Vigil Vindex

Will Arma 3 ever be able to have it's in-game voice-over-network codec updated from the now long time discontinued Speex codec with the newer Opus codec? The Speex website itself states that Speex is now obsoleted by Opus. http://www.speex.org/ http://opus-codec.org/

I have also noticed that when you capture a zone and then the counter-attack happens the AI are spawned within the zone, sometimes right in front of you. I don't think this happened in the previous version.

Really enjoying this mission. Many thanks from me and the group for creating this, we have been playing every night this week and so far we have only conquered half the map. Think we will be playing this mission for a long time! :) One thing that would be nice would be able to get supply drops so when we are out in the field we can restock on ammo, maybe a tiered ammo crate system that costs 10 ammo points for a crate with magazines, 50 ammo points for a crate with magazines & AT and 100 ammo points for a crate with everything. Perhaps require capturing an airfield to allow for ammo drops to be enabled within a certain radius of owned airfields. I have also noticed that one of our players has been placing FOBS within capture zones for bases. The check to prevent this works when trying to initiate placing a FOB within a zone, but we have found that if you are outside the zone and start FOB placement and run into the zone you can then place FOBS within the zone. Not sure if this is an issue but it does negate some of the logistics mechanics of the mission. Might need to add a check during FOB placement to prevent this. Also wondering if we can have more items for base building, such as the barbed wire fences and the larger multi-level guard posts.

I think the new DLC system is a mess, cooked up to solve a problem that is never going to get solved. Especially not while we have the intrinsic split in the community between those who can afford to pay and those who cant. The intention of the new DLC system is to not split the player base, but it does exactly that by employing new and creative ways of nagging players to buy DLC, such as limited functionality for partially-free content, or displaying ads, or just flat out obscuring your screen with gaudy graphics. I don't see anyway around the fact that the player base will have to split along lines of content being used on servers and the content players have access to. The only way to mitigate the problem is by enhancing the steam workshop integration to enable users to have mods downloaded and loaded automatically based on the server they join from the server browser in game. That would remove some of barriers to players joining with other players, for content from mods which are free of course, for paid for content there will be the split. I think the old style "expansion pack" system was better. When we have the community flooded with DLC this will only add to the complexity involved between players playing together.

I would say that FPS/Performance and AI are both areas that BIS should have tackled much earlier in the A3 dev cycle. Having to have them listed as things we want added now after release of A3 is a bit of a let down.

@Dwarden: Can you make sure the wiki starts getting updated with the practical things like the changes regarding servers and the gamespy closure on the wiki? In fact can you try and say to all the people at BIS in general and tell them the wiki really needs some LOVE.

I am hopeful that BIS will eventually fix the FPS problems, as I see them, concerning AI and MP performance. As far as I can tell these two issues are what cause the greatest drops in FPS. In SP we get good FPS until AI path-finding gets so loaded that we see considerable drops in FPS. In MP this problem is exacerbated by server FPS affecting client FPS, which seems counter-intuitive but is what is happening. The developments happening with DayZ and the rumored 64-bit and multi-core server improvements should hopefully resolve the issue regarding the server limiting client FPS. These improvements should be transferable to Arma 3. This will leave BIS with the task of fixing the AI, which is no easy task and is why it has mostly been left undisturbed in Arma 3. I am hopeful that BIS will invest in a proper re-factoring of the AI systems to isolate them properly from the rest of the systems so it can be more reliably controlled to not impact on the client side FPS experience as severely as it does now.

I can confirm this is working on a dedicated server.

I don't understand why BIS felt the need to make their own licenses. Creative Commons has licenses to cover all use cases. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ If I intend to release anything it will be under a CC-BY-SA license, as that license has much better standing in court as it is in use all over the world and internationally recognised. These BIS licenses are something they cooked up themselves and has never been tested in court or seen in wide-spread use. Plus it qualifies as a free cultural work, which is what creativity is supposed to be about, contributing to our societies culture, not squeezing financial benefit out of society for as long as possible. https://creativecommons.org/freeworks

It's a real shame AI was not on the todo list at BIS when they decided to make Arma 3. The situation that MadDogX describes has been the situation since Arma 2, probably since OpF.

^^ BIS are saving those for the "GRRRL POWER DLC" coming out next mothers day! ;p

Paid DLC for features and fixes is much closer now than it was last week. Once the infrastructure is in place it will naturally creep in to incentivise DLC purchases.

@Chortles: I agree that due to the technicalities of how OA was distributed it may not be considered an expansion, but at the time it felt like one.

My wallet is the rubicon, and it gets crossed far too often in my opinion. I too also prefer the old style expansion packs where you felt like you really got a good deal because they had so much content. Now we get every little thing atomised and micro-transaction'd.

Will you be releasing the web interface for self hosting etc?

^^ this +1! I want to buy the DLC. But I feel that from the very start of Arma 3 development BIS have dropped the ball letting AI languish in a state that has been static since 2001. AI is central to the infantry experience and it wasn't even given a proper overhaul since 2001. How do I relay this to BIS? Thread after thread, year on year this has remained a problem. I will try and resist buying the DLC in the hope BIS will get the message. It's a shame I have to resort to such desperate measures to try and ensure BIS get the message, we need the core game fixed before new content. How you go from Arma 2 to making Arma 3 and not even consider sorting out the AI is beyond me. PS. The reason I think the core game engine needs overhauled before new content is because I read the ToH flight model caused a 10 fps drop, at the time the average fps was about 30fps, so removing another 10fps would lower the average and make things unplayable so they cut it. Now after some performance improvements in other areas we can spend that 10 fps on the ToH flight model again, hence it being in the Helicopters DLC. I think even being in a situation like that where performance is so limited that you have to actually cut stuff to keep the performance is a sad situation that cries out for an overhaul.

@Kerc: Just to be clear I am not claiming the Karts DLC is "out of touch". I personally just feel that AI and MP performance really needs a concerted and significant investment from BIS to take us forwards. My primary concern is actually regarding VR like Oculus Rift, where there is talk that 120fps will be the minimum for an acceptable experience, and I worry that Arma 3 will never be able to achieve that level of performance. I think that is the bigger picture.

Funnily enough, most of their hopes and aspirations for the game do indeed lead to a bigger picture. I thought that was the whole story behind Arma and the community, where the community has a direct hand in shaping that bigger picture.

I actually think this is the argument that is playing out now. After the rough release of Arma 3 many people are expecting a focus on fixing long standing issues such as performance and AI but we are not seeing this, instead we are seeing new Karts DLC. Regardless of how much time or effort it took, end users only see what they are shown, we don't see much publicity regarding performance fixes, the Karts DLC is more visible leading to the feeling that the focus is elsewhere. ---------- Post added at 14:57 ---------- Previous post was at 14:56 ---------- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/semantics Must I be an idiot and have no understanding of the English language because you don't agree with my point of view. Regardless, sandbox or simulation, I don't see how these two words can define what we are allowed to expect from Arma 3 as a computer game. I think the two words are used to describe the same thing, an environment where objects and concepts are modeled and interacted with and observed.

Exactly, my point being that text book definitions of sandbox vs simulation are debatable at best and hardly proof either way as to what we should expect from BIS. The two terms are in my understanding both describing an environment where objects can be interacted with and observed. Neither are mutually exclusive.

Semantics. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/simulation http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sandbox ---------- Post added at 14:41 ---------- Previous post was at 14:36 ---------- Most successful companies listen to what their customers want and allocate their staff accordingly to meet that demand. This is what leads to the expectation that BIS devs would spend the majority of their time working on the product to make it better meet the demands of customers Nobody is actually dictating how BIS should manage its devs. People are merely expressing their desires and expectations, which is completely reasonable and not to be condemned.

At first I believed this too. Then once I seen all the achievements and seen all the DLC restrictions I really really doubt one guy spent his free time doing all that. ---------- Post added at 14:32 ---------- Previous post was at 14:28 ---------- I think most of the people who have a problem with it are finding it hard to understand how Zeus gets dev time while the 3D editor is still to show up in any meaningful form. I too find it hard understanding the thinking behind the decision to create Zeus while ignoring the many years that people have been requesting for the 3D editor.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/piecemeal PS. Good software can be measured by the quality of it's documentation. So I did a search for "AI" on the BIS wiki and looked at the revision history for all the hits. Guess what, not one single revision in 2014. So no progress worth documenting in the last 5 months at least. https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Category:AI

The shame is on BIS, this is a bad decision to opt for such restrictions in a game built on the back of the modding community. You have to admit it leads to a pretty obvious contradiction in ideals, should the MoveInDriver command now be changed to check for DLC ownership before it can be called? What a slippery slope we tread when we try to make our intentions fit in with our capitalist economic fantasy.

I can't wait to read what the official BIS reply to this thread will be...