Dragon Rising has been released

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

WTF is this guy talking about?

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/operation-flashpoint-dragon-rising-game-pc-113/399198-does-pc-community-have-mission-designers-game-moders-2.html#post6000912

another lost and confused DR player. Saying ACE folks shut up shop and waiting for a game. And to say BIS should have put what's in ACE2 in the beginning.

Here's the hypocrisy..... in his beloved DR, NOTHING they said would be in the game was included. But he'll easily point the finger at BIS for not producing a finished product.

Ok DR idiots...... BIS MAKES THE ENGINE and some content to get the community started. The compiled code is the engine, not the game!

Bis couldn't just release an engine and go "here do something" course they had to put a game around the engine, but the open source allows nearly anything to be created. We have zombies, we have world war 2 mods coming out, we have taliban, we have more islands to explore, we have ACE2, we have hundreds and hundreds of missions, game modes, models, sound and light effects.

What did the holy relic of DR get? Blue and Red horrible looking smoke.

oh, and if DR is so wonderful, and they bow down to the TGFX for his wonderful full roam map. Let's see it do what I did.

can DR do this?

And they still claim DR can trump A2. - It's so comical driving by those forums.

oh that picture of the guy with the champagne bottle is just wrong and should be removed bit by bit from the internet.

Edited January 25, 2010 by [RIP] Luhgnut

[Placebo 29]

Vilas one of those images was hardly suitable for public forums, and one was >100kb.

That said I don't see how such posts are really relevant to discussing the topic, discuss with words not silly pictures please.

[NoRailgunner 0]

[RIP] Luhgnut now you sound like one of those fanboys who doesnt want to see that BIS+publishers are releasing buggy games. Are you going to excuse that Arma2 still has many things to fix and that the engine isnt optimized for many pc's? Keep your eyes peeled!

What if BIS would not have so much support and dedication from the community? There are many addons/mods which are trying to fix things for BIS but this should be the exception not the rule - imho.

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

Vilas one of those images was hardly suitable for public forums, and one was >100kb.

That said I don't see how such posts are really relevant to discussing the topic, discuss with words not silly pictures please.

Thanks Placebo: After seeing that, I think I'm now sterile.

---------- Post added at 09:55 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:43 AM ----------

[RIP] Luhgnut now you sound like one of those fanboys who doesnt want to see that BIS+publishers are releasing buggy games. Are you going to excuse that Arma2 still has many things to fix and that the engine isnt optimized for many pc's? Keep your eyes peeled!

What if BIS would not have so much support and dedication from the community? There are many addons/mods which are trying to fix things for BIS but this should be the exception not the rule - imho.

I don't get this optimization thing. I have a really old PC that I OPTIMIZED. Dual core at 3.5Ghz, Nvidia 9800GTX+ and it's not the peoples machines that are bad, it's how people set theirs up. The Hard drive throughput is critical to smooth and consistent gameplay. I just purchased an SSD drive and I get consistently 33FPS. I'm also on a huge HDMI 25" monitor so my resolution is way up.With Post-processing turned on low, everything is smooth as can be. View distances out to 3000+. And the game is smooth. Just built a 40player pvp map with several hundred AI troops possible at once, and still I"m in the 30fps, and can drop into 20's if in big city. It's very much playable. I've seen over the top machines running 80fps and you know what? I can't see a difference at all. Not in the least. The biggest killer of stutter, and LOD problems are your hard drives people. After the SSD install, I spin around, zoom in and out with scope, animations are smooth, no headless AI, no buildings popping up. NONE. Before, any of those things were happening. Which is the main complaint people are saying about optimization. This SSD xfers 2Gbps. The sata raid I had it on before? 160Mbps. One of the things I do for a living is optimize peoples machines. I have people say "I have this killer gaming rig, and it's totally clean." ok let's see, well you have 5 drivers out of date, you're outputting your sound to 3 devices 2 of which have old drivers, you have 20 crap apps still running in background, your registry is full of garbage, well duh.

are their bugs? sure. Always will be. Are their bugs in Windows 7? Does it stop people from using it?

Edited January 25, 2010 by [RIP] Luhgnut

[jw custom 56]

Luhgnut;1553739']

I don't get this optimization thing. I have a really old PC that I OPTIMIZED. Dual core at 3.5Ghz' date=' Nvidia 9800GTX+ and it's not the peoples machines that are bad, it's how people set theirs up. The Hard drive throughput is critical to smooth and consistent gameplay. I just purchased an SSD drive and I get consistently 33FPS. I'm also on a huge HDMI 25" monitor so my resolution is way up.With Post-processing turned on low, everything is smooth as can be. View distances out to 3000+. And the game is smooth. Just built a 40player pvp map with several hundred AI troops possible at once, and still I"m in the 30fps, and can drop into 20's if in big city. It's very much playable. I've seen over the top machines running 80fps and you know what? I can't see a difference at all. Not in the least. The biggest killer of stutter, and LOD problems are your hard drives people. After the SSD install, I spin around, zoom in and out with scope, animations are smooth, no [b']headless AI[/b], no buildings popping up. NONE. Before, any of those things were happening. Which is the main complaint people are saying about optimization. This SSD xfers 2Gbps. The sata raid I had it on before? 160Mbps. One of the things I do for a living is optimize peoples machines. I have people say "I have this killer gaming rig, and it's totally clean." ok let's see, well you have 5 drivers out of date, you're outputting your sound to 3 devices 2 of which have old drivers, you have 20 crap apps still running in background, your registry is full of garbage, well duh.

Headless AI is caused by having Objects detail set to under high.

I run ArmA 2 from a Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB harddisk which is filled with lots of crap and very rarely defragged and it's running just fine.

[Aeneas2020 10]

[RIP] Luhgnut now you sound like one of those fanboys who doesnt want to see that BIS+publishers are releasing buggy games. Are you going to excuse that Arma2 still has many things to fix and that the engine isnt optimized for many pc's? Keep your eyes peeled!

What if BIS would not have so much support and dedication from the community? There are many addons/mods which are trying to fix things for BIS but this should be the exception not the rule - imho.

That is a self defeating question buddy (hate to weigh in here and i rarely do) but the REASON BIS has such great community support is precisely because they make their games so moddable and are so accomodating in the first place. That is why we forgive them the initial bugs. Most people look at arma2 as a toolset. Sure the sp can be a PITA when it doesn't work but if you give people what they want i.e. good tools, constant contact with the devs and numerous patches then you foster a caring and devout community. If you want to see how not to do this then go about doing what CM did.

[max power 21]

Some people do just like it you know, and they are allowed to, without you insulting there intelligence. (and funnily enough you just end up insulting yours)

I'm sure you're not insulting Vilas's English skills... Because I know that someone with such a masterful command of Polish would never stoop to insult someone's English as a second language.

[NoRailgunner 0]

Umm... well lets see if people have recommended hardware or even better they still have to buy the latest SSD only to get it run without LOD issues and stuttering or other things? Sorry - but to shift the responsibility on to customer isnt the smartest way even if its done by many others.

Why OFP was so successful? Why people do know and remember Papa Bear or Guba, Tasmanian Devil etc? Without a great campaign and missions a game is only a toolbox - people may remember the addons/mods but they wont remember the game itself.

Imho there is no reason for BIS to focus only at the core engine.

DR was only a public test of the EGO engine capabilities for console shooters, nuff said. ;)

[Madus_Maximus 0]

Umm... well lets see if people have recommended hardware or even better they still have to buy the latest SSD only to get it run without LOD issues and stuttering or other things? Sorry - but to shift the responsibility on to customer isnt the smartest way even if its done by many others.

Why OFP was so successful? Why people do know and remember Papa Bear or Guba, Tasmanian Devil etc? Without a great campaign and missions a game is only a toolbox - people may remember the addons/mods but they wont remember the game itself.

Imho there is no reason for BIS to focus only at the core engine.

DR was only a public test of the EGO engine capabilities for console shooters, nuff said. ;)

Runs perfectly well on my system. It ran like crap when I had my GeForce 8600, runs like silk with the GTX 260. ArmA 2 is a very GPU intensive game, but you don't need a monster rig to play it. I'd hardly call my rig monster, I'd hardly call it mid range either these days, maybe lower mid range. Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8GHz, GTX260, 6GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (trust me, I noticed absolutely NO improvement in performance from 2GB. I knew I wouldn't, I got that RAM for running Photoshop and so on).

RAM discs and SSD's are the extreme end of getting more performance, but at least they have benefits outside of gaming too. An SSD improves the performance of your entire machine. A lot of people have machines that too much hardware in them too. Very very few games are written to take proper advantage of multiple GPU's and multi-core CPU's. Most of the more recent ones are optimised for dual cores. It's hard programming for multi-threaded CPU's. This is why you see folk with uber i7's with their 8 logical cores running at 4GHz OC with 8GB of RAM and 2 GTX 295's in SLI getting such crappy performance, the software doesnt take advantage. Infact it often slows things down because of the overhead. It tries to address resources it just can't handle.

[Zipper5 74]

ArmA II runs at a constant FPS of above 40 FPS for me, and I don't have the most amazing rig ever. I have a GTX 280, Core 2 Duo E8440 3.00GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM and Windows XP Professional SP3. I run at settings that are very close to full as well. I have no need to go to the extremes, like some do, to get even more performance.

DR I can max out and get 100 FPS and above, but that is for obvious reasons...

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

it was like this.... get an SSD and load my hard streaming games on it (right now arma2 is only thing on it. Or pay more for graphics card or more cpu. It was cost/performance for me, and this was a cheap upgrade to get more CONSISTENT fps, than I can see anyway. For me, arma2 ran smooth enough at 30fps, but I didn't want load lag, and the SSD smooths out the FPS. In a years time, SSD's will be mainstream anyway.

---------- Post added at 02:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:59 PM ----------

Headless AI is caused by having Objects detail set to under high.

yup, I know, but the SSD allows me to bump all the graphics way up (object detail etc) so they load like "right now". The headless guys are a side benefit due to being able to run object detail much higher.

[Second 0]

That is why we forgive them the initial bugs. Most people look at arma2 as a toolset. Sure the sp can be a PITA when it doesn't work but if you give people what they want i.e. good tools, constant contact with the devs and numerous patches then you foster a caring and devout community. If you want to see how not to do this then go about doing what CM did.

Most/many people HERE (points at these forums and few more) look it as toolbox. Most people over there (points at direction of world) looks at it as game.

As for community. Yes. That part of community which stays around and accepts it's faults sure loves BIS. Other just leaves with more or less violent manner. I see lots of people who joined during 2009... Not so many from earlier days. Were you here when ArmA got released and stirs it's state created within community? Yup i was there. What was most popular thread? Well after screenshot thread came dissapointment thread, which noted many times that ArmA was good just for screenshots. There was also positive thread about ArmA, but it couldn't reach nearly the same amount of posts or views as dissapointment thread did.

Yeah ArmA2 seemed to be much more satisfying game, towards which people are less hostile. But memories from days of ArmA when this community turned into hell for a long time remains with me, as with many others who saw those days, weeks, months.

I'm not seeing much difference between ArmA and OFDR in this sense. BIS hid their time, took lots of time to get ArmA into proper shape (which still unsatisfied many). Game could be considered somewhat fixed during US release. Some people had suffered from Beta-game for months, was it half year i don't recall.

[vilas 477]

Placebo - i wanted to show some positive feedback to DR

we all moan here, but i wanted to give some positive opinions from different people and i posted them with those people photos

satisfied customers of CM :)

[Aeneas2020 10]

yeh the average consumer will see arma2 as a game 1st but that still doesn't alter my point one bit. If you base your entire marketing campaign on false screenies and then give the community zero support in the long run you get what u ask for. I released a peice of software once that had a crash to desktop error that affect 99% of the users. It sucked it took a year to gain people's trust back. Arma and Arma2 have bugs yes but at least BIS are working to fix them.

Empire Total War crashed for a lot of users during the campaign when it was first released. People forgive crashes and bugs if they are fixed, be it by the devs or community. What people don't forgive is lies, false marketing and zero community support.

[Madus_Maximus 0]

Most/many people HERE (points at these forums and few more) look it as toolbox. Most people over there (points at direction of world) looks at it as game.

As for community. Yes. That part of community which stays around and accepts it's faults sure loves BIS. Other just leaves with more or less violent manner. I see lots of people who joined during 2009... Not so many from earlier days. Were you here when ArmA got released and stirs it's state created within community? Yup i was there. What was most popular thread? Well after screenshot thread came dissapointment thread, which noted many times that ArmA was good just for screenshots. There was also positive thread about ArmA, but it couldn't reach nearly the same amount of posts or views as dissapointment thread did.

Yeah ArmA2 seemed to be much more satisfying game, towards which people are less hostile. But memories from days of ArmA when this community turned into hell for a long time remains with me, as with many others who saw those days, weeks, months.

I'm not seeing much difference between ArmA and OFDR in this sense. BIS hid their time, took lots of time to get ArmA into proper shape (which still unsatisfied many). Game could be considered somewhat fixed during US release. Some people had suffered from Beta-game for months, was it half year i don't recall.

The major difference here is (well, there's two) is that BIS didn't promise the world with ArmA 1. They didn't say it'd be the greatest thing to ever grace the market or that it'd have features x y and z, or promise to be the second comming, which is how CM marketted DR.

The second difference here is support. BIS actually support their games, for a long time (in comparison with other developers). I mean damn, they just recerntly released another fairly large patch for ArmA 1 and we got 1.05 for ArmA 2. You'll be lucky to see CM release a third patch for DR, never mind one that fixes as many things and teaks as much as BIS patches do. Then you have the BETA patches, which just get better witch each release and they come through thick and fast.

As with any kind of business where you provide a service or product, it isn't so much the actual product, it's how you support your customers if and when something goes wrong with it. Good customer service means the difference between a good and bad reputation. You could have two companies that make the same products to the same standards. They get the same number of defects and the like. The company that deals with those issues in the most friendly and respectful manner is the one most people will prefer to use. The other company who just don't seem to give a crap will get bad rep and lose future business. Codemasters are in the latter category.

[templargfx 10]

stop assuming things when you make comparisons jeez :j: And why do you feel you need to compare anyway? Got tired of saying that the two arent comparable. which is all this thread (and you people) were saying 50+ pages ago.

You assume support is going to be dropped, just like people assumed before the first patch that support was going to be dropped after it came out. What do you base this assumption on? whimsical flights-of-fancy? or fact?

You know, if you look out into the gaming world, outside of the BIS community, Dragon Rising was pretty well accepted. It's continued increasing sales seems to suggest that people in general like it.

[Deadfast 43]

You know, if you look out into the gaming world, outside of the BIS community, Dragon Rising was pretty well accepted. It's continued increasing sales seems to suggest that people in general like it.

The multiplayer numbers suggest otherwise.

[templargfx 10]

its not an MP game only you know. I've played about 10 hours of MP in total. and I run the game almost daily. and its not that I cant play MP cos its P2P either.

[JdB 151]

You assume support is going to be dropped, just like people assumed before the first patch that support was going to be dropped after it came out. What do you base this assumption on? whimsical flights-of-fancy? or fact?

Experience with CM's business model and previously bought products.

You know, if you look out into the gaming world, outside of the BIS community, Dragon Rising was pretty well accepted. It's continued increasing sales seems to suggest that people in general like it.

If there are, they certainly aren't based on CM's own forums, and many other fansites have closed already because they couldn't handle the amazingness of DR.

[-Snafu- 78]

If there are, they certainly aren't based on CM's own forums, and many other fansites have closed already because they couldn't handle the amazingness of DR.

"DR is becoming more popular each day."

Rising player numbers? I doubt it.

[JdB 151]

[iM]http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/images/07-minister.jpg[/img]

"DR is becoming more popular each day."

Indeed. A more plausible explanation for those fansites shutting down is the vast amount of money needed monthly to pay for the gigantic bandwidth usage, and ever increasing server hardware needed to make all of those connections to satisfied customers...

... Or it could just be because of the complete lack of a modding scene. Pretty sure even Duke Nukem 3D is still modded more than DR (High Resolution Pack comes to mind, something DR could use as well with those ancient console size textures).

Edited January 26, 2010 by JdB

[Aeneas2020 10]

"DR is becoming more popular each day."

Rising player numbers? I doubt it.

ROFL that guys was my hero!

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

Let's see a little sampling to see if Templar's claim to be true.

Dragon Rising

Arma2

hmmm same amount of people sampled. But since there is no multiplayer in DR. These people just sit around and do what exactly?

Average time played per day in Dragon Rising is just over 84.6 minutes

Average time played Arma2 is 158.3 minutes

Yeah looks they are on a major push. Sorta like when you go to the bathroom.

Templar, even the people on the CM forums claim you are probably the only person doing anything with the game.

Now lets consider this. DR has been out for what 3 months. From #9 to #175 in 3 months. Average decline is 5.3 points a day.

Arma2 has been out for what.. 9? (including Europe). Average decline is .18 (or non existent).

That's fail in any book.

Edited January 26, 2010 by [RIP] Luhgnut

[JdB 151]

Luhgnut;1554220']But since there is no multiplayer in DR. These people just sit around and do what exactly.

Playing the expansive campaign with it's free roam and replayability?

Playing with the mods?

Working with the mission editor in the console versions?

Downloading free DLC?

Taking screenshots of the high tech engine?

Making videos that show the awesomeness of DR's Ai and posting them on Youtube?

Making a list of features that DR has, and ArmA2 supposedly doesn't?

Reading Lindop & Lenton's "World of Fantasia Marketing, a Dragon Rising Story", the epic bestseller that has already outsold the Bible, sure to win a Pulitzer prize for Best Fairytale Gone Horribly Wrong?

Listening to the audio-book instead?

Giggling at bad ArmA2 reviews, and rejoicing at the positive DR reviews that clearly show the reviewer had never actually played the game, and just copied the PR statements off of CM's website?

Edited January 26, 2010 by JdB

[templargfx 10]

people playing MP, and people modding, have nothing to do with people buying the game. 20,000 sales per week is pretty good for something that is apparently so shit no one would want to play it