CNutter

If you plan on to criticizing my point of view, I challenge you to read all of this post because I've worked hard to put my side of the argument to words. Willfully, happily? Hell No. Realistically? Yeah– simply because Arma fills a gap in the gaming industry that nothing else quite covers. First off, all of this is from my own (perhaps limited) observations. As followup to that, I realize that absolutely nobody (myself included) can change the state of things due to the monopoly that BIS has as well as the decline in online milsim culture. I think all of us who dislike where the series and community are going are woefully yelling at a brick wall. As I said, Arma fills a gap– it's like a tarp that's been sprawled over a gaping hole in a roof because there's not enough incentive to build a new roof, but there's still intrinsic need for the hole to be patched. The sad reality is that there are just enough milsimmers out there to make something like Arma marketable– with it's wide gamut of features such as combined arms, large scale coop, in depth strategy and realism, single player campaigns and missions, custom mission editing, and wide acceptance of modding. But milsim is still niche enough that companies like BIS can stiff players and get away with it: neglecting their wants and needs; expecting the "modding community" to fix their shortcomings; releasing glitch-riddled products and expansions with seemingly no QA or play-testing; the list goes on. Yet players will still come back for seconds, because there's literally nothing else like it. Sure, there are other titles and projects like Squad, but by and large those titles have and will always have much smaller player-bases because they lack a wide enough array of features to cater to the colorful needs of the milsim community at large. So, one could say from that statement, that BIS should be commended for creating such a largely appealing game for this community? Absolutely not! Countless times have they released half-baked feature additions and easy stopgap maneuvers to drum up business, because at the core Arma is failing. Point in case: Life, PVE, BP, and RPG servers in general are reaching much greater numbers– even though Arma is marketed as a military game! Arma is failing to retain it's original player base of traditional milsimmers which it gained through OFP and A2, and there simply isn't enough monetary or PAX incentive to keep improving the game for those folks. Let's face it, there just aren't enough of us or our dollars to catch their ear. There are more "casual" folks who want Arma 3 to be turned into "RPG simulator 3" or "Run and Gun 3" than there are milsimmers seeking a game in-depth enough to scratch their itch. Why am I so critical? BIS developers are more focused on bringing in money to keep their business running (an understandable directive) than they are on actually improving and polishing the gaming experience by say, scrapping the current terrible engine in favor of a better one, improving the realism of AI, bettering the current "futuristic" lore and factions, incorporating features from community works into the core game, etc. Yes, there have been attempts at helping the community such as Make Arma not War, but really how many of the content made in response to that competition is still being maintained today aside from what was already present before, and what won. And how much quality content creation did that incentivize anyway? Money can help temporarily, but at the core it can't drive dedication, and BIS should have known that. Rather than fostering long-term community involvement they made yet another stopgap maneuver to drum up business and increase player levels. Moving on, There are more empty servers than full in the Arma 3 server browser, with the exception of PVE / PRG / Zomgies / what have you– which I say again don't align with games "military" focus. Really, does Altis Life sound like military simulation to you? It sounds like Cops and Robbers to me. So maybe BIS should accept that those are the people playing the game now and shift their marketing to reflect that? It seems that every decent milsim group I find is shorthanded at best, and a ghost town at worst. And further therein, for a community so praised for fostering the idea of "if it's not there, mod it in", I see a surprising amount of servers with red dots blacklisting any and all all mods for the reason of preventing hackers. This brings me to the topic of anti-cheat, which apparently SUCKS if you have anything to do with addons, so much so that server hosts and admins are turning off addons altogether (aside from server-sided ones and mission scripts). That kinda kills the idea of even using addons, don't you think? And me personally– I refuse to play the game in vanilla because the core game lacks a ridiculous amount of the features I've come to rely on just to enjoy playing. Oh, and speaking of enjoyment, if I were to reflect on my 1100+ hours and 3+ years spent playing Arma 3, I would have to say more than half of that was spent having zero fun because of various problems including but not limited to: testing addons to see if I can fix them or if they're broken / conflicting, desperately trying and tweaking to no end to get decent stable FPS, joining and being kicked from servers because "this addon isn't allowed", "invalid version of x", Battleye bugging out, other non-related game crashes, waiting at a load screen (even in spite of having OS+A3 on an SSD and a rig well above the recommended spec), attempting to command friendly AI to do simple things, respawning or loading a previous save because a poorly balanced AI system 360-noscoped me as soon as I came into it's (absurdly large) detection radius, or because it saw me with x-ray vision through foliage or other soft "cover", or because it somehow knew I was 100 meters away behind it because "cones of vision" are a seemingly unknown topic to whoever programmed the games simplistic, copy-paste, AI. Of course the list of shortcomings goes on, as you could infer. Moreover, I'm quite confused and angry with BIS and the community they breed and host. The community is definitely polarized, with people on one had (seemingly blindly) worshiping Bohemia Interactive as if it's a deity, and on the other hand people throwing baseless or misguided accusation and anger at them. I personally don't understand how people can be so easily appeased by the game devs mundane additions and changes, and overlook all faults as if Arma 3 == OFP. Of course on the flip side I see very few of the people who are angry pointing out any of the real issues the game has, or taking any time to gather unequivocal evidence (objective or even reasonably subjective) to give the devs any motivation to make the improvements they demand. If you have trouble seeing what I'm saying, perhaps you could look at the War Thunder / Gaijin Entertainment debacle. That game fills a need; it's the only widely popular MMO focused specifically on aerial combat. Sure, there's IL2, but seriously that's far less popular... War Thunder's popular enough to hold monopoly even though it lacks many basic and expected features such as modding, community hosted servers, even remotely acceptable and balanced match-making, or proper peripheral support (think HOTAS, MFD, switchboard, VR, multi-display), so much that mouse and keyboard are recommended for a flight sim game?! And it doesn't even cover a decent array of aircraft; you're limited to WW2 era vehicles (even then once you get to a high enough Battle Rank you'll be waiting upwards of 30 minutes to get into a match). And that isn't bad, But it does serve to illustrate my point. The community there is just too niche to monetarily justify developing for, so much so that Gaijin still relies on micro transactions to fund War Thunder's servers. It sucks to be part of a niche player base.

Just read through the thread, and now I see that there is a lot of stuff in the dev version that's not in the version I was using. Admittedly I had stopped using Athena until recently, and kudos on all the awesome stuff you added! I just installed the latest dev version that you posted, and ran A3. Was getting like two or three FPS and I couldn't get the app to connect to the game (I let it through the firewall, etc.) Started looking around and I noticed that you said to disable Battleye for the dev versions. Disabled BE and I was immediately back to normal FPS, and the app happily informed me that there was a terrain that it needed to render! Funny thing was that I was still in the main menu– apparently Athena detected Tanoa, which was rendered as the background scene. So I let it do it's thing and the height mapping looks brilliant! I think the dev version just about solved all my problems Not sure if it's been asked, but can/ do you plan on getting it working with BE? Kinda bummed not being able to use Athena in multiplayer :/ Thanks anyway man, you do great work!

I haven't tried a different allocator since Apex, but I've played around w/ it in the past... Been running whatever the default is, but I'll try playing around with it. Using the public branch, no betas or anything, few addons running, I'll try playing vanilla for a while and see if the crash still happens. Launcher params: ebable HT, no splash, ExThreads, File operations, texture loading, geometry loading, maxmem 8192, maxvram 3840, CPU count 8 I'll do some reading on the profiling branch, maybe give it a try; didn't know there was such a thing until a day or so ago.

Also having this issue, seems to happen randomly as far as I can tell, and more or less the game needs a full restart to get it back to normal FPS. Game drops to lower poly counts than Half life 1 and FPS slows to less than 10 and fluctuates unpredictably from 0-10. Sometimes, however, it will return to normal FPS if I just stop moving and 'let it load' for a few minutes, like it's being caused by some kind of 'hang'. This has been happening for me since the Apex update. The issue is uncommon enough that it doesn't bother me, though I would like to know if BI knows of / is working on the bug. Sadly, as it's random, I have no idea how to recreate it. I've also been having quite a few more crashes since Apex, most relating to "out of memory" or directx... Specs (slightly older build) i7 2700k @ stock clock (was OC'd until I upgraded to win 10) 16GB MSI GTX 970 4GB Samsung 850 Evo 500GB w/ OS and A3 installed

Some unrelated questions and comments... A few posts back you mentioned that you imported Tanoa. Will that be available as a map package download on the website anytime soon, or did you mean you imported it in some other way? Reason I'm asking is that I can't seem to get that done myself... When I try to use EXPORTNOGRID ( or TOPOGRAPHY) I don't get any .emf files. I ran A3 in administrator mode, and double checked that I was entering the command right, and I got the activation message after typing the command each time... I checked the A3 wiki, and it seems to quote KK's blog, in saying: "Go to c:\ ... If you had activation message and no file saved, something is wrong with write file permission to this location, you will have to troubleshoot it on your own." Not really sure how to troubleshoot that, and google doesn't seem so sure how to help me either :/. I'm running windows 10 and I think UAC is disabled, but maybe there's still some issue with file permissions (I can't imagine what). Can a kind soul enlighten me as to what I may need in order to fix this issue? Also, a link to a .emf or .png download for Tanoa would rock too! Tried googling for said downloads, but I can't find either. Second question, is the Athena program available on your website the same version as the one on the Windows store? Which do you recommend using? On a less serious note, the image links in the thread OP seem to all 404 :P

Wow, that was fast! Thanks for fixing it bro.

It seems to me that the Athena website is down. Will it comeback or is Athena dead?...! Great tool by the way, I use it almost all the time now.

I recently got an X52 Pro from Saitek. So I installed the drivers and Smart Technology programming software for it and it all seemed to work fine, but when I fired up Arma 3 I found that my head tracking wasn't working in-game. The head was working fine in Freetrack and the Freetrack interface was selected in the outputs tab. It just wasn't showing up as a controller in A3. What I've done to test / look for a solution: I tested Freetrack in Arma 2 OA and both Freetrack and TrackIR interfaces were showing up. Normally I use the Freetrack interface in A3 since it supports it, so I looked in my game configs and only my X360 controller and the X52 Pro were showing in the list. No Freetrack I went back to Freetrack and checked TrackIR off in the outputs tab and unchecked Freetrack. Then I went back to A3 and TrackIR does seem to show up as a controller, so I enabled it but my head still isn't moving in game. So I figured maybe my controls weren't configured for TrackIR. I checked the view section in A3 controls, and all of the correct things are bound to TrackIR movements but Arma just isn't getting the output data from Freetrack I've re-installed Freetrack, and ran A3 without any mods on, but neither fixed the problem. I thought maybe my player profile was corrupted (since that's what saves control settings), so I created a new one. Still didn't work. So I did some research and found this: http://free-track.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=1224 Which basically says that Saitek's Smart Technology software prevents Freetrack from communicating with other programs. So I uninstalled Smart Technology and restarted my system. Checked and head tracking still doesn't work. I ran CCleaner thinking that maybe there were still a few registry values that needed to be cleaned up. Restarted my system again, and still nothing. TL;DR >got a new Saitek X52 Pro >installed its stuff >Freetrack no longer works in A3 >It still works in A2 OA, so is probably an issue with A3 >can't fix it, need help I've checked my firewalls and anything else that might be preventing Freetrack from working, tried using the TrackIR interface instead, banged my head on a wall, and nothing's working. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? Or better yet, how to fix it? I can't function without Freetrack, and I'm not going to shell out another hundred or so to buy TrackIR. Thanks, Nutter Problem Solved! For reference to anyone else who gets this problem: What causes the problem: Something to do with Saitek software, or just installing new drivers for anything can cause it. (that is, actually installing a driver other than windows default driver) What I believe causes this is when the new software is installed it changes a registry key that ends up preventing Freetrack from communicating with Arma 3. Or at least that's the best I can figure. What the problem looks like: 1. You install a new piece of hardware (i.e. a controller) or software (i.e. lower level code such as a hardware driver) 2. You find that Freetrack appears to work when launching it, but it doesn't show up in A3 as a controller. How to fix it: Re-installing Freetrack, creating a new A3 profile (or resetting your A3 settings), restarting your machine, and changing Freetrack's output will likely not solve the problem! So What I ended up doing is downloading something called FaceTrackNoIR and setting it up with Freetrack's Point Tracker as the source and TrackIR as the output. I used this guide to set it up (Skip straight to the "Installing and Configuring FaceTrackNoIR" section!), and FaceTrack's website can be found here

Thanks man. I guess I'll just have to work around it :/

I used thread search, but it's easy to miss something in a several hundred page thread- sorry if this has already been answered. I run a server that does live Zeus + MCC missions. Is there is a way to have more than one person logged in as mission maker at the same time?

Yeah, Freetrack had a slightly nicer UI in general, but oh well. And I agree completely, FaceTrack has much smoother head tracking, and it's less finicky to set up. Love it! I guess I've solved my problem, and I honestly didn't expect to come close to fixing it when I came here. This is probably the best first impression I've gotten on any forum / community ever! Updating the OP with some reference information in case anybody else comes across this problem / thread. Thanks, Nutter

Yeah, I've used FaceTrack before (stayed with Freetrack because I liked it more), and I'm guessing I'll be forced to switch to it :( I just wish I could figure out what's up with Freetrack. But no matter if I use the Freetrack or the TrackIR interface to output in Freetrack it doesn't show up in-game... So I wonder if FaceTrack would even work. I'll try that next, and if it doesn't work I guess I'll try a fresh install of Arma as much as I hate to do it. I'll update this after some more testing, so fingers crossed! ---------- Post added at 09:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:53 PM ---------- By God FaceTrackNoIR Works! Now I just have another million hours of tweaking my profile and curves to perfection *sigh* You wouldn't happen to know a way to import the curves from Freetrack 2.2 into FaceTrack, would you? Thanks, Nutter

I didn't notice that when I was messing around with it. Thank man. I looked through the logs and the update videos, guess I missed it. ---------- Post added at 16:28 ---------- Previous post was at 16:20 ---------- Maybe the server has weapon fire disabled at spawn? Are you using mod weapons or any mods that might mess up bullet sounds/ physics like JSRS?

So what does the "Ambient Warzone" option do? I tried it and all it does is place markers on the map, but it doesn't spawn enemies at them or anything else. Also, first post yay!