. And if we are honest then we have to admit that the game hasn´t moved forward very much since the Alpha release and is in parts still inferior to Arma 2 (mainly ammount of unique content and broken sound engine).

So how can we motivate BIS to allocate more ressources to Arma 3? Because that is the main problem to me. There simply aren´t enough people working on this game and more and more get transfered to other projects.

I doubt that Arma 3 has paid off yet and therefore BIS has DLC plans for sure. They aren´t going to abandon the game if we tell them that they have to do some serious work first before getting more of our money.

^this, I still haven't seen that fix for ACR, nor a proper fix for my physx crashes (they are less often now though) and I went through what they did with TOH (dumbed the expert mode down), I am also considering taking Tonci's stance, and if ARMA dies because of it, well then I guess it will have to be that way because I guess it will not deserve to survive. I think BIS can change, but I am not sure if they have the WILL to do so. Sega managed to after the Rome2 bombshell, so there is hope for BIS.

Edited by [EVO] Dan

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
as far as im aware you cant even do the old helicopter drop with the divers... its awful

I've done it before, took a lot of fucking around but it works. You can't do it adlib though it needs to be semi-scripted(when AI is involved.. if it's just player pilot plus player divers it should work fine with some precision)

Edited by Kerc Kasha

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
you do realize that you can play all of those maps in arma 3 (AiA and others), right? just making sure :p.

Indeed you can, also without using AiA, but the problem is, they all come with the insane A3 ai, which is enough to frighten any serious player off ;)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Dan;2610560']^this' date=' I still haven't seen that fix for ACR, nor a proper fix for my physx crashes (they are less often now though) and I went through what they did with TOH (dumbed the expert mode down), I am also considering taking Tonci's stance, and if ARMA dies because of it, well then I guess it will have to be that way because I guess it will not deserve to survive. I think BIS can change, but I am not sure if they have the WILL to do so. Sega managed to after the Rome2 bombshell, so there is hope for BIS.[/quote']

Nice example with ACR. In he past BIS has always been praised for their extensive after Release support. That was one reason why I wasn´t bothered that much by the Arma 2 bugs around release. But lately BIS has gone through some starnge changes regarding that.

ACR wasn´t really fixed. ToH still has a lot of troubles, in fact one of my friends can´t even get it to run even tho his specs exceed the recommended stuff, Carrier Command is pretty dead too and doesn´t seem to get almost any Dev time. It seems as if the promised MP mode was silently axed. And now what we have with Arma 3. This doesn´t seem to be the BIS I´ve known and trusted for so many years. So I really don´t know what to do.

The Creative Assembly really fucked up with Rome 2 and I don´t know if they fixed it. But if they did, then only because they knew that otherwise nobody would buy DLC = No more money. If it worked well for them, why not for BIS?

If someone has a better Idea, please tell me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
It's not about the complexity of calculations in ArmA, it's about not doing the calculations in proper, multicore, multithreaded way. Some can be done WAY, WAY FASTER on the GPU, AI included. We all get poor performance NOT because we don't have the hardware, but because the code is not efficient.

I know that, and infact i also wrote

"Sure, RV would benefit a lot from multi threading optimization, x64 exes and so on, but i wouldn't expect a miracle."

I still stand on my point tough.

Sure it will benefit from better code and better HW resources usage, but i wouldn't expect it all of a sudden (with all those things done) to run on a stable 120fps.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

2. At this stage, a mass boycott would simply mean the death of the Arma franchise: DayZ makes them plenty of money, Arma makes them less money. DayZ needs less effort, Arma needs lots of effort. People (leaders, like Marek) are burnt out working on Arma, DayZ is "fresh". From a purely business PoV, it seems much more sensible to me to drop Arma (and its demanding fans) and just go with DayZ (and its fans who are willing to pay $0.99 for additional beans or ammo...). A massive drop in sales would do nothing but validate that opinion.

This is what Ive been saying all along and I think it may be the case even without a boycott. The intial Founding Fathers or Brothers were completely burnt out with the whole military thing a long time ago. They talked about changing direction with a Western themed RPG and then plodded into strange territory with Take Ons, CC etc... I thought it strange when the underwater aspect was so strongly promoted and you could feel the excitement they had for this 'new frontier' while leaving old military grognards scratching their collective chins. Fixing a million requested fixes, expanding AI to new realms of indoor AI or role specific behaviors and playbooks just doesn't excite them methinks. You can in a sense tell that they're in a certain level of auto-pilot when bringing up a simple, easy to see problem with an AI such as reaction time or wrong weapon and they ask you for a repro..? If someone where at the wheel with a real passion for really fixing let alone taking the game to the next level, you would think they'd see the many glaring problems via a simple playtest.

I still enjoy the game but am pretty sure it will be the last full fledge title we'll ever see in the series.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Nice example with ACR. In he past BIS has always been praised for their extensive after Release support. That was one reason why I wasn´t bothered that much by the Arma 2 bugs around release. But lately BIS has gone through some starnge changes regarding that.

ACR wasn´t really fixed. ToH still has a lot of troubles, in fact one of my friends can´t even get it to run even tho his specs exceed the recommended stuff, Carrier Command is pretty dead too and doesn´t seem to get almost any Dev time. It seems as if the promised MP mode was silently axed. And now what we have with Arma 3. This doesn´t seem to be the BIS I´ve known and trusted for so many years. So I really don´t know what to do.

The Creative Assembly really fucked up with Rome 2 and I don´t know if they fixed it. But if they did, then only because they knew that otherwise nobody would buy DLC = No more money. If it worked well for them, why not for BIS?

If someone has a better Idea, please tell me.

I feel completely the same way you do man.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
All the discussion or complaining in the world won't matter unless BI themselves actually do something about it. If complaining doesn't do it, then maybe loss of funds would. It's like saying if you gave EA a trillion dollars and mass complained about BF they would change it all of a sudden. They're focused on the money, you're complaints mean nothing if they have your money and it's like that with any business, even with BI. I think BI does care about the community, but I think that care has to stop at some "business point" where the potential for profit outweighs the cares and criticisms of the community that's still going to support them even if they ignore those cares and criticisms.

If Arma is no longer profitable, they can just kill it off. I for one rather make compromises than boycotting.

And the "how" is also important when you complain. Just bashing isn't going anywhere. There are people that are no longer taken serious because of the way they complain; not even necessarily about what.

It's the last thing I want to do, to say don't support BI, but it may be something that has to happen. I would hope that BI wouldn't let it get to a point where community action would be the downfall of the franchise but if that's the extent of their "community support" then so be it. You can't change a business by throwing money at them for doing something wrong and expecting them to change when they make money doing the wrong in the first place. You can't positively reinforce something negative and expect that negative to magically change into a positive. There's no incentive and no reason to do so, you have to introduce a reason to do so. I would hope discussion like this, seeing the community reacting to problems like this, in this way, would show them that they are at a critical point.

That would be true if we were talking about DayZ here, but right now, Arma is the underdog to that. And demonstrating how bad it does financially isn't a solution. Especially when the passion is gone from the people that have to make the decision.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
They talked about changing direction with a Western themed RPG

such a shame it didn't happen. i really dig arma for it's authentic parts but i always thought that a lot of players are so elitist and conservative about the whole strictly military realism thing. i think they mentioned aliens along the line too some time. too bad they didn't have the balls to piss off some of the milsim fanatics :p it might have ended up more successful than arma while remaining the sandbox it is.

You can in a sense tell that they're in a certain level of auto-pilot when bringing up a simple, easy to see problem with an AI such as reaction time or wrong weapon and they ask you for a repro..? If someone where at the wheel with a real passion for really fixing let alone taking the game to the next level, you would think they'd see the many glaring problems via a simple playtest.

very well said.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  

×