Bohemia Interactive's future ARMA 3!

[PuFu 4591]

Crossfire?

Charlie Foxtrot

[NeMeSiS 11]

Charlie Foxtrot

Last time i played MP was more than a year ago, i barely game these days. :p

[PuFu 4591]

Last time i played MP was more than a year ago, i barely game these days. :p

no worries, i am in the same boat, but since i've been part of ic/cf since their start back in A1 days, well :P

[maddogx 13]

Last time i played MP was more than a year ago, i barely game these days. :p

Oh, I always thought you were the "Nemesis" on CF. Never mind then. :)

[l5p4ngl312 10]

@OP if BIS implemented DMM for all objects in Arma 3 you would need to buy Roadrunner. Even in SW:TFU which is a linear game with small maps they only implemented it for a few objects such as a wooden gate etc. Euphoria should work fine though. Anyways what I want:

Campaign less buggy, better acting,better pathfinding, and MORE CLEAR OBJECTIVES

I hated the mission Razor Two in Red Harvest where you're objective was to uhh... go find some guy... err... somewhere I don't know just walk a couple thousand kilometers and you might find him. Ok so it wasn't that bad but it was annoying. You should at least get a proper location on him if you follow all the clues:

Dressler Camps

Marny tells you about Olegevich who tells you about the power plant

Power plant man tells you about quarry

Vshynoye castle

After you visit all those places if you don't find him someone should be like "Ok we got a UAV tracking a blue car near so and so town" and then you have his exact location.

Also a less buggy cutscene trigger. Here's one of my experiences with this mission:

I played it before and found no one waited at the town for Bardak/Lopetev BEFORE I even got the message and no one ever came. So this time since I know the locations I go straight to the power plant. Nothing. So then I get a helo to take my squad and I near the quarry as not to alert the people there. Scarlet O'Hara (sounds feminine) could not seem to find his way around the tail of the chopper to get in the other side, so I had to order him around with 'move there' commands. Instead of letting the chopper land like a sensible person I ordered my squad to jump out of the chopper and I did the same. However, my squad sucks at parachuting so they all land in the water. I get bored when waiting for them to swim 70 meters to shore and start firing at a bird (unprofessional I know). This I believe alerted the 3 quarry guards and they came racing over and the next thing I know I'm under fire. I crawl behind a nearby house, fire off a few HE rounds with my grenade launcher. Then I lean from cover and pop the last guy. And my squad is ashore. Wonderful. The only weapons they have are there M9 pistols. I told them to go grab the AKs off of the dead guards. I then order Sykes to collect dogtags of one of the dead quarry guards (that's how I knew it was them). So he runs over near the body of the guard that had the dog tags and stands there for 5 minutes before I give up. I was about to give up on the tags before I saw a flash of Dog Tags (Evidence) on my HUD. I have to fiddle with the mouse to get it in the exact right position to show it again and press enter. We walk into the camp to check for Bardak and he's not there. O'Hara says "No guards, no lookouts, no transport vehicles, nothing". 5 seconds later Bardak pulls up in a white car, gets out, and starts running away *facepalm*. I run after him and pull out my M9. I shoot him twice in the leg and he starts crawling. I run up to him and around him and over him trying to trigger the capture cutscene. I even tried T-bagging him but to no avail. I had to execute him because of a bug and then the mission debriefing says "Killed while attempting to resist arrest" ..... by crawling very slowly away with two bullets in his leg.

So to summarize here are the main problems with the campaign:

Buggy Pathfinding, Buggy Triggers, Bad Acting, Pretty random successes/failures for some missions (on another one a helo took out my main objective on the way to pick up someone I had arrested, killed the local chedaki leader, and even some smugglers all on the way to get to me). Don't get me wrong I love the openness. I love that those guards apparently heard me shooting at a bird and ran over to check it out. I love that I can order my squad to pick up weapons off of dead bodies if they lose their own. I also enjoyed following all those clues, but I did not enjoy my hard work amounting to nothing and then having a random guess win me the mission. I also didn't like how the mission ends before I can gather all the evidence I want to.

Now for some other suggestions:

Medical things:

Wounded can be transported in a few ways:

Drag/Carrying

Across the back seat of a car

On the back of a tank?

In an APC

In a transport helicopter or boat

Wounded can be healed in transport helicopters during transit

I know in MP some people's main job is transporting troops to the action via helicopter. I think it would be cool if they also had to pick up wounded and take them back to the field hospital.

Fighter Jets:

This is a noob thing I know but I wish there was a way to designate your target for a bomb while diving in and then dropping the laser guided bomb when you are over the target to hit it. I know you can lock on to vehicles if you put your crosshair just over them and press lock and that is kind of the same thing, but I want to try to hit multiple infantry targets or structures

Squad Command:

Spot button when pressed while mousing over an enemy highlights the enemy to you and all your squad with a red circle or something while they are in sight of your squad (maybe a timeout also). The order to engage can be given by mousing over a dot or something above the circle and pressing the F# for the squad member you wish to engage the target. Or spacebar for all of the squad. This feature can be turned off for hardcore multiplayer people.

Battlefield Commander:

Pressing Tab should give you an RTS style top down view to command units from. This means that it renders the map in 3D from far away (so less detail to save performance) and you can zoom in on specific parts. Another thing that would be cool to add to this is that you can only command in a certain radius from your actual position. This would make it so you actually have to move up which would be realistic.

Other things:

All buildings should be able to be entered (i think that was confirmed) along with better door opening/closing which kind of goes with my campaign buggyness complaints.

Wishes:

Better structural destruction (BFBC2/BF3 style)

Proper joystick throttle support

Better physics

Ragdolls (Euphoria: Yes!)

Oh and at least a mini-campaign for each vehicle type except cars and boats UNLESS you can command destroyers, carriers, etc. Jet, Attack Chopper, Tank, and even Transport/Medivac pilot would all be really fun

Edited August 15, 2011 by l5p4ngl312

[MulleDK19 21]

Better physics

Ragdolls (Euphoria: Yes!)

Better physics, including ragdolls have already been confirmed.

They considered Euphoria, but went with PhysX instead, for god knows what reason...

[NeMeSiS 11]

They considered Euphoria, but went with PhysX instead, for god knows what reason...

Performance probably, ever played GTA4? :p

[Zipper5 74]

I'd imagine it's because VBS2 had already proven the ease of using PhysX with the RealVirtuality engine.

[MulleDK19 21]

Performance probably, ever played GTA4? :p

I've got no issues in GTA IV.

[NeMeSiS 11]

I've got no issues in GTA IV.

Now run into a large group of people at the same time (>7), on both my PC (PhenomII 955) and my 360 the performance drops to a rather unacceptable FPS. Now image running it in an environment with exponentially more units running about.

EDIT: Now that i think about it, on my 360 the game runs rather unacceptable most of the time. The FPS is fine, but when driving about at high speed the environment doesnt load fast enough and i often run into invisible objects or even through a grey blur which what i guess is supposed to be a really far away LOD which isnt changed fast enough.

Edited August 16, 2011 by NeMeSiS

[MulleDK19 21]

Now run into a large group of people at the same time (>7), on both my PC (PhenomII 955) and my 360 the performance drops to a rather unacceptable FPS. Now image running it in an environment with exponentially more units running about.

I do that all the time.

[NeMeSiS 11]

I do that all the time.

Thats an interesting statement but if you dont mention your specs/console it means absolutely nothing. Not all of us are running high end i7's or better. ;)

[MulleDK19 21]

Thats an interesting statement but if you dont mention your specs/console it means absolutely nothing. Not all of us are running high end i7's or better. ;)

Intel Q6600 and an old 8800.

[PuFu 4591]

Better physics, including ragdolls have already been confirmed.

They considered Euphoria, but went with PhysX instead, for god knows what reason...

Euphoria is not a physics engine...It is a middleware animation engine. Oh, it is compatible will PhysX, Havok, Bullet and whatever other physics engines are there

Edited August 16, 2011 by PuFu

[purepassion 22]

And would you mind sharing with us the source for BIS considdering to use Euphoria in Arma 3?

[MulleDK19 21]

Euphoria is not a physics engine...It is a middleware animation engine. Oh, it is compatible will PhysX, Havok, Bullet and whatever other physics engines are there

Stop saying it's not a physics engine. It is...

And would you mind sharing with us the source for BIS considdering to use Euphoria in Arma 3?

They're not considering it. They were considering it.

I don't have a source. Dwarden told me directly.

[STALKERGB 6]

Stop saying it's not a physics engine. It is...

It's an animation engine primarily, all it does is work out the animation for something on the fly.

I don't have a source. Dwarden told me directly.

Wouldn't that make your source Dwarden then? :p

[MulleDK19 21]

It's an animation engine primarily, all it does is work out the animation for something on the fly.

Which is exactly what a physics engine is supposed to do. All physics engines makes animation. Animation is just motion. Physics engines figure out the motion over time.

Which is exactly what Euphoria does too. Saying that it's not a physics engine is just plain dumb.

Euphoria uses the CPU to generate motion on the fly

Wouldn't that make your source Dwarden then? :p

Sure, but I cannot attach Dwarden to posts.

Edited August 16, 2011 by MulleDK19

[CarlGustaffa 4]

@l5p4ngl312: Sorry, but your post made me laugh pretty good. Razor Two and Manhattan are fairly complex missions, I'd be surprised if they worked 100%. I've had minor issues with them myself, some of them outright hilarious (like Bardak making a run for it it our HMMWV - the nerve on some guys :D), but I have to say it's the first time I've heard about actually failing the mission. I've played it plenty of times, and I've yet to achieve success on everything, and Bardak annoyingly often escapes. So what? You win some, you loose some, but the war still continues and you're able to continue. Evidence can also be tricky to find, but that's part of the challenge of this type. It's very open and confusing, so you do your best. Success or failure may have an impact further down the campaign, but sometimes this isn't a campaign where you must succeed in all objectives. Some are designed to fail too. And stay away from beta versions of the game (especially new players who just want to have a go at the campaign), as they may introduce campaign cripling bugs and incompatible saves.

Don't forget Razor team can be team switched in many missions. Not my ideal sense of realism, but it greatly improves speed when trying to micromanage them, so I'd use it anyway for things like picking up that evidence.

I'm not sure why you complain about your units dropping their weapons in water, when they end up in water on your command though ;) We were told to go to great lengths to avoid getting our equipment (very) wet, so the dropping weapon to simulate ruined weapon makes sense to me. What I have noticed though, is that when trying to arrest Bardak, a significant amount of time may pass before the right words are spoken. Thought it was just my low spec PC.

[STALKERGB 6]

Which is exactly what Euphoria does too. Saying that it's not a physics engine is just plain dumb.

To use GTA4 as an example, it used Bullet for it's Physics engine, Euphoria acted as middleware to use the information provided by Bullet to work out the animations. You could say that Euphoria works as a Human Physics Engine though...

Anyway, surely the cost of Euphoria makes it prohibitive to use.

[MulleDK19 21]

To use GTA4 as an example, it used Bullet for it's Physics engine

So many wrongs in that.

Bullet is not THE physics engine in GTA IV. It was one of them.

GTA IV used the physics engine Euphoria for characters, and the physics engine Bullet for vehicles and other objects, not handled by Euphoria.

Just like Star Wars used 3 different physics engines. One physics engine for rigid bodies, one physics engine for characters, and another one for advanced physics. Havok, Euphoria and DMM, respectively.

[dmarkwick 261]

Physics engine. Animation engine. WTF does it matter what it's labelled?

[PuFu 4591]

Dude, get this straight. Euphoria is NOT a physics engine. It provides animations without keyframes (it is like saying all parametric behaviours in 3d engines are physics). Without a physics engine, euphoria doesn't work. simples as that.

Can we agree that one can add Euphoria on top of PhysX engine handling EVERY aspect of physics in the game?

[MulleDK19 21]

Dude, get this straight. Euphoria is NOT a physics engine. It provides animations without keyframes (it is like saying all parametric behaviours in 3d engines are physics). Without a physics engine, euphoria doesn't work. simples as that.

Yes, it's a physics engine. Look up animations, look up physics, and look up Euphoria.

[dmarkwick 261]

One question: can Euphoria work on it's own, with no other physics engine?