Megiddo

Thanks for the pics Il_padrino. Those units look awesome. What is the weapon variant held by the soldier on the left? I don't use GREF for now, but i don't remember this one in the mods. A new toy variant? All in all, really nice teasing guys, once again, all this looks like top notch pieces of work. Can't wait to have the next version installed! Also, i don't want to go against the rules about requests for sure, but i'm curious about the audio aspect and the new surprises brought by Laxemann and the teams for the future version. In a word, a bit of video or audio teasing could be really cool too, if possible of course. Thank you and keep up the great work :)

Took another look at the video, and something also seems improved, not completely sure : The source of the sounds, i mean the direction and distance from where they are emitted seem more precise and diversified. the source of close to mid distant sounds seem easier to spot, for example the direction from where the gunshots are coming. And the longer the distance is, the "blurrier" this source seems to be. previous versions were not that precise if i remember well. Also maybe some environmental effects like bird calls seem to come from more directions and different distances (through volume levels maybe) than before, sources seem more diversified and numerous, which seems good to render some sense of "volumetry" in the environmental compositions. Maybe i'm wrong cause i don't have knowledge about sound rendering in arma, but that's an impression. Maybe you improved some things in that domain or capitalized on some recent changes made by Bohemia on the vanilla sound engine... Some better or more educated ears than mine could probably tell and that would be an interesting thing to know.

Thanks for the video! Sounds very interesting, as usual. Don't remind if they were already in the current version, but the "debris falling on the ground" sounds and samples displayed for some seconds after an explosion in or near a building or a car, or when a building is collapsing are really well done. Distant sounds, echoes and propagation effects seem really good, notably some detonations that seem to have a secondary and punchy flap/slam echo propagating (i.e at 2:28). Very nice. Vehicle engines are roaring the right way. Snaps and cracks seem to have punchy but reasonable volume levels...maybe the bullet impacts, wizz and ricochets volumes being a bit shy gameplay-wise maybe, but this probably is a YouTube effect. Keeping in mind what you said about Vegas rendering and YouTube limitations, all this seem very promising. Can't wait to hear the new distance effects for aircrafts and choppers. Thanks again, and keep up the good work :)

Thanks for the update guys. Keep up the great work. Best wishes to the mod and the teams for 2017 :)

Perfect Time for Launch

First, thanks for sharing those awesome mods. Those are great pieces of work. Been trying Dynasound 2.0 along with Enhanced Soundscape (they work well with 64 bits it seems) and they bring a lot to the audio immersion. Echoes, distant sounds and reverbs induced by ES are undoubtedly a success when it comes to giving some "flesh" to the fighting scenes, the gunshots and the detonations. Specially when heard from a distance. The new versions seem also quite performance friendly. Very nicely done. If i may bring some observations : - I noticed that the 4-five pistol has no echo effect. The gunshot sound is dry, no echo or ES reverb noticed with this one. Someone else having this issue? - Concerning the choppers : First, Holy Shit, those gatling and 20/30mm cannon shots and impact sounds, along with their echoes and reverberations are gorgeous. As well as the fly-by effects : The engine "woosh" displayed when the chopper is passing just above our head is very well done. Though, and please take that observation as a question rather than criticism, but don't you think that the distance at which their engines can be heard is a bit short, compared to their shots? That's only my opinion for sure, but gameplay-wise, we could think that a longer distance could help the player to hear and spot a bit more easily such a serious threat. I tried with a good volume level through headphones though, and noticed that beyond 900/1000 meters their engines become almost inaudible. This feeling was maybe particularly noticeable for the AH99 Blackfoot. This precise point leads me to the last observation : Maybe i'm totally wrong and you'll explain us, but if i remember well, the choppers or aircrafts engine sounds don't benefit from those echoes and reverberations, through Dynasound or ES. To make it short, i was just wondering if applying the echoes or ES effects to the loudest engines, such as choppers and jets ones, could bring one more step to the immersion value, while rendering very well the very "threatening" and loud presence those war beasts have over a entire zone. Maybe this is something you already considered for further developments. Thank you and keep up the great work :)

Tried the Dev branch lately, and just wanted to congratulate Bohemia teams for this major improvement. With a quite solid PC (i7 4790K, 16G DDR3, GTX1070, non SSD HD. Im used to play with all graphic settings maxed except view and objects distance, equally set at 2000 meters on foot and 3500 in air), the stuttering that was tied to the textures or objects loading, when zooming or switching to scope mode, with weapons or binoculars for example, has almost completely disappeared. In terms of gameplay it's way smoother and more stable, improving the gameplay experience and allowing the player to extend the visibility distance settings. Also tried with Alive mod enabled through client and SP scenarios in the editor, and really, i'm wondering if switching to 64 bits has no beneficial effect on IA calculations. There is clearly less stuttering when they are spawning, and more of that, their reactions are quicker in combat or when they move. Maybe just like when we're using a headless client, to picture the things. Not an expert about CPU or RAM usage by the game for sure, but after comparing between stable and dev branch, in the same scenario, This clearly doesn't look like a simple placebo effect. Really eager to try that with more than 8G of RAM enabled. After "what", "why" and "how", the only remaining question is when. Great job guys :)

"You only need the dll in @ALiVE (at the moment) if you are doing map indexing on the client" "The current @ALiVE folder has the ALiVEClient.DLL that is 32-bit. Today the ALiVEClient extension is used for index mapping only. It is not used for either ALiVE mission creation or running ALiVE on your PC. If you are not doing map indexing then you do not need the extension." Maybe i understood the wrong way, but does that mean that ALiVE is functional in 64 bit dev branch if we only make and save ALiVE scenarios through the editor in SP? or that a new x64.dll is needed anyway in the @ALiVE folder? Would just like to test the dev version with ALiVE enabled in the frame mentioned above, but hesitate to download it for the moment. Is a workaround like the ones concerning ACE or TFAR planned (or available?) for public testing purposes? Maybe i just misunderstood what you said, so better ask. Thank you anyways for the continuous work. 64 bit is a great perspective for ALiVE users :)

Thanks for these useful explanations. It helps to see the process. You clearly got what i meant, and i wanted to bring a precision, actually that's more a question, concerning those little steps and the consequences they have on both movements and aiming. Too bad i'm neither a video guy, but i'll try to picture things once again. Just stand still, immobile, with your character and take your pistol. In normal aiming stance, not iron sight. In first person view it's even more obvious. Then, simply rotate the character right or left with the mouse. At one point, the character is making the "little steps" we're talking about. The problem imo is that those little steps have a direct influence on the horizontal aiming line. At each step you can see that the gun, and even the entire character, is leaning right or left a little bit, and it breaks what i call the aiming line, its horizontal trajectory. Maybe it could be better if this light leaning was, either continuous, or not present at all, while we are rotating. I think i understood what you meant about those blend steps and their effect on the animation sequences, the link between them, and the priorities you were refering to. Aside from the movement animations, is there a way to also influence their consequences on what i call, the clumsy way certainly, those aiming trajectories? Or are they completely tied to each other? some sort of axis matter or simply a chain of animations... I don't have the knowledge for sure, but from the point of view of a simple player, it seems that those steps, when the character is immobile, walking, or even running and changing direction, have a negative effect on aiming (is it also tied to the scope bug?) and the global character reactivity when moving. At least, imo, compared to the simpler, but so reactive and precise animations we had in OA. Could be great if that was something you could somewhat influence the right way, too. Thanks.

Nice work, thanks for sharing :) Been trying the mod since yesterday. The bugs you're talking about are present, indeed, but they're not a game breaker at all. Changing direction is still relatively quick, and if we're already in scope mode or ironsight view, the left->idle->right process is unnoticeable. Some more tweaks and it will do the job. Hard to describe and give some feedback in english, but the movements and animations seem a bit more "squared". To picture things : In terms of gameplay, i always prefered the direct and squared animations from ARMA 2/OA, at least when it comes to lateral movements, so to say, strafing while walking or running and aiming. i always found them more precise and more sensitive. From this point of view, your tweaks are rubbing out a bit the soft and limp feeling vanilla animations have. maybe you cut some animation phases, changed their speed or else, but the feeling is more direct, i like it. Specially in 3rd person view. Hope you'll keep improving your tweaks further. By the way, if retrieving the effectiveness of some of the good old OA animations is part of your goal, do you plan to make some tweaks : - About running animations, specially when starting/stopping to run and changing directions while crounched. Same concern about the A3 animations. They're limp and kinda imprecise imo. - About the acceleration/deceleration effects of the character : Here again, to emphasize on the inertia of the character while advantaging a better animation reactivity, specially when starting to run while stopped in stand up or crounching position. The same when the character stops with a deceleration effect. - About the head bob : even at 100%, i find them very weak compared to OA ones. In terms of immersion, the old ones were better i think. - About character rotations and the inertia of weapons : That's the big part. Don't know if this has to do with what you said about changing directions having a higher priority than aiming stance, but remember well, in OA when you were aiming somewhere (right, left, up or else with the mouse), your weapon movement seemed to have a little latency compared to the character turning/rotating animation itself. The priorities were maybe different, don't really know... It was really reactive and well done to give some sense of weight to your armaments, while ensuring a good feeling of homogeneous movement to your character. In comparison, today we have those little "on the spot" steps when the character rotates while stopped, that are breaking a good part of the aiming homogeneity by adding cosmetic, useless animations. Don't know if this is the same problem when the character is moving, but, do you have some latitude to try and tweak, speed up or even suppress completely those little steps the character does when he is rotating? Really hard to describe this in english, sorry, but i hope you got the idea. Anyways, keep up the good work and thank you. those tweaks are already a good improvement for me.

Thanks for the update! will give this new version a good try :)

Ransom of success probably. You deserve it guys. Thanks for the update, that's great work as always :)

Great work guys. Thanks for the update :)

Hi Robert, First, thanks (again) for this essential mod. Seems that since the APEX update, the following error is pointing to your Pistol Pack : No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWeapons.ItemInfo'. Only have two content mods for weapons, accessories and gears these days, RHS and your Pistol Pack. When deactivating and reactivating the mods one by one, this error seems to be tied with your mod. Not a specialist of course, so i'm not 100% sure, you'll tell us. Oh, and if a possible update happened to come with a .45 Glock, an HK P30, some Sig 1911 TacOps or P320, or even a laser attachment visible by day,you know ;) Joke aside, not asking for anything of course, but do you plan further updates for the pistol pack, maybe with new sound and echoes effects to stick with the new BI sounds?

When proceeding by elimination, so to say when deactivating all the content mods and then reactivating them one by one, it seems that this ItemInfo error is tied to Robert Hammer Pistol Pack. (only have RHS and RHPP active as weapon/gear mods these days) Not 100% sure of course, as i'm not a specialist, but it seems that either the pistol box itself, the weapons, attachments, or ammos are causing this. Something good in this : this will bring us an update for this excellent, essential mod :) Will report this in the dedicated thread as well.

​Have almost the same error since the update ( update + APEX DLC): No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWeapons.ItemInfo' shows up at the main menu screen and twice when opening any editor mission. As underlined, maybe this is caused by some weapon mods or CBA with joint rails? Will test Ineptaphid method to try and spot the cause.

Hey, Thanks for your answer Von. Ran some more test sessions and wanted to bring a correct answer this time. First, yes, i run the latest CBA (2.4.1.16) and all your standalone modules as mods, among other ones. Had to update two of them (SOCOM and FROGS if i remember well), so all your standalone mods are up-to-date. The tests took place in Stratis mainly, and i made my own "starting base" on the map, with the SOCOM laptop. So i have not used the off-map ops center, or the camp for some tests. For other tests i started at the ops center and the error messages reported below were the same. - All your standalone modules were put in the editor, as shown here : - For the settings, all the SCAR modules were set to make RED/OPFOR/CSAT units spawning : most of the settings stayed the default ones, except some of them : -In the SQUADS module, 30% probability for infantry. the rest are default settings. -For the AOs module, all stayed by default, except the rogue intel and infantry intel percentages, set to STATIC. Reliable intel, so to say, for testing purposes. - Finally, for the combatants module, 50% for the setting. After some test sessions, but certainly not enough, found those settings quite satisfying to simulate a light map occupation, suitable, as you said, with specops and stealth ops (appreciate those ones as well :) ). Chained some SOCOM missions, infantry units spawned as expected, saw some planes or choppers units flying-by without attacking (TPW i guess), and even some choppers patrolling at low speed and low altitude. Very nice. Haven't seen submarine units near the shores, vehicles or armored units through the map though. Maybe because of the low probabilities or lack of tests more probably. One or two observations with the spawned units : SQUADS Being able to spawn units in a 3000 meters radius is really good IMO. Along with the SOCOM missions, or simply from the map occupation/ambient battlefield point of view, it advantages the careful recon actions and suits well with those notions of probabilities. It ensures a good replayability. Then with the AOs, We have partial intel, and have to complete it directly on the field, by discovering in details where are the "cold" and "hot" spots. Very immersive. With different settings and ambient scuffles between allies and enemies, it's certainly quite interesting as well. Still have to test that. Works very well on big maps like Altis for example, though when on Stratis or smaller maps, the AO "radius", from what i saw with intel reports, notably infantry ones, seem very large. when checking for example the infantry AO with the SOCOM laptop, the radius covers almost all Stratis island. This is not a complaint of course, and it could even appear as something "realistic" because, finally, you can find some enemy troops patrolling anywhere on the map thanks to the SQUADS module. A fortiori, a chopper or rapid vehicles covering quite a distance in a reasonable time. In fact, this is more a question about the "readability" of the AOs generated by SCAR's AO module : As you said, the units are actually spawning when we "enter" in this AO. I also keep in mind that the way they are represented can show a radio or radar radius, you'll tell us. Finally, gameplay-wise, the question is more something like "when am i entering in an AO, and what are its limits"? is it an invisible fixed radius around the icon like 400 or 500 meters, or is it one of the radius circles we can see on this pic, or something completely different? In addition, are the units spawned by the AO module operating or patrolling in that zone only? Then, how is managed the "despawn" of units? at each cycle, or after particular events? Saying that because i followed some rogue units i think (OPF_G_F) at two occasions. 2 infantrymen approached a building (the ruined houses facing the Kamino firing range base) : had to go through to join an objective and decided to get rid of them. watched after their movements and they stayed there. Once i was on site, they simply weren't there anymore...not a big deal anyways, maybe i simply missed them :P Do we have to set the same faction in the AO module, under "rogues", and in the combatants module? Also, and here again, maybe my tests were not numerous enough, or maybe this is not your goal at all, but do you plan to make enemy forces occupy and defend strong points like military bases or large civilian infrastructures (it was possible with EOS IIRC), or do they only patrol in the open? Only tried your modules for now, but in cunjunction with ALiVE (AI commander with "occupy" behaviour and military placement), it could certainly do wonders. - Finally, here are the error messages i encountered so far : Systematically these ones, on the loading screen and as soon as the session starts : Not sure that the second one is caused by your mods, but as soon as i deactivate them in the launcher, this error disappears. And this one, seems to pop out at regular intervals when i'm near or in a chopper AO : BTW, concerning the choppers, i had the impression that they were spawning in number, despite the low probability settings. Maybe even overrepresented on the field, in compact zones. Just a personal feeling, maybe i'm wrong. Sorry for this wall and the approximative english guys, wanted to bring more precise elements this time. Anyways, your mods bring a lot to the immersion and ambience of the missions. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work :) Edit : Not very comfortable with the new forums yet, please excuse the size of the pics. if they're too big, a moderator is welcome to resize them if necessary. thanks.

Will take a second look at the instructions and make some more tries. Thanks for the link :)

Also very interested in the SCAR Modules. Tried some sessions in the editor, with only the SCAR modules, then along with the SOCOM module, and finally, as Von Quest recommended (this SCAR BETA post has disappeared or maybe i haven't retrieved it?) , with all the standalone modules, so to say CORE, FROG, LEAP, SOCOM and SCAR. The SCAR modules start, all the intel messages are displayed on the map and finally the radar intel. Have waited, as recommended, till the disappearance of the final radar intel before starting anything, and then went for some free roam, or even tried some missions via the SOCOM laptop. the SCAR units never spawned. Got systematically some error messages concerning the spawn probabilities and the number of spawned units, as soon as the modules start, and during the wave of intel. Tried to lower the number of units spawned, tried to set the probabilities to 100%, same result. Not very precise, sorry, will try to report those error messages a bit more precisely next time. Certainly, i missed some things or screwed some settings in the modules. For example, is it mandatory to start the mission at the off-map ops center? can we use the SCAR modules only? Is it working for you Ski2060? Plenty of questions, as said, those SCAR modules seem very interesting :)

Was just passing by to say thank you for the SOCOM module. Works well with an ALIVE environment, particularly on Altis. Really like the mission generation process with the laptop, the clear map intel, the great briefings. Got some nice missions lately and enjoyed them so far. Still being a noob at creating coherent missions, even with 2K+ hours on arma 3, so this tool is really appreciated. Can't wait to see more about the TOC and SCAR modules, and the kind of ambient environment they can create. If they're as user (and CPU) friendly, i'm in! Keep up the good work :)

Great work, thanks for the update :)

Those WIP Xiang sounds are simply awesome. Rotors, Throttle, RPM, Stress sounds on the hull...Very, very nice. Just wondering, though : at the end of the video, the aircraft approach and fly-by volumes seem always quite low with aircrafts, and it seems that vanilla sounds, as well as other mods out there, are very shy with those volumes. Is it intended to keep reasonable volume or Db levels, or are you facing some restrictions about that? Do you plan some "jet wash" effects as the aircrafts pass just above your head, just to give the idea, those sort of sounds? https://www.pond5.com/sound-effect/54224900/jet-fly.html Keep up the good work, can't wait to hear the next version :)

Really like this mod. Thanks for the regular updates and improvements! Keep up the good work. Gory but not too much :)

Excellent work as usual! Thanks for sharing those units and for all the nice updates :)

Really nice mod, i'm enjoying it so far...Thanks for the update :) Currently using it along with Mao's Blood Mist and it's really good. Have you included the mists with this update, or is it for later? Maybe a bit more pronounced, or at least coloured/textured ones compared to Mao's ones? specially for the headshots maybe? Always satisfying to see long distance shots hitting the flesh :P Just wanted to report some blood spats conflicting with the stairs, sometimes a part of the splat is "suspended" because it's longer than a stairtread. Thanks again, keep up the good work!