Arma 4 a look to the future

[Greenfist 1863]

I assume all this has been mentioned before in the thread, but regarding the recent comments: 

Their new flagship engine does dynamic shadows already, has (seemingly) much more efficient resource usage, and does expose a lot more of the previously engine-side functionality to modders. 

Arma 3, on the other hand, won't see any major changes or official content anymore. I mean, the downsized team first came up two years ago already, and just the other day BI said there's only a few guys left keeping eye on the life support.

[Asmodeuz 54]

Should there be Arma 4 (or "a new milsim with some name" from BI) and it's made with Enfusion then I hope they will include as much of the tech that they've been creating for DayZ all this time. I especially mean the tech that affects character status in many different ways (hunger, thirst, temperature and so on, basically everything that can today be read about in the DayZ wiki, see: Character Status). Would be nice if the next game offered such functionalities from the get-go and those could also be available for mission makers as placeable modules or something the like in the (possible) mission editor.

[=jps=sgtrock 4]

Maybe I missed it as I skimmed through this thread but I didn't see anyone including server admin tasks on their wishlists.  For example:

 

• Role based authentication so I, as a server owner, can set limited privileges for some users.  Allow them to kick, ban, etc. 
  • The original Half-Life engine had a mod called Admin Mod that made this a relatively simple task.  It was the best way that I've ever seen to make sure that your server has near 24/7 protection to protect against griefers.  I've never seen anything like it as a mod for any of the ArmA engines, which is a real shame.
• Make it easy to report player abuse to a server owner via an in-game mod. 
  • Even if it's just a quick email sent via a quick button selection, at least it becomes possible to find the right timestamps in the server logs.
• Keep the ability to run a local dedicated server for LAN play. 
  • Too many games these days have either stripped out this function from existing engines (I'm looking at you, Insurgency:Sandstorm) or don't include it at all.  It's silly to do this.  It restricts the ability to do local testing of MP mods, for example.  Not to mention, makes it a lot harder run a LAN party.  😉
• Consider how to best modularize the game engine. 
  • This is already done via the headless client option, for example, to improve AI performance.  It's still a pain to get configured correctly, though.  You still need to buy an additional license to run it, too, which has never thrilled me.
  • I would love to see this extended to the back end.  There's been some talk in this thread of moving away from a single global lock which is definitely a step in the right direction.  I keep wondering if it would make sense to extend that thinking to consider breaking up the game engine to run in microservices inside containers.  Done right, it would make it a lot easier to scale performance up as object and player counts go up. 

 

What do you think?  Do these kinds of features make sense to people?

[Sosse_HD 0]

Hallo dear People,

i have a question. The new Engine was tested on DayZ and it was succesfull! and pretty good. Will the Arma team make Arma4 with the new Engine so its better lag free and even more fun? because it would be very cool if they make an Arma4 because Arma3 was realesed 2013 and 7 years later not Arma 4 maybe its even capable with steam VR?

[target_practice 163]

BIS have stated that the intend to use Enfusion for future projects, including Arma. The unprecedented lifetime of Arma 3 compared to previous installments would certainly indicate that they intended to wait until they had a viable new engine, as opposed to further use of Real Virtuality.

The current state of Arma 4's development is unknown, but it's unlikely to be anywhere beyond pre-production.

[old_painless 182]

Check out this discussion of subtle findings:

 

[CertainDeath7 11]

First i wanna Thank all bohemia Devs for bringing us the biggest and best combined warfare series that is existing! Arma is  simply the best game in this nieshe, well done!
@ Dear Moderator. Thank you for pulling my thread into the right forum subsection.

But i rather would not want to have it as a page 7 comment on someones proposal to make arma 4 ww2, but i wanna suggest/discuss features almost exclusively from a PvP Perspective. I could not delete the posts in the thread you merged it, sry for inconveniance

In Short my Background to Arma: I play it now for years in a german Team vs Team Community "Operation Pandora Trigger", we organize combined warfare battles every 10 days in campaigns that ongo half a year, the community is active since ofp, and will stay true for many years to come! Even now in times when playerbase is dwindling, we fight battles with around 60+ people every time. Our community also was engaged in a few different user made competitive tournements (ctf and more)
On top of that i have played a lot of EUTW, even more KOTH, and i think i have not finished a single one of the single player missions from the game, and played in 3 user made pve missions, so as you can see, for me only the multiplayer experience matters, the singleplayer experience bores me.
Arma 3 is the best game there is for such TvT combined warfare. But there could be some improvements.

This features would improve TvT, tactics, and combined warfare:

• Multicore enhancment: we lost so many players, some with competitive background, which liked the principlies what we are doing, but they could not bare the fps. we have a slim mission, but still, best you can get is 60 fps when you have high end + overclocked computer. A future Iteration of the game must allow a medicore quad core computer to have around 60 fps minimum, and a high end pc must reach 144+ fps! Future improvments in computing will be by stacking more cores, cause with speeds we reached limits, and even smaller production processes will make it even harder to maintain the speeds gamers wish. So multicore enhancment cant just be "this core makes this", and after 8 cores theres no significant improvment anymore, cause it will create the next dead end in 5-10 years.
• input lag: there is a big input lag from clicking the mouse to triggering the shot ingame on your own screen (!), and the time till enemy receives a hit lasts even longer, often up to a second delay! this must be adressed and drastically improved!
• guerilla warfare is near impossible. in real life i am pretty good in a tactic we call "camouflage and deceive" in arma 3 you only have poor possibilities to practice this. Ideas to adress this:
  1.) a soldier could have options to use his enviroment. to take some branches of bush and place it somewhere, or to camouflage his silouette, or a vehicle. and it should take time.
  2.) the soldier should be able to terraform terrain with proper tools (dig a guard hole f.e., or a trench, which would use much more time, and require a pickaxe on asphalt on top of the shovel or stronger machinery)
  3.) Sewers should definitely be a thing in cities! It adds a whole new tactical layer onto attacking and defending areas.🙂
  4.) it should be possible to make and place underground structures in editor, and to a certain point also ingame. we would be first to play a asymetric campaign with a numerical superior enemy to a technological superior, but in open enviroment without use of underground and camouflage it would be a joke, so we never did a asymetric campaign in arma 3, which is a shame, for a game that is often used for milsim
  5.) a way to easily readjust camouflage patterns and colours of vehicles and clothing in mission editor or somewhere else. f.e. our csat fraction on tanoa is moaning about the bad camouflage pattern and colours while fighting a nato jungle camo that has excellent colour sheme
  6.) to turn shadows off should at client side not be an option. hiding in the (semi)shadows is a key point of camouflage, especially at night. If shadows on distance are to ressource hungry, there may be auto generated LOD for the shadows? does not have to be perfect? Just ideas, i dont decide whats possible.
• more interaction with "stuff". ability to move f.e. furniture, f.e. to allow for creating barriers, but you also can cut trees and you will have a trunk and some braches, or a power pole, whatever. If you have the right tools. would allow for a new class in the game, the army engineer with its own tools/machines/vehicles. you could also move stuff to make a building climbable.
• more accurate destruction of buildings:
  - while an apfsds makes a hole into a building, with some bricks missing on all walls it hits in its way through, a HE shell can blow parts out of whole buildings. how you do it is not that important, but there should be more buildings states, then just intact and destroyed, and it should have impact on the battlefield and make it more dynamic.

  - possibility of creating loopholes and foxholes in buildings interior and exterior walls (with the right tools depending on what wall you have there, a mud wall can be penetrated by salvos of heavy mg fire or crowbar, while a concrete wall needs a LOT of time with crowbar, so you wanna bring a jackhammer for a fast solution.

  - possibility to remove whole wall sections of a building, f.e. to create covered stall for military vehicle inside a family houses living room. good luck they made its exterior surface mostly glass, so it was not necessary to call the engeniers, we simply backward drove the tank in.

• Vehicle modernisation: As the foot soldier gets many more opportunieties, so should the armoured force as well:
  1.) more modern shell types: if the infantry has the ability to dig in deeper, the vehicles should have fancy stuff like airburst shells, to fight covered inf, or proximity fuse air targets.
  2.) more forms of vehicle sensors for vehicles. fe. usually u know when you are laser paintet when in a 2030 vehicle^^
  3.) modern countermeasures in variety for vehicles (flare, chaff, soft kill and hard kill APS, reactive plating etc) and some possibility of automation through computing (server settings)
  4.) improvments in vehicle damage models. way more detailed models with hard and weaksposts and different forms of armor reacting different to different projectiles.

• Terrain modification: Freedom! I thinks its basically the same feature as listed in terraform terrains. would not only allow for shaping maps, f.e. to make balancing in tvt or creating missions for pve and tvt, or simply making a crater in terrain, when artillery hits, or beeing able to create a hull down position for an armoured vehicle, given enough time and manpower to dig the hole (or having a caterpillar^^)
• Soldiers mobility: Depending on stances and obstacles there should be different ways to overcome obstacles. there are fences where you dont have to jump over, maybe you crawl under? Or hatch between the bars while crounching? While the only way to get over a 2.5m wall is to make a jump and grab the top, or maybe your comrade can give you a robber leader for a faster approach? (or just place explosives^^)
  - possibility to climb (depending on your loadout, weight, and the object you wanna climb, you have to holster weapon etc). f.e. climb some trees, walls, pylons. (its recommended to storm enemy occupied buildings from above - if you can)
• Melee Weapons and unarmed melee
• further improvments on how different vehicles interact with different terrains
• enhancment of weather features and seasons , and weather interacting with terrain, like snow falling and accumulating on surfaces, or a dirt road getting muddy and hard to drive when its raining, or heavy tracked vehicle creating dirt traces when driving through rain soacked meadow, or different sea states with different wheater types (and a pond behaves different then the pacific)
  Spoiler

   

  A Hydrologic Simulation would be awesome!

  In our last Team vs Team Battle we had fog.

  We played Tanoa. The fog was a bit underwhelming. At Sea Level you had 5 metres of view, when you came higher, there was no fog at a certain height, did not matter where on map you where.

  now. i know pictures of tropical islands with cloudy mountains and when there is fog, or clouds, it may float around the hills, down or up valleys.
  We talked about that in our debriefing, and how such a feature would make the battlefield more immersive AND it would constantly change the battlefield conditions (f.e. you had clear sight with your sniper rifle or your drone, but then a cloud floats through the valley you are observing, you have to adapt now, or ur useless for a certain timeframe)

  
  The Hydrologic Simulation should include/control:

  • Moisture of Surfaces
  • moisture level of soil -> may have terrain modification impact -> fe different ruts when a tracked vehicle drives over soacked or dry land, or more stamina usage and slower progress when the soldier has to dig into soacked soil (also resulting in muddy surface, where its harder to walk).
  • All Forms of Fog (Ground Bound or High)
  • Clouds, also the ones close to ground floating around and arising. different cloud formations for different wheaters.
  • Forms and intensity of Precipitation (Rain, Snow, Hail, with scaling intensities while the wheater moves)
  • waterbodies
    - behave differently in different conditions, interact with terrain, and change volume
    - may even not exist when the right conditions are not present (f.e puddles or in extreme a vadi for desert maps)
  • the way audio is moving. in a foggy morning, everything sounds dampened. on a clear day you can hear the best.
  • Maybe it is possible to pre render some of the physics for that? Like what nvidia does with graphics for games where developer buys computing time for that? I have no clue from such things, as before, just ideas.
     

  Such features should defenitely be in server control in multiplayer, and if there is this cloud moving here on my computer, it should move in that location for every other player on the server.

   

   

• moon phases resulting different lighting on different times and calendar dates (or settings)
• modern screens have functions like black tuner, which gives the player who owns such a device a big advantage in night battles (thats why we dont play night battles anymore). when playing in night time, the game should not render colours outside illuminated areas to suppress this feature to make night time pvp more balanced, and as a human barely cant see colours even in the shiniest full moon night it wont be missed ;).
• Smoother Terrain especially around ridges, and more terrain details.
• Pre-Made Instruction Sets and User Interfaces for customizeable PvP Missions, such as a easy to use ingame soldiers loadout manager, or different types of objectives, everything scaleable and possibility to remove and add or edit stuff
  i dont know how practical this is, i am not a modder. just an idea.
   

• Balance:

  Shikra is King. Neo is King. T140k is King (the others are good too, but after t140 there is t100 because of its exceptional mobility, then kuma, good mobility with better gun, and then those pity nato in their slow things with a mediocre gun). Tigris is way better then cheetah (because of mobility meta). Indie doesnt even have such thing. List can continue...
  There should be a technical power balance. Not everything has to be the same, but the introduced factions should in sum be en par to each other, when placing them in PvP enviroment. Especially in the Air you should either have competitive hardware, or you have the options on the ground to contest the air space effectively, or f.e. if your top speed and acceleration is inferior to enemies jet, you may have the edge in AA rocketry or something.
  A certain startup mmo company even made a pvp gamemode which was on open beta for pledgers only for balancing their stuff for the main game.
  One can dream, can he?

 

This features are really good, make arma good and definitely should stay:

• big variety on combat stances. when you port it to console, just let it in there as it is, but pls dont remove such great feature from pc anytime, just because the kiddies cant use it! Its so much better then in every other game, and if you practice its even useful in TvT! Maybe there is headroom to impove this element even further?
• big variety of actions and commands. Hell i have binded my page down page up, home and end keys. in none other game i need that, and its good. a big variety of options, that can make combat less foreseeable, and keep the game interesting. Command Roses could get a thing on top of that, if needed, but really should not be commands nested into menues to make command rose a fast interaction. I only have to use my mousewheel to switch vehicle seats, or interact with static objects, cause i double and triple assigned keys, so for me this is not really an issue (loocking at JR^^)
• big variety of vehicles and vehicles types: I am 100% sure, if you do half of the things listed above and just implement vehicles from older arma with all the stats and visuals, 100% of players of my 300people arma community will buy the game. you can add new stuff on top of that whenever you want, we really wish, you focus on the core features, to make the game as versatile as possible!
  Then bring us the armies of different timeframes and so on as dlc, we will buy them all 🙂It just would be a shame, if a new arma 4 had less stuff, then arma 3, thats why i would support a move, that saves some ressources by reusing as much as needed, to save development time for additional content on top of that.
• good modability: i do not fear, that we will have downgrades here. we can hope for improvments, BI is making a good job in supporting modability of the game, and this art can be cultivated and polished to make it even deeper. Then arma 4 can be, what arma 3 was: an incubator for many ideas and many nieshes and playstyles.

This features are not really needed:
Dont make a mistake with going WW12 or similar, cause modern timeframe has the most tactical bandwidth. f.e. a korea war mission with 3 new armies could be a big dlc with a map and a own storyline rather then the base game, which is best placed with all modern means of warfare. ( i would love a korean war mission for dlc. korea war was a time in history, when jets became good, but not goodlike. air to air missiles and air to ground missiles have been in their kids shoes at this time, would be pretty good multiplayer balancing i guess)


Nice to have, but not PvP:

• More and more diverse enviromental Audio FX - yeah, i love my bush cricket. it follows me. in every bush the same cricket, and its in every bush, it also never needs a brake.😄 Just an example for a broad variety of possibilities.
   

it may be, that i edit this thread, maybe someone has more very good ideas, i would love to discuss this, and we are all waiting for arma 4 related news. we really are.

 

--------------------------------------------------------

Edit 10.09.2020:

women characters: give em a fair representation in this game too. There are women in service and in this game all over the world.

 

Edited September 10, 2020 by CertainDeath7
added and stuffed the armored vehicles section and women

[rübe 127]

I think state of the art text-to-speech synthesis absolutely would be a really big win for the whole family. Speech and radio chatter is immersive as fuck (to say the least), but a huge hassle to get right. Meanwhile the vocabulary of the radio protocols is limited and not very accessible anyways. The idea of such radio protocol is still excellent, just needs an overhaul, that is a switch from fixed sentences/vocabulary to deeply learned/trained text-to-speech synthesis. I'd suggest a hybrid approach, where you still have voice actors doing it old school for perfectly dramatic cut scenes in the campaign or what not. You still need them to train the text-to-speech thing anyways. State of the art is amazing, BIS could totally pull this off, and once trained that stuff would easily run in pretty much realtime on core 11.

Getting the emotions of such speech right can be easily switched by combat-mode (given it's all nicely parametrized and trained by voice actors). Stealth for calm and quite talk. Normal. And combat for shouting. Perfect. What else would you need? Add usual pitch modifier, (or something more clever). Add effects on top, reverb depending on the environment, or some distortion and bandpassing for radio, and that would kick so much ass.

Mission makers could put speech and talk dynamically together with ease(!) and it would integrate perfectly with the radio protocols, because it's the same model/voice. I'm convinced, the quality of missions would skyrocket dramatically. Because it's not just about immersion. Communication is god damn critical to convey intent (duh). Ever tried to make a single player mission where the player is not the leader of the pack? You need to make your AI leader talk, or chances are the player will simply goof off and do whatever. You like sneaky missions? You need to make the enemy officer talk and reveal his plans. And don't even get me started on generated/randomized missions, civilians/NPCs, and so many other things that has never been done justice to, because nobody got time to record all that.

 

Assembling a team of hobby voice actors for your mission (or module) is a huge burden, requires good connections, proper organization, and then your mission is "frozen" because you can't record it all over again, and chances are it will turn out meh, no matter how hard you try, because voice acting is hard, nothing is consistent, Alice used a shitty microphone with terrible noise level - best she can do, Bob was high as fuck, it sounds like noodles, and now he refuses to record it all over again since he's high as fuck, again, bless Bob, and so much work for this? I say: no! We must put an end to this madness. Imagine a world where you can just

    _dude tell format["hit that %1, at %2 and %3 already! Go, go, go!", _this, _and, _that] 

and the unit would yell that shit in your face because he's in the danger zone right now.

 

...but yeah, terrain features (all of them, including seasons and mountains  and climbing and rivers and underground and flora and fauna) and brand new, super flexible killer AI that could drive a car and actually live a day in that amazing environment with rivers and bridges and snow and bears and tanks... That's also important.

 

 

[Weisssbrot 8]

The next Arma is confirmed!?

The post is from 2018 -_-

 

[nikiforos 450]

Excellent hopefully my interest for the game will be at the same level when it's released in 2028 😁😂

[major_barnes1987 33]

ArmA franshise must not die.Cause there isn't any other game like it in the whole gaming industry.We know BI is working on a big project we all think is ArmA 4.A confirmation is all we need.

[jeza 5416]

Google Stadia Exclusive.

[Jackal326 1181]

Also worth mentioning is 'Contact' came out after 'Tanks', so take that Tweet with a pinch of salt. Its far from a confirmation and is more of a "...if we make another Arma game it will utilise the Enfusion Engine" than actually stating one is in the works. Don't get me wrong, I hope there will be a continuation of the series, but I'm not holding my breath until one is announced officially and not on April 1st...

[drebin052 324]

10 minutes ago, Jackal326 said:

Also worth mentioning is 'Contact' came out after 'Tanks', so take that Tweet with a pinch of salt. Its far from a confirmation and is more of a "...if we make another Arma game it will utilise the Enfusion Engine" than actually stating one is in the works. Don't get me wrong, I hope there will be a continuation of the series, but I'm not holding my breath until one is announced officially and not on April 1st...

 

Crowe's tweet wasn't wrong even at the time of its posting though. Contact was the Dutch team's project and Old Man was just a freebie that began development before Tanks. Same goes for Art of War: yet another semi-freebie that requires minimal input from the main Czech devs.

[Valken 622]

I am glad they are thinking about ARMA 4! If the game can have "standard" settings at this quality level 

 

 

 

and use multicore properly, it will be a Alpha MUST BUY for me like in ARMA 3!

 

Just be honest about the hardware requirements because many of us would like to plan any upgrade properly.

[froggyluv 2136]

Yall basing this all off a Dev who said this and then quit ... 😋

[Wavemaker 1]

Arma 4 will come out the same time as Half life 3.

[CertainDeath7 11]

edited women characters for fair representation

into my suggestion list above in post

 

[Tiuhtukkainen 10]

Just some feedback/wishes based on 1000+ hours of Arma 3 and at least as many hours of Armed Assault, Arma 2 and Operation Flashpoint. 

 

Improved vehicle AI

- Ability to follow roads and traffic laws without crashing.

- Ability to drive as a column without crashing.

Improved AI pathfinding

- Improvements to building navigation / room cleaning. 

- No more walking through each other.

- If possible, some kind of support for custom compositions (creating custom paths in Eden editor?) 

Improved animations

- More lifelike animations in general. No more unnatural animations such as the current ADS crouch walk / running.

- AI shouldn't muzzle-sweep constantly. 

Command menu / system overhaul

- Kind of self-explanatory.

- No more scroll wheel.

- Ability to deploy static weapons much more conveniently and precisely. 

Expanded unit capture feature

- Expanded to ground vehicles and infantry.

- Ability for AI to smoothly move into the position where the captured sequence starts. 

- Could be used to circumvent problems with AI pathfinding (custom compositions and such) or create room cleaning sequences. 

Performance tweaks

- Self-explanatory 

 

As for features that would be nice, but that I feel are not as important to implement 

- Some kind of way to simulate deep snow and maybe even mud. Doesn't have to look perfect. 

- The ability to deform terrain in Eden editor to create realistic trench systems.

- Low and high ready positions for weapons (very much like in Ground Branch) and AI support for those stances as well.

- AI deploying bipods. 

- More animations with fluid transitions, so they could be used outside of cutscenes.

- Improved stealth mode with handsignals and more realistic movement and behavior.

 

Also, I know this is a bit unusual and weird suggestion, but considering not everyone records custom voice lines to their single-player missions, the game probably could benefit from easier and more streamlined way to make "visual novel" style dialogue windows with background images. 

 

/    /    /    /

 

Thank you for the great games. There's nothing quite like them on the market. 

[R0adki11 3949]

On 10/15/2020 at 4:12 PM, Tiuhtukkainen said:

-snip-

 

Moved your thread to the correct location -  Thanks

[razzored 37]

doubt they'd go for ww2.
Maybe as a dlc at best.

[pierremgi 4889]

1 hour ago, razzored said:

doubt they'd go for ww2.
Maybe as a dlc at best.

Future is easier, unfortunately. A little touch of future makes you free to do anything you want, skipping the History analysis and equipment's fidelity/accuracy.

Humbly request for the modification of the utterly ugly CSAT uniforms and helmets.

Spoiler

Don't forget, the victory belongs to the army with the prettiest uniform!

 

[sgt_hawkins 9]

I'm pretty easy to please.. I just want female character models. I like creating realistic missions with dark overtones. As a veteran I believe people should see the dark part of combat that nobody wants to talk about. When Arma 3 first came out...I was super excited and I started working on a campaign featuring two families journey to becoming insurgents. Which was going to be based off some real life experiences that I have encountered. I never finished it because the female character assets were never delivered like I expected them too. I couldn't make the story make any sense whatsoever without female units.

 

Regardless of how you feel about female combat soldiers.. the complete lack of female units for me was a deal breaker and I moved on to other games.

 

I have recently checked back to see what progress Arma 3 has made over the years and found that modders finally filled the void. I feel like i can finally make the type of missions I enjoy creating again. Hopefully Arma 3 still has enough of a player base to enjoy them.

 

I don't think female character units is too much to ask for in 2021.....

 

 

[Janez 531]

1 hour ago, sgt_hawkins said:

I don't think female character units is too much to ask for in 2021.....

 

I don't think we should be fine with everything just because it's 2021 or 2077 for that matter.

 

I've seen quite a few posts around in that line of thinking lately but yours is different since you're asking for female character models, not female soldiers per se.

[sgt_hawkins 9]

22 hours ago, Janez said:

 

I don't think we should be fine with everything just because it's 2021 or 2077 for that matter.

 

I've seen quite a few posts around in that line of thinking lately but yours is different since you're asking for female character models, not female soldiers per se.

 

I never once said we should be fine with everything because it is 2021. There are some arguments that have no place in today. For instance I'm sure we can all agree that an argument for legalizing slavery is a 1700 argument and has no place in todays society. The argument against adding female character models in video games is a 1972 argument. We don't live in 1972 and we shouldn't have the women cant perform this or that role....type of argument. That argument was already resolved ..at least in the United States. 

 

If you are from a third world country and still see women as property or as lesser human beings...then I honestly don't know what to tell you.

 

Having female character models in video games is not a new thing. They have been doing this for decades. I think the argument is extremely ridiculous imho. We honestly shouldn't be having this type of debate in 2021.