Waiting for a miracle...

[Jester_UK 0]

Quote[/b] ]Falcon 4.0 simulates an ongoing battle over the entire Korea region if you are there to see it or not and we are talking about a game that came out 5 or 6 years BEFORE operation flashpoint.

No it doesn't.

F4 fools the user into THINKING it's doing that. What it actually does is creates a populated "bubble" of approx 40km radius (if I remember right) around the player's aircraft. Anything outside that bubble is not rendered (except on the campaign map which is strictly a 2D environment) but is simply a series of simple calculations on the CPU. It does a very good job of creating an illusion of immersion (I've spent many happy hours with it myself), but in this context it's a poor comparison.

[Jester_UK 0]

Think about it now, for a few minutes at least. "NORMAL".

Lets define Normal.

Standard, average, not the best, mediocre, plain and boring are a few that spring to mind.....

Normal is a setting for those that have a average PC and it makes them feel better to not run on low settings. High is a setting for those (me included) that have a very powerful PC.

....Or you could define normal as the settings at which the game developers feel the player will (on a PC meeting recommended requirements at the very least) get the best balance of graphical quality and smooth frame rates ...... In which case your biggest problem with ArmA is an overestimation of your PC's capabilities.

[deanosbeano 0]

Hey,

the game has "NORMAL" settings! If you use settings above "NORMAL" then you go to an area where your complaints about not being able to play the game because the settings are too demanding for your computer, are ridiculous.

Think about it now, for a few minutes at least. "NORMAL".

<span style='font-size:23pt;line-height:100%'>NORMAL</span>

Cheers,

Baddo.

lets think for another .3 of a second

Quote[/b] ]Processor: Pentium 2 GHz

Memory: 512 MB RAM

Video card: Nvidia Geforce FX w/128 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9500 w/128 MB RAM

Sound card: DirectX 9 compatible

Hard disk: 6 GB free space

CD ROM: DVD ROM

Other: MS DirectX® 9

Recommended requirements:

Processor: Pentium 3 GHz

Memory: 1 GB RAM

Video card: Nvidia 6800 and better or Ati x800 and better with minimum of 256 MB RAM

lets look at it in reality when we are in options

normal is for ofp, arma should be running like the videos in the promos espsecially the ones where it says ingame footage and states the min/recommended hardware.

all bets on one of those people with "the next person to whine" tags or a fanboy coming here and telling us if you dont like it dont play it in the next 5 posts , sheesh somebody make a mod and name the units after those w@#ks , i will worship you.

[Heatseeker 0]

I'm pretty sure theres enough engines out there that can handle it exactly the same way if not even better as AA engine does. AA might have been a positive thing 2 years ago. in 2007, with game engines like cryengine 2 coming (And 100% sure cryengine 2 can do everything the AA engine could do as well, just a lot prettier and more realistic...), its pretty much a disappointment.

You dont understand how much world detail there is in Sahrani or the fact that you can go anywhere too.

Cry engine 2 might increase the eye candy in the mutant shooter genre but as far as relation betwean large scale rendering and graphics quality go Arma stands alone. Im sure Crysis will be purty but feel quite small in comparison... they are raving about having day/night cycles in 2007, something we already have since 2001 (in OPF).

Arma looks great in normal settings with a decent resolution and view distance, behiond the "looks" its a fantastic new platform for war game enthusiasts. Its massive, open ended and real time. Playing and editing it is an experience you wont find anywhere else.

If you really think Arma is just a reskinned OPF then you fail to understand the many improvements in it. Arma will keep me busy for a long time.

[baddo 0]

Hey,

I think BIS made a mistake.

The mistake is this: Users are able to choose settings too freely in ArmA, or at least without guidance in-game regarding what settings could be appropriate. There should be warnings with big red letters stating what will happen if settings are selected too optimisticly for the user's hardware. It seems that many people just ignore the fact that their hardware is not made in the future and thus has only performance of current level. If you go read the postmortem article in gamasutra.com about development of Operation Flashpoint, you can clearly see that one of the mistakes BIS admits they did with OFP was that quality of graphics was too low at time of release and they indicated they will not make that mistake again in their future products. I think it is very wise to make a game scalable so that users can get even more out of it in the future when there are more capable hardware available. It is in my humble opinion a good thing that you CAN adjust the settings higher (even if your current computer cannot handle it) AND get visual benefits with future hardware.

One can wonder why is there not an automatic procedure in the game which measures in some way the performance of the user's hardware, and then recommends some settings based on the results of the measurements? Wouldn't those kind of measures bring some sanity to these discussions? People just put their settings to "high" or "very high" and then complain, like there is no common sense in this World at all.

Of course BIS needs to optimize their game engine, of course they need to tweak the settings of Armed Assault to make the game perform better, of course they made a lot of mistakes, of course they could make it more obvious for the users what their hardware is capable of, of course, of course, of course. All this talk about how un-optimized the game engine of Armed Assault is, do you seriously think that the folks at BIS don't know that they need to make it even better? Do you seriously think that they don't want their products to be the best of all and to perform like an insane monkey? I honestly think that they could very much improve the setting-up process so that users are more aware of what their hardware is capable of. A good question is, why on Earth do we have so many options to change? Do you want to change anti-aliasing? Do you want to change anisotropic filtering? Do you even know what those terms mean? Do I need to become an expert on computer game development or on computer graphics hardware in order to understand what settings I am tuning? I think that I should not have to even think about anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering or anything like that, that's tech talk and completely unnecessay terms for the end users (who are nto hardcore geeks and absolutely want to adjust exactly anti-aliasing and the friends.

Of course we all want that the games developed by BIS are the most attractive when it comes to visual quality, of course we want their games to have top performance, of course of course of course. I have never seen anyone on this forum say the opposite, fanboy in your eyes or not, we all want the same from BIS products, to be the best games in every possible way.

Best Wishes,

Your friend Baddo.

[Journeyman 0]

IMO I think the only serious mistake that BIS has made was implementing those 'High' and 'Very High' settings options at this stage in the first place!

Give people the belief that they might be able to do something and they will slag you off once they realise that they cannot! The choice has been made so that gamers can choose between performance and graphics depending on as much your preference as your PC specs. And how many of you ‘top specers’ would complain if you could already run everything on max with ultra smooth FR knowing that specs will surely be many times improved in less than a year? What a wasted opportunity if they could have crammed in much prettier graphics for future proofing!

I don't see what age has got to do with it either! I'm 43 and have been messing with PC games for as long as most. When I was a kid there was no such thing as a PC for home entertainment! I'm just glad to see things developing in the knowledge that progress will prevail. Will people ever be happy though, that is the question? Patience is a virtue and I will wait knowing full well that I cannot do any better myself! I’m pretty sure that if BIS were able to fully optimise ArmA tomorrow so that everyone with average PC’s could play at 60fps with everything maxed out they wouldn’t hesitate to do so! But in time I’m sure that things will improve with the code in the same way that hardware and drivers will improve also.  

[memnoch 0]

F4 fools the user into THINKING it's doing that. What it actually does is creates a populated "bubble" of approx 40km radius (if I remember right) around the player's aircraft. Anything outside that bubble is not rendered (except on the campaign map which is strictly a 2D environment) but is simply a series of simple calculations on the CPU.

Rather like the way X3: Reunion handles anything outside your current sector.

[Alfie-UK- 0]

If any mistake was made it's in marketing ArmA as a kickass game and then delivering the demo, not to mention the various releases before that.

I think the mistake for many users is assuming that ArmA = OFP2.

I will admit that I had the same assumption, but I waited for the 505 release and v1.05 patch on the grounds that pretty much no software released nowadays is fit for purpose before a patch, or two, and by v1.05 we might have a playable SP campaign.

Based on the fact that it took me 4 years of upgrades before I could run OFP on close to max settings, I expected ArmA to be a hog, I expected the first release to need much bug fixing, it is the BIS way. I did not expect ArmA to run above normal on my rig.

What I did not expect was that after 4 months of certain versions being released that the SP campaign was still not completable, or that the v1.05 patch would introduce errors that did not exist in the v1.04 505 release.

I hope, and can see through the bugtracker, that BIS are still trying hard to tidy things up, even more visibly than with OFP, and I guess that by the US release we'll have a pretty stable product, but;

but, but, but,

The early release must have hurt sales, the initial poor ratings can't help, and the UK release going straight to bargain bin prices is an indicator of how this may be received in the US.

I still love and play OFP, even with Kegetys DXDLL it ain't that pretty, but at least AI knows to seek cover, doesn't shoot an AK as if they had a laser sight, takes cover appropriately, etc. Why are we still seeing in ArmA errors that were fixed in OFP ?

ArmA may be aimed at MP rather than SP, but the SP campaign initially sold OFP, ArmA's SP campaign is short and in most cases not completable due to bugs. MP public servers are pretty much full of the usual FPS smacktards, and then there are fanboys that are worse than noobs 'I played OFP since 2001, I know it all and you will bend to my will', dear god.

I still have hope for ArmA, I think like OFP it will take a while after the US release before all the idiots have left the scene and the die-hards make good mods and run friendly servers, even for 'n00bs' that have been playing OFP since 2001 but don't want to join a clan just to play co-op on a decent server.

[esti_the_big 0]

F4 fools the user into THINKING it's doing that. What it actually does is creates a populated "bubble" of approx 40km radius (if I remember right) around the player's aircraft. Anything outside that bubble is not rendered (except on the campaign map which is strictly a 2D environment) but is simply a series of simple calculations on the CPU. It does a very good job of creating an illusion of immersion (I've spent many happy hours with it myself), but in this context it's a poor comparison.

Well that 40 kilometer radius is A LOT bigger than Armas Range... Plus other happenings are being calculated outside the bubble. I'd rather say AA is a poor comparison to Falcon 4.0...

Quote[/b] ]You dont understand how much world detail there is in Sahrani or the fact that you can go anywhere too.

Cry engine 2 might increase the eye candy in the mutant shooter genre but as far as relation betwean large scale rendering and graphics quality go Arma stands alone. Im sure Crysis will be purty but feel quite small in comparison... they are raving about having day/night cycles in 2007, something we already have since 2001 (in OPF).

Arma looks great in normal settings with a decent resolution and view distance, behiond the "looks" its a fantastic new platform for war game enthusiasts. Its massive, open ended and real time. Playing and editing it is an experience you wont find anywhere else.

Actually afaik cryengine 2 has streaming worlds and theoretically unlimited big islands. On GDC some developers were thinking loudly about using cryengine 2 as a flight simulation engine....

Ofcourse a game like ofp has to be programmed first onto an engine and since that won't happen with crysis engine it's no sense raving bout that...

Thing is its just very disappointing that BIS is Releasing this obviously mediocre ofp 1.5 for full price 5 years after its predecessor ofp delivered almost the same experience, just with a bit worser visuals. 5 Years is enough time no only to just update an engine but to actually maybe improve AI a bit or to do a descent campaign. I kept my faith to BIs and ofp ever since its release, but what BIS is doing now with products is actually pretty pathetic.

[Journeyman 0]

I agree that there are many things that BIS should have done better regarding ArmA's release, and for many (including myself) it does seem that they have wasted that all important opportunity to get things right from the beginning. Bad reviews = bad sales we all know that and many newbees will have put this game away already and possibly never return to it in light of this 'bad start' with far too many bugs.

But it is easy for us looking in from the outside to be harsh and critical over BIS about this. There are too many things we simply don't know.

We know that BIS was under a LOT of pressure to get this game released by the community. They may well have been under a lot of financial pressure to get it released also (they need sales to pay the wages). Then there are the publishers, how much pressure did they put on BIS? My gut feeling that it was financial and maybe time factors were an issue because we know that they have other projects also (VBS2/Game2).

With regards to the quality of the campaign, this time it seems certain that it was all their own effort. How many of you realize that OFP’s campaign was massively assisted by Codemasters? Then on the subject of Codemasters just how much were they able to port from OFP to ArmA due to copyright laws? This could possibly be the reason why so much had to be changed. This I am speculating, but by speculating I am giving BIS the benefit of the doubt!

The fans will stick with them and wait. There is still no other game that even attempts to be as diverse as ArmA. Sure nobody wants to play a game that is still WIP, but better that than we are all still waiting and whining!  

[a24710 0]

for all of you who are complaining about performance on high detail settings (i include myself there)

do you wonder how much improvement we could see if ARMA were multithreaded?? think about it

this game is a cpu hungry beast and all dual core users have a whole processor that is totally wasted

this is my request for BIS ->> dual core support as soon as possible please

cheers

[esti_the_big 0]

Well afaik this game isn't selling too bad, its in top ten in several countries... at least i hope bis will remember its responsibility it has towards its customers and will do everything to make this game what it should have been

[BroK3n 0]

do you wonder how much improvement we could see if ARMA were multithreaded?? think about it

this game is a cpu hungry beast and all dual core users have a whole processor that is totally wasted

my fists shake in both anger and uncontrollable imagined delight.

If only it could materialize soon enough.

[killaalf 0]

To all those hoping for multicore-support via patch: don't get your hopes up, it's just not gonna happening. See, to make an application multi-threaded it has to be decided from the start to make it so. Have the AI run on one thread and the graphics rendering on another, sound on yet another and so on and then there's the difficulty of getting all those threads running in sync. That, my friends, is far from trivial. Patching in something of that magnitude, pff, I don't think it is even possible without going back to the drawing board and do the whole thing from the ground up again. Obviously, ArmA was not developed that way and that is the way it is going to stay, like it or not.

[Bram 0]

A simple google search tells me that your wrong KillaALF. Theres been many games patched to take advantage of Dual core processors.

Linkage

[Maddmatt 1]

A simple google search tells me that your wrong KillaALF. Theres been many games patched to take advantage of Dual core processors.

Linkage

Those are not all patches to make the game multithreaded. Some games (such as Call Of Duty 2) had problems running on dual core CPUs and needed a patch to prevent issues.

It is possible to patch a game to make use of multithreading though, but I doubt that it's easy. Hopefully BIS will do that, but don't count on it.

[a24710 0]

of course it is almost impossible to make ARMA run completely in multithread right now, cause they should have to re-start the desing an all those things

but it is possible to add a patch so certain tasks could be run in multiple threads, there is no need to put different things in different threads, for example running IA in one thread, physics in other and all those things

but it´s possible for example if you have something like this

for (int i = 0; i<num_objects; i++)

{

}

[wamingo 1]

Think about it now, for a few minutes at least. "NORMAL".

Lets define Normal. Standard, average, not the best, mediocre, plain and boring are a few that spring to mind.....

Normal is a setting for those that have a average PC and it makes them feel better to not run on low settings. High is a setting for those (me included) that have a very powerful PC.

Maybe we should let you define "playable" as well...

What kind of fps are you getting that annoys you so?

And why are normal settings necessarily for "normal computers"? Normal is setting that is in between the higher settings and the lower ones, that's all. Perhaps "Medium" would've been a more precise, but so what.

Maybe they should've just called them: Not so High, Quite High, Ridiculously High and Ludicrous Setting, and we wouldn't have had this word-nitpicking issue...

But my 3500+/7600gt can run mostly all on high-very high with 8-20fps too and I'm quite sure a good core2duo can double or tripple that. That would seem playable to me. Why deny people that. What I deem playable may not be what you deem playable, don't forget.

Regardless, even on lowest setting arma still looks miles ahead of ofp - let alone, is in every other way that really matters: Control model, size, density (in many ways), setting, etc. If you have your reasons to stick with ofp that's fine of course, but graphics quality cannot be one of them.

[a24710 0]

of course it is almost impossible to make ARMA run completely in multithread right now, cause they would have to re-start the desing and all those things

but it is possible to add a patch so certain tasks could be run in multiple threads, there is no need to put different things in different threads, for example running IA in one thread, physics in other and all those things

but it´s possible for example if you have something like this

for (int i = 0; i<num_objects; i++)

{

do something

}

translate that into this thing

thread 1

for (int i=0; i<num_objets/2; i++)

{

do something

}

thread 2

for (int i=(num_objects/2)+1; i<num_objects; i++)

{

do something

}

there is always a big loop in every game that does something like i have written before and that every iteration is independent from the others so is possible to send some iterations into one thread and other iterations into another thread

don´t know how BIS desinged the game, but certainly there is room for some multithread code modification without redesingning everything

cheers

[Bram 0]

Those are not all patches to make the game multithreaded. Some games (such as Call Of Duty 2) had problems running on dual core CPUs and needed a patch to prevent issues.

It is possible to patch a game to make use of multithreading though, but I doubt that it's easy. Hopefully BIS will do that, but don't count on it.

I'm not saying those links are all to do with dual core patches, it was just a simple google search to illustrate that Dual core patches can and have been released for games previously.

I understand that it's not just a case of the developers writing a few lines of code and voila! Dual core fast lovelyness. But it's very possible and totally feasable that BIS would dedicate the worktime needed to make dual core optimisations, especially with their VBS2 running on the same engine as Arma and due out for release very soon.

[killaalf 0]

A simple google search tells me that your wrong KillaALF. Theres been many games patched to take advantage of Dual core processors.

Linkage

Yeah, these games support multicores through a patch, that does not mean they are suddenly multithreaded, though, which is quite a different beast. Most of what these supposedly supported games provide is the ability to run on multicore systems at all or just the ability of having the graphics driver run on a different core than the main application. Heck, I followed a few of your links (did you?) and I saw no marked improve in framerates especially at resolutions where the GPU becomes the bottleneck. A few quotes:

"Our results with Call of Duty 2’s 1.01 patch weren’t nearly as spectacular as the results we saw with Quake 4 1.05 a few weeks ago. In our testing, performance was at best on par with the initial retail release of the game. At worst, we saw performance declines of 3% or more, particularly on AMD Athlon 64"

"Call of Duty 2 shows far less impressive results, and indeed a drop in performance at all but the highest resolutions, where it ekes out a tiny advantage - A rather bizarre state of affairs in all honesty. It would be interesting to see what happens with this title on Intel's dual-core and HyperThreading parts - The 1.01 patch is titled as an 'Intel update' after all!"

"Quake 4: Erste Tests des Beta-Patches auf einem unserer Testsysteme auf Basis eines Pentium 4 660 blieben in dieser Hinsicht jedoch erfolglos. Translation: First tests of the beta-patch on one of our test system based on a P4 660 were not successful. w/o patch 129,4 fps, with patch 126,7 fps (1280x1024 4xAA, 8xAF)"

ArmA already supports multi-cores, as in it will run on them without a patch, it just was not built to seriously profit from them (as in being multithreaded), so I'll stand by my former statement.

[mr reality 0]

Maybe we should let you define "playable" as well...

What kind of fps are you getting that annoys you so?

I'm suffering from this, so i'll define playable in one word.....shit....

To be honest though i'm only airing my grievences because i can't enjoy ArmA like you can, and this makes me p****d off...

[Fiasco 0]

Don't confuse multithreading and dual core support.  

ArmA is a multithreaded game.

Heck, basic Java apps I write are multi-threaded.

[wamingo 1]

of course it is almost impossible to make ARMA run completely in multithread right now, cause they should have to re-start the desing an all those things

but it is possible to add a patch so certain tasks could be run in multiple threads, there is no need to put different things in different threads, for example running IA in one thread, physics in other and all those things

but it´s possible for example if you have something like this

for (int i = 0; i<num_objects; i++)

{

}

To my (admitably limited) understanding there may be a good reason to still release games without multithreading at least for a couple of years yet - that is unless you make games that are targetted directly at, at this point fairly new and high end systems, multiple cores - arma is aimed at low p4 2-3ghz (single core) and up.

The problem is overhead. Some people point at syncronizing but what they may not know is that it has a lot of overhead involved as well and thus not just a question of complexity. Code for creating and managing threads equals overhead. And this overhead is to my understanding quite severe.

If you want to gain anything from multiple threads you need to split things up in much greater chunks.

A quote from this article on multithreading:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051117/gabb_01.shtml

Quote[/b] ]As a practical example, consider that a typical 3D game engine outputs many frames per second (FPS). At 30 FPS, each frame takes only 0.0333 seconds to compute. Let's assume that the particle dynamics subsystem can be effectively parallelize and that it accounts for 5% of each frame computation (0.0017 seconds). A computation that takes so little time is unlikely to benefit from parallelism after considering the overhead of thread creation, scheduling, synchronization, and management.

I know the article doesn't mention how much time threading overhead takes and I can't find anything at this time that does, but that's the gist of it. One solution it proposes confirms what I said about games having to aim for multicore to benefit from them.

So to make my first point completely clear: The overhead is several thousands of lines of code. This means a single core will obviously be overloaded by each of the threads, while a multicore may not benefit very much at all in the first place, if at all.

My guess on why why NV/ATI drivers can give you 5-?20?% benefit from another core, without the game having native multithreading, is because it's all outgoing code. No overhead need be done after it's sent to the driver as it simply does its thing on the other core. Games do not usally have that luxury as all the functions within it are in a web of data.

As for other games... Do not put your trust in what developers say they have done about this problem. Some games have some multithreading support but have gained very little or nothing at all. Those that have gained some have often been just the enabling of running on the other cores - like affinity in taskman. Or perhaps the driver thing.

Either way, I believe it's a very complex problem at this point, not just in code, but also in regards to what hardware the consumers have.

[wamingo 1]

whoops, sorry bout double post. brainfart.

snip

Ok that I understand, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the graphic options.

I used to have a similar problem on a geforce2 when the fan stopped working. Heat issues would make sense too as it seems it's not just ati cards. If I was you I'd find some other 3d heavy game or test or so and let it run for a while.. or take some of those cards out. switch em around. or something. anything. good luck.