ArmA 3 Large Terrain Shaking Issue Explained

[Snake Man 407]

Since Armed Assault days we have been riddled with the large terrain shaking issue, this is bit difficult to explain so I created a video to demonstrate it.

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In short your weapon and its accessories shake badly on large terrains (classic 51km is fine but beyond that it begins) when you are in the "far side" which is when you get closer to top right corner.

This is nuisance for ArmA 2 and ArmA 3, I'm not realistically expect bis to fix this, but yeah it would be really cool to have smooth game play experience on larger terrains "far sides" in ArmA 3. Feel free to open feedback tracker issue with reference to this video heh.

[Szelf 10]

This is nuisance for ArmA 2 and ArmA 3, I'm not realistically expect bis to fix this, but yeah it would be really cool to have smooth game play experience on larger terrains "far sides" in ArmA 3. Feel free to open feedback tracker issue with reference to this video heh.

Ahh, the good old floating point precision problem :)

In short : object positions are (usually) represented using floating point data types

( google for IEEE-754 on wikipedia, this is my first post on the forum and I am

not allowed to add any links at the moment ).

The thing with floating point data type is that when the numbers are big, they lose precision.

In computer graphics this starts to occur when object position coded in single precision floating point is more than 30 000 units ( usually meters ) from (0,0,0) point.

And it starts to look like the position of the object is "quantified".

Look at the video at 4:05 - the rifle looks like it moves for certain number of

centimeters every frame - its movement is quantified.

BIS should use double precision numbers to store the information about object position/rotation

( it looks like they do this for people in Arma 3 ).

The problem for BIS is that they probably use single precision numbers in hundreds of places

in their code ( rendering, networking, scripting, AI etc etc ).

Big and painful code review is coming to poor developers :)

EDIT : submitted as issue 19751 to feedback tracker.

I also created a mission, that you can download from feedback tracker

and check the issue yourself ( BTW : I found a small lake on a

new VR map. It is located in NE corner ). I also checked that this

problem touches only a soldier equipment.

People ( and things that they carry on themselves ), vehicles and

objects driven by physics are not affected by this issue.

You can check it out by driving a kart in a mission and trying to push a chair.

Edited July 15, 2014 by Szelf