what cheap, immersion features would be good for Arma?

[maffa 29]

Im for the smaller but more variating islands. Honestly there's no way to exploit Altis as big as it is. When you do a transfer from base to OP you can munch some 10/20km, but how much of non descriptive land do you need to skip through? Even in heavily populated maps, how many players and Ai and vehicles and overall added objects can you sustain? 200 top? Elektrozavodsk can easily contain them all. Altis is too big and looks all the same for its own good (and it's still too small for fixed wing air and sea operations, and always will be unless someone comes with a map including Peloponnese and Cyprus). And we still miss mideastern islands, where 85% of RL operations take place.

Now if there were some mountain islands, with mountaneering, ski, and snow based operations and survival...

[chortles 263]

Even in heavily populated maps, how many players and Ai and vehicles and overall added objects can you sustain? 200 top? Elektrozavodsk can easily contain them all. Altis is too big and looks all the same for its own good (and it's still too small for fixed wing air and sea operations, and always will be unless someone comes with a map including Peloponnese and Cyprus).

In this I personally find a fundamental issue with Arma as milsim -- if a terrain can simultaneously be too big for ground (infantry, wheeled, tracked) and possibly rotary-wing yet too small for fixed-wing and "sea operations" (I'm guessing that you mean "big ship as walkable yet moving vehicle"), then is there any (plausible) way to achieve a map that can incorporate both "properly" -- without VBS3's terrain technology which was enabled by a corporate acquisition -- or do you just see them as irreconcilable ideas due to the differences in scale?

And we still miss mideastern islands, where 85% of RL operations take place.

The setting should have already told you that BI doesn't give a damn where any percentage of real-world operations take place... BI's outright stated that the Expansion's new terrain "objective is to produce something truly distinctive: an entirely different feeling to that of Altis, Takistan or Chernarus", hence people's speculation about that meaning entirely different terrain types -- i.e. snowy mountains like you're interested in. ;)

I don't think islands are a cheap immersion feature..

Me neither... Edited March 29, 2015 by Chortles

[katipo66 94]

I don't think islands are a cheap immersion feature..

But how about better AI helo insertions instead of the climb to 1000mtrs or what ever it is and advertise to the whole area that "we are landing right about here yo".. Watching the AI landing is like watching granny reverse park, even worse when you in the helo getting shot at.

[maffa 29]

This is true, the twitch when hit is completely ridiculous and lets the rest of the game down, i shake my head each time i see it, start swearing on 4th hit :D

oh i can even go further. What people do when hit by a bullet is not twitch, we all agree. The things they dont do, moreover, is looking at the source of the bullet, locking on and retaliate with topmost accuracy. This unless the people taking the bullet are not Terminators Type 800, in which case the animation is very accurate. Another hting they dont do -humans, not T800s- is falling like silent cinema divas when dead. Unless the are silent cinema divas, but then it will be the scenario to blame in this case.

The things humans do as soon as they are hit by a bullet is recoiling along with the impact, put a hand on the wound, try patching their wound, panicking, looking for medication and help, and stay out of further bullets for a while. I think it is safe to say that as soon as someone receives a non fatal yet full hit bullet into his body, wherever he may be hit, he is going to be out of the game for at least 20 seconds.

---------- Post added at 20:21 ---------- Previous post was at 20:01 ----------

In this I personally find a fundamental issue with Arma as milsim -- if a terrain can simultaneously be too big for ground (infantry, wheeled, tracked) and possibly rotary-wing yet too small for fixed-wing and "sea operations" (I'm guessing that you mean "big ship as walkable yet moving vehicle"), then is there any (plausible) way to achieve a map that can incorporate both "properly" -- without VBS3's terrain technology which was enabled by a corporate acquisition -- or do you just see them as irreconcilable ideas due to the differences in scale?

Unless they manage to fit thousand of people inside a server, EVE-like, on a EMEA map i dont see how this will ever be possible.

EDIT: i threw a fit back in 2013 on a thread about fixed wing vehicles on Arma, which i still think it's a waste of resources and coding time. You also partecipated on that thread. I still stand by my opinion.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?160966-There-should-be-multiple-jets-in-the-release-version&p=2462071#post2462071

Air warfare -and sea warfare which i know much less- is though stuff. Every piece of plane costs millions, and their pilots even more. Aerial warfare starts on safe ground, as far as a quarter of fuel tank can take you from the front, and if you are a strategic bomber that could well mean another continent. If you take a look at any war in the latest 30 years, no plane ever took off from a country at war. Iraq buried their MiGs and Su's when war was on its land. I think the last aerial operations that took place from the same country where they had to operate was the Incheon/Pusan defense during the early stages of the Korean war in 1950.

Same is to be said about naval warfare. If we are talking about warships, so carriers cruisers frigates submarines etc, the smallest ground you need to have is Baltic sea/Northern Sea/Half Mediterranean scaled. I reckon the Black Sea too small for this purpose.

The setting should have already told you that BI doesn't give a damn where any percentage of real-world operations take place... BI's outright stated that the Expansion's new terrain "objective is to produce something truly distinctive: an entirely different feeling to that of Altis, Takistan or Chernarus", hence people's speculation about that meaning entirely different terrain types -- i.e. snowy mountains like you're interested in.

well, when mission planning i dont know how people do it, but i for sure dont have any first hand experience so i have to rely on the impressions news and books give to me.

Me neither...

I suppose because you think they are cheap, because there's nothing more immersive than a new ambient a map gives.

Edited March 29, 2015 by Maffa

[2nd ranger 282]

What people do when hit by a bullet is not twitch, we all agree. The things they dont do, moreover, is looking at the source of the bullet, locking on and retaliate with topmost accuracy.

Well, neither does the AI, actually. They suffer a temporary reduction in accuracy after being shot. They do keep firing immediately after being hit, which is bad, but their accuracy is impaired for a short time. Obviously there needs to be a better hit animation and corresponding delay in returning fire, but AI dev oukej recently said this on the subject:

in the end the desired state would be that the lower skilled AI takes more time to start shooting after a distraction and then even more time the AI will still keep firing off the target. It seems it needs some tweaking ;)

The new suppression feature will complement this behaviour, because if you're shooting at an AI, he may already be suffering reduced accuracy from your rounds passing nearby even if you didn't hit him. But I guess in the context of this thread, what is needed is a better hit animation.

[chortles 263]

Unless they manage to fit thousand of people inside a server, EVE-like, on a EMEA map i dont see how this will ever be possible.

EDIT: i threw a fit back in 2013 on a thread about fixed wing vehicles on Arma, which i still think it's a waste of resources and coding time. You also partecipated on that thread. I still stand by my opinion.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?160966-There-should-be-multiple-jets-in-the-release-version&p=2462071#post2462071

The (funny? sad?) thing is, I believe that the Arma 3 dev leadership very much agrees with you on this matter and that their continual, explicitly-declared focus on the infantry scale (comprising infantry, ground vehicles, helicopters especially, and small boats) is reflective of that agreement... but I'm guessing that BI also feels the same way about ships and thus their being relegated to background scenery (other than the LST) with only small boats as driveable is also reflective of that. Now if only their terrain design complemented that...

I suppose because you think they are cheap, because there's nothing more immersive than a new ambient a map gives.

On the contrary, I absolutely agree about the power of immersive qualities in terrain design, but no way is a terrain (much less a good one) a case of "little features that are cheap to implement".

[maffa 29]

The (funny? sad?) thing is, I believe that the Arma 3 dev leadership very much agrees with you on this matter and that their continual, explicitly-declared focus on the infantry scale (comprising infantry, ground vehicles, helicopters especially, and small boats) is reflective of that agreement... but I'm guessing that BI also feels the same way about ships and thus their being relegated to background scenery (other than the LST) with only small boats as driveable is also reflective of that. Now if only their terrain design complemented that...

Unfortunately there's the balance of things. There's always the rock-paper-scissor balance you need to think of. How would you cope with a warship some miles away at sea that has some howtizer class cannons (and GPS guided missiles) hammering inland positions? How are you going to counter a LGB from 25000 feet? As things are now, we have our hands full with a single attack helicopter: without proper equipment, a hind/apache can easily reap 40-50 infantrymen totally unopposed. The same cannot be said, for example, for a MBT, where a few AT4s/RPGs can patch the threat. Best thing is considering them as "acts of God", stuff that fall from the sky and that you cannot do a thing about. And TBH i dont like having to create the one person with the one single use weapon that kills the one otherwise invincible enemy. It's too gamey. Having one soldier with one stinger missile is much like the triangle player that has to make his "TING!" at the end of the concert. Sounds lame.

[Guest]

I don't think islands are a cheap immersion feature..

The feature already exists, and always will, and my proposals are primarily aimed at reducing size and scale, not increasing, I don't see how that causes things to be more expensive rather than be 'cheap'. I'm simply stating ideas involving modifications (primarily reductions) of any future maps/islands that will be created and released by BI.

No worries. 3D Editor will solve the realistic mission design problem. Object placement, as you say, is one of big NOs in mission making because it's hard to get accurate and the current workaround to better workflow (Zeus+MCC) isn't the best there can be.

Yea.. that would be awesome :) After spending some time editing with Oblivion some time ago, it really changed what I thought could be done with an editor.. I mean you can spend some quality time in an editor like that decorating both interiors and exteriors in such a highly functional 3d editor and come up with very good looking environments that match the quality of what you would see released in a high quality game and all of that with NO map making/modeling experience and very little time needed to get used to placing objects in the 3D editor. (Granted that Imo the Oblivion editors scripting system on the other hand was kind of a pain in the neck, as was dealing with working with the AI as well).

Yeah I'd rather have a terrain the size of Chernarus with higher detail and smaller settlements than one the size of Altis with two abandoned cities. But on the subject of CQB, that's one reason the buildings can't be full of normal furniture - the AI wouldn't be able to move through them. But frankly, even a couple of pictures on the wall, a toilet and a kitchen sink would make the buildings in Altis look a little better, because it's not just the lack of objects in the buildings that is weird - most of them only have two or three rooms in them. It's like the buildings are prefabs that have just been erected and haven't had plumbing or dividing walls put in yet.

Another reason against pre-furnishing the buildings is that people might want to create their own interior compositions, which is why above I only mentioned objects that wouldn't be in the way of people doing that (or in the way of the AI). But on the other hand, even the Takistan buildings had some furnishings like a table, rugs, and small objects scattered around (in the rural civilian dwellings). I'm still pretty impressed by the quality and complexity of those buildings.

Oh yea I totally agree. I would not want anything in those 'pre fab' buildings permanently locked into the building models. They could simply just include various objects placed by hand in the buildings right in the editor on new maps (with any vertical rotation/etc being in objects Init code), and then objects can be removed/moved, etc.

Edited March 30, 2015 by Guest

[bad benson 1733]

I don't think islands are a cheap immersion feature..

But how about better AI helo insertions instead of the climb to 1000mtrs or what ever it is and advertise to the whole area that "we are landing right about here yo".. Watching the AI landing is like watching granny reverse park, even worse when you in the helo getting shot at.

lol. 100% agreed. i think it would much more sense to "cheat" and use non dynamic methods to force land AI properly than having what we have now. it just doesn't work. scrap it. replace it. fix it. long overdue.

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

I remember in Arma 2, the UN showcase. If you fire into the air, it will cause a one of the two MI-8's that come to land, to crash into the hill sides of Takistan. For some reason, even though the heli wasn't around, it got spooked, and hit a hill. You would then we accountable for them dying and everyone in the base would simply open up on you. Lol, AI. They kill you because they screwed up. It's not that bad in Arma 3 though, AI don't hit much anymore.

[sttosin 67]

Fastrope!!!

Why was this not part of helicopter DLC? mad:

[chortles 263]

Why was this not part of helicopter DLC? mad:

Ruled out as far back as Gamescom, no indication that the designers ever reconsidered it.

[sttosin 67]

Ruled out as far back as Gamescom, no indication that the designers ever reconsidered it.

It made sense to however. Especially since they introduced sling loading. Its been on community wishlist. Very much hoping they will tackle at some point like they are with bipods now. Just seems like a missed opportunity.

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

It made sense to however. Especially since they introduced sling loading. Its been on community wishlist. Very much hoping they will tackle at some point like they are with bipods now. Just seems like a missed opportunity.

It's very possible. There is still a a ticket on the Feedback tracker that includes rope related requests. Fast-roping is on that list, and the ticket is still labeled, "Assigned". If Lifting was the only official implementation that BIS planned, they probably would have marked it as Solved by now. One can hope. You never know.

On a separate note, VON. I know, it's probably not cheap per say, but i swear, it needs to change. Forget about what they said they did to it, it's still buggy as hell. You have to hot mic for a good 30 minutes before your messages even get through to anyone in one piece. When you first start using VON, it starts out choppy, and stays that way for a goo 5-10 minutes. I avoid using it and prefer typing, as it get's the message across more seamlessly.