Orientation Callouts Completely Broken

[froggyluv 2135]

Im not sure when this happened as they used to be somewhat reliable -but now bot AI/Player callouts are utterly borked. Im too old now for color commentary in the video but just note I am the leader always facing the enemy yet both my team/and myself (player) are constantly calling out enemy as Right/Right Flank. Worser still at the end an enemy Sniper who is dead ahead is called out as "Back". This hugely impacts reaction on to how to respond to an enemy's direction and honestly I just cant see how this is so broken?

 

 

[dreadpirate 173]

I've noticed this as well. Why can't they just call out a compass direction?

 

Or even bring back the on screen clock face from OFP?

[teabagginpeople 398]

Haha always was annoying as hell. 

 

Definitely compass bearings would have been way more helpful, considering the bootcamp emphasis on doing this. 

[sniper pilot 36]

Even the old “Oh’Clock” of OFP was more reliable. 

[Grumpy Old Man 3545]

This seems to be bugged to hell and back.

Had enemies being called out "behind us" or "to our left flank" with nothing actually being the case.

This is confusing the heck out of me when playing with AI teammates.

 

Seems that SP folks really got the wrong end of the stick this iteration of the franchise.

 

Cheers

[froggyluv 2135]

Ok this seems a bit silly and should be totally fixable by a dev as it requires no new voice acting etc ...South is treated as Back while North is treated as Front with Right and Left being effected respectively. Simple put an enemy unit north of you and youll call out Front while vice versa calls out Back. At longer ranges they tend to use Cardinal direction or compass callout and they seems to be in order. Its the shorter range stuff

[froggyluv 2135]

4 months and nothing. Makes me wonder if these sorts of things even bother the Devs or is just acceptable as  Arma quirkiness.. Cant imagine starting up a game be it Far Cry/GTA/insertMainstreamGameHere and hearing an AI yell out the exact opposite direction than the enemy actually is. Cost no money to hire additional voice acting -just delete the the false directions and use only cardinal direction ie "Enemy, North" etc.

[Grumpy Old Man 3545]

15 hours ago, froggyluv said:

4 months and nothing. Makes me wonder if these sorts of things even bother the Devs or is just acceptable as  Arma quirkiness.. Cant imagine starting up a game be it Far Cry/GTA/insertMainstreamGameHere and hearing an AI yell out the exact opposite direction than the enemy actually is. Cost no money to hire additional voice acting -just delete the the false directions and use only cardinal direction ie "Enemy, North" etc.

Thing is, sometimes the direction is correct, but not all the time. Cardinal directions seem to work 50% of the time, while relative directions like "front" or "back" seem to be wrong all the time.

Looks like there's a +180° offset in there somewhere.

 

Just played the combined arms showcase, got hostiles reported 100m behind me, so basically where I came from...

 

Cheers

[lexx 1363]

So what exactly is "front" and "back"? It is obviously not necessarily my direction if my character doesn't say it... but then how do I know who said it.. quickly? This whole mechanic really doesn't work all that well without any visual cues.

[froggyluv 2135]

 

 Its worse than that "Front" means North and "Back" is South - how it ended up that way ive no clue. When facing South, you can literally aim your cursor directly in front of yourself and the AI order delivered will be "Move, Back!"..."Left" and "Right" are borked respectively. I remember they were working on situational awareness type stuff for a while  -remember the Squad Radar we had for a bit before they abandoned? Literally feels like this entire aspect of the game has been abandoned as they could clearly at least take out the direction cues that are just outright wrong leading to many "WTF?"-type situations. Was playing a mission the other night which must have included its own verbal directional callouts (the voice was amateurish but good enough) such as "Enemy Northwest!" -and guess what -it works flawlessly. Really just dont get the stubborness to fix this -why would you want a new gamer just coming in to Arma to hear AI callouts that are just flat out wrong.. a few addons also do the squad radar thing which really helps -id love it if the icons would actually blink when talking so you could quickly ascertain their facing direction if nothing else.

 

Maybe if we can convince them this is also a Missile/Plane problem we can get some help *whistlingGif*

 

@GOM: Ive not seen them make mistakes with Cardinal directions -it always seems on point. I also discovered Goko has a custom directional callout addon -basically just a new voice when player hits reveal on enemy AI -but not setup for AI callouts which is what we need for better situational awareness. But again, it never seems to mess up with strictly cardinal directions

 

 

[froggyluv 2135]

LOL just reinstalled Arma3 on a new build tried Infantry Showcase and AI Squad leader called out "Engage Enemy -Back/Rear/Behind us!" the entire valley fight (no less than 40 times). So much so that i got worried about him and ran back to see if maybe HE was facing the wrong way -he wasnt.

[.kju 3244]

Anyone considered a scripted replacement yet?

[reyhard 2082]

On 1/19/2020 at 12:04 AM, froggyluv said:

LOL just reinstalled Arma3 on a new build tried Infantry Showcase and AI Squad leader called out "Engage Enemy -Back/Rear/Behind us!" the entire valley fight (no less than 40 times). So much so that i got worried about him and ran back to see if maybe HE was facing the wrong way -he wasnt.

Are you sure you are not using any mods? Just tried it and AI were either calling out Front or West all the time.

[froggyluv 2135]

I did have the lambs mod running and now without running - i cant duplicate the issue. Even with it running -it still wont replicate... such is Arma. Thanks for checking it out -i retract my complaint! 

 

for now o/O

[old_painless 182]

Can't remember and too lazy to check right now - what is the compass direction for the Infantry Showcase where you move through the valley ? If North, then callout of "Front" really means "North", is that the correct interpretation of this finding ?

[froggyluv 2135]

West. And they are correctly calling it "Front". The previous issue was that the "Back/Rear/Behind Us" was being said for any enemies that were South and/or even SW/SE While "Front" was called out for all Northern Direction regardless of enemies actual placement. The issue is seemingly fixed a while ago in one of the change-logs. I only brought it up again as I just reloaded Arma (but with an AI mod) and the issue had returned full force - but i now see it wasnt Vanilla re-igniting the problem.

[old_painless 182]

Hm, I have always wanted a bearings callout system, to remove all the confusion. Like all human players use in online games. Perhaps the skeleton crew that is in place now (which will listen to requests but only for very small tasks) could look into this.

 

Actually, since you like "Front" as indicating West - i suppose that is because you know that your general direction is towards West? Then an attack from behind would be "Back/Behind Us" meaning East. In the Front=North scheme we were a bit closer to actual bearings. And I just think that if in general you get spun around and/or take cover and shortly lose sense of where the general direction is, a callout with bearings would be unambiguous. Something immediately useful with no need for compass math.

 

It is of course all up to personal preference, would be fantastic if some talented coder could mod the callout system and make it possible to choose between a bearings system, a waypoint-relative system and perhaps even a third variant.