First ARMA impressions

[Stealth3 0]

I know what he meant but regardless, the soldiers clearly wear body armor as you can clearly see it. So point still stands.....

[martinovic 0]

I think you can solve that even in OFP with giving soldiers more hitpoints.

They all wear the exact same body armor too... ahwell.

[frederf 0]

I know what he meant but regardless, the soldiers clearly wear body armor as you can clearly see it. So point still stands.....

While the ArmA soldiers clearly have body armor visually, there's nothing clear about whether any body armor is actually coded into the models at all.

[Ian Malcolm 0]

I know what he meant but regardless, the soldiers clearly wear body armor as you can clearly see it. So point still stands.....

While the ArmA soldiers clearly have body armor visually, there's nothing clear about whether any body armor is actually coded into the models at all.

Apparently no. Body armor and helmet are in ArmA giving soldiers no protection at all.

[YourMessageHere 0]

Got to say I'm really disappointed. Flashpoint was such a different and special game when it came out that I was happy to overlook the down sides like the clipping and animations being screwy. This game has its good points, certainly, but to find many of the same mistakes in the supposed follow-up, plus some exciting all-new problems too...sigh.

- Why are helicopters so radically different to control compared to OFP? the OFP method was the nicest, most intuitive implementation of fully functional helicopter control I've ever encountered (screw realism; it worked) and it's been replaced with over-sensitive clunkiness.

- I concur on the sights problem. I don't think you can explain away lining up a T72 shot at a the centre of a stationary APC 50 feet away on a level surface and missing as wind, bullet drop or anything like that. Something is just wrong with this.

- Messing with the mission editor, I try out sniping. I swap to my pistol and one of the things that got me killed innumerable times in OFP smacks me in the face again: I have to stop to swap weapons. Somebody made a conscious decision to force people to stop completely in order to sling a rifle on their back and unholster a pistol. This is insane.

- The mouse steering with ground vehicles was another thing that made OFP great for me. It's been a long time, but I'm sure that there used to be a tiny dot crosshair for drivers so they could tell what direction they were going to end up going, and now there's not. This is a pain.

- Physics. What the hell? I drive a UAZ up a ramp outside a factory, to see if I can park inside, and suddenly I've entered low earth orbit. I'm trundling along in my T72 and I turn a corner, and suddenly I'm whipping weightlessly round and powersliding like this is Ridge Racer, rather than a 41-ton steel beast. And yes, boats drive over land.

- Damage. I try to drive an "Offroad" down a hill and it's unusable before I get halfway down. I shoot a car tyre and all four wheels become rusty. While I was trying to puzzle out the helicopter controls was I ended up with the helicopter apparently balancing on the ground on the edge of its spinning rotor, facing straight down and taking no damage. However, so much as graze a heli with gunfire and it leaks fuel like a firefighter seaplane.

- the HDR is totally screwed; walk inside a building and everything goes a speckled grey for a few seconds. HDR is quite good when done well but done badly it's just immensely annoying. Possibly related was a problem in showing textures on meshes, e.g. when exiting a jeep, it was sometimes up to 5 seconds before the textures appeared on my Dragunov.

- I'm disappointed by the sparseness of units. Yes, so it's more than OFP had originally (if you say so, anyway, I don't remember it like that but never mind) but it's far less than OFP had eventually.

Basically, I expected a game to rival OFP as it ended up, but what we have is a game much like OFP when it started out, only with more wrong with it. Given how long it's taken to arrive, I expected this retail game to resemble a retail game more than an alpha.

[jantenner 0]

what sucks:

physics are bad like in ofp

tanks go 8kmh uphill, 200kmh downhill, when taking a corner with high speed it slides like on ice, they mow down a forest with no sound

soldiers fly up like a rocket sometimes when hit with rpg or similar

choppers dont crash 50% of times, instead they lay on ground in all kind of fancy positions, not exploding

damage model is bad like in ofp

only thing which have changed are that you can screw a single tyre when driving against a road sign and similar. it gets a weird rust texture then, and car only move 8kmh, like in ofp, just without texture change

destruction in general for vehicles means, they suddenly swap the whole texture to rust, and the model stays the same, some fire and smoke and a ground-hit-texture. but texture, fire and smoke soonly disappear and theres just the rust model

grass in current state sucks...

going prone is useless now 99%, you better crouch, because you cant see anything, but ai can see you. grass is everywhere thats not sand, city or road

helicopters, look and fly weird while especially when flying in 3rd person

AI gets stuck very often, cant get into vehicles, is unable to drive vehicles to specified locations, doesnt react to commands

you can get stuck in some places

no reloading / change weapon while moving

the bigger northern part of sahrani is quite unspectacular.

explosion radius of rpg, ags30 and satchels seems to be too low

tracers look very bad

shooting sounds of weapons sound bad, with a few exceptions

shilka doesnt fire four barrels, just one single barrel like in ofp

to get in a vehicle you have to find a tiny spot, where the sign appears, too difficult

choppers dissappear randomly

units in distance move choppy like they have 3fps, in sp and mp

no tweaking options for networks and graphics, only basic graphics settings

sounds of vehicles are either too loud or too silent

loading screen when switching to map and back, sometimes you have to wait 5 seconds to get back in game

the good:

soldier models and animations look very nice

movement and overall control good like in ofp

ironsights and weapon models look very good

vehicle models look very nice

overall the game looks very good and runs fine even with many units on screen, i tested with 32 tanks and 128 soldiers, and little fps impact compared to ofp

max group size is much bigger

join in progress works fine

game runs stable, even with many alt-tab

computer:

a64 3800 dual core

1gb ram

gf px7600gs pcie 256mb, slightly overclocked

winxp, clean system

settings:

1024x768

4xaa 4xaf

terrain low

objects normal

textures low

shaders very low

shadows low

so it will be a very good game when modded right and when its a little more patched, i dont regret to have bought it

[Bunkers 0]

Wow, talk about progress! I just ran down to the nearest hardware shop and bought a new 7900GT card to replace my current 6800GS. My 3DMark06 score improved from a depressing ca. 1400 to an impressing ca. 3800! (sorry I forgot to save the exact results). AND, more important: I had to run ArmA on 1024x768 all details low and viewdistance less than 2000. NOW I can run on 1280X1024 (my native resolution) and ALL detail levels high AND viewdistance 3000  

BTW how do I measure my fps in ArmA? I'm embarrased I dont know that

[OIK 0]

What about you rig?

Can you give us some detailed information please?

Thanks

[Ian Malcolm 0]

BTW how do I measure my fps in ArmA? I'm embarrased I dont know that

Try Fraps.

[Bunkers 0]

What about you rig?

Can you give us some detailed information please?

Thanks

My Compy:

AMD 64 3500+

2GB PC3200 RAM

7900GT 256MB

[OIK 0]

What about this card is it good enough ?

Asus GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3, HDTV, PCI-Express, Tv-Out/2xDVI-I, 560/1400MHz

[Turkmenbashi 0]

+

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db97yQXrW7A

=

?

[Jinef 2]

LOCALITY BUGS IN MULTIPLAYER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Big Dawg KS 6]

LOCALITY BUGS IN MULTIPLAYER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You say bugs, I say features.

[deady 0]

Call me a whiner if you like, but this *is* my first impression.

It is OFP with modern graphics but with most of the AI bugs still not fixed.

These are bugs that cannot be fixed by anyone other than BIS - but if they didn't fix them for v1.00 they're very unlikely to ever get addressed until OFP2 because they're such a huge amount of work to fix.

Vehicles driving along a road will still come to a complete halt, and do a bunch of weird maneuvers if there is an object on or NEAR the road ahead. You can forget any mission that involves the AI driving somewhere unless all roads are completely empty.

I got annoyed and gave up with the campaign because a convoy i was in kept on stopping and starting with a "9 board 4x4...9 roger....9 negative....9 board 4x4...." loop.

The AI drivers still treat bridges as objects of fear, too. I should also mention the rather tall grass, and how it only serves to block *your* view when prone - I get the feeling the AI can see you anyway.

The voices are also very disjointed - the putting together of pre-recorded words is way more obvious than in OFP.

On the good side...well its pretty if you have the hardware...theres a female voice...and the islands are large with some big cities. At the moment i struggle to think of more things it offers that OFP didn't have.

I'm not saying the game sucks - I'm saying right now...its about the same as OFP. After about 3 or 4 patches, it will be better than OFP. Just not amazingly better, because of the unfixed AI.

[maxqubit 1]

What about this card is it good enough ?

Asus GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3, HDTV, PCI-Express, Tv-Out/2xDVI-I, 560/1400MHz

For me the XFX AGP 7600GT was the perfect choice for my P4 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM @ 1024x768 system

It runs and looks good (after some tweaking ArmA, gfx card and memsize=768 ... btw, with texturedetail=normal i had spikes, i run on texturedetails=low with no probs)

I made a heli flight video to give an impression what to expect ... Heli Attack (30MB, save link as ...)