Lobotomy Lobster

Arma needs vehicles but the OP raises a really good point, smaller maps have a whole bunch of advantages over huge maps and there is such a thing as an island that's too big. Look at this picture from Karel Moricky: Altis is one of the biggest maps there but it is nowhere near as detailed and varied as places like Los Santos, one part of the island looks and plays much like another. The bigger you make a map, the less time the map makers can spend on detail work so you get copy and paste towns and bases and wilderness that look lifeless and repetitive (think Cherno woods). Its pointless having a huge map if it looks mostly the same across the whole thing as you are never going to use all that space at once. Arma might have land, sea and air but its an infantry focused game. Land vehicles generally aren't all that much fun to play as the handling, damage modelling and visuals are quite crude compared to a lot of even quite arcadey games such as World of Tanks and Red Orchestra 2 and they're just too vulnerable to infantry AT (as discussed here https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/189117-are-aa3-players-tank-shy/#entry2996108). All of that sounds very harsh but I think BI see it the same way considering they made Tanoa smaller, though its a shame that more buildings aren't enterable. I think Arma's future should definitely focus more on quality than quantity with smaller, more detailed maps.

Firing weapons on full auto causes significant FPS drops under all circumstances. A mag dump in VR causes FPS to drop from around 200 down to sub 20 with chopping and stuttering. This problem is obviously a lot worse in normal missions. This occurs with all weapons, though it seems particularly bad on the MXSW. Using a 2D scope or a silencer seems to remedy the problem, though it doesn't totally fix it. Going into 3rd person fixes the issue if the camera is behind the player but it comes back if you free look behind you (where the muzzle is closer to the camera). It looks like there's something wrong with the close level of detail particles for the muzzle flare and smoke effects when you shoot. This video was taken in the single player editor with no mods running, no major scripts running (no while spam) and very few objects placed. FPS idled at around 200 when not shooting. I'm not the only one out of my group who gets this problem and my computer runs other more recent games such as Crysis 2, GTA:V, Metal Gear Solid 5 and DOOM at a stable 30-60 FPS with no artifacting or anything else to suggest that its a hardware issue on my end. I also don't use ESET or any other anti-virus programs that have been reported to cause issues in A3 (I even uninstalled what I currently use for testing) and a scan for issues turned up clean. I have tried changing my sound channels (as posted here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-OE1vwOWo), changing my memalloc, running the game with command line parameters for GPU memory and CPU core allocations, setting CPU priority to Realtime, running the game at 50% resolution scaling, verifying cache integrity in steam and disabling Steam overlay, all to no avail. My GPU drivers are recent and this problem existed before I last updated them. Searching several forums and the bug trackers suggests that I'm not the only one having this problem and it seems to go back quite a long way: https://feedback.bistudio.com/T68213 https://feedback.bistudio.com/T83184 https://feedback.bistudio.com/T69743 https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/144359-gpu-usage-while-firing/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/107410/discussions/1/540743128783425135/ http://www.armaholic.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=31178 System specs and performance RPT from vid: I will raise another issue on the bugtracker tomorrow.

Totally agree. The weapon sway has always seemed to be both too strong and too variable in direction in A3 and the new changes are definitely over the top. While heavy breathing will definitely affect your aim, the sway up and down is far faster than the character is breathing and has a lot more lateral movement than I'd expect from breathing alone unless your arms were tired as well. I think reducing this on its own would bring a lot more people around to the new way. Making the sway so extreme when fatigued just seems like a way to give the player an incentive to manage stamina when at the moment there aren't really many other downsides to sprinting everywhere. Playing with the new system some more, I think its a case of one step forward and one step back. The gear limitations are great and do a lot to limit players to a set role and encourage teamwork and more close range fighting, but the sway makes combat too chance based and is annoying while the lack of a progressive stamina drain means there isn't really much reason not to sprint everywhere when you have the stamina to do so. This whole set of mechanics just needs more development and I think the answer is going to involve fudging the 1.54 system with the 1.52 system and trying to find a middle ground.

While its early days I'm actually pretty happy with a lot of the new system though it does have a lot of issues. We finally have a system that forces people to limit the amount of kit they carry and to have to choose what equipment they need for their role. Even playing more casual game types like KOTH, I see a lot more people using assault rifles and limiting their kit, I see a lot less ghillied snipers and I see almost no-one hoofing around with MGs and launchers. I will do some proper tests later and post up some more accurate data but as a quick test I went into the editor and measured the distance that you can sprint with my normal mission rifleman loadout (MX, 6 mags, 4 nades, a plate carrier and helmet for PPE, a backpack with a spare 200 round 6.5mm box and some medkits and smokes, all of which fills about 35% of the loadout bar in the inventory). The stamina bar was empty at about 165m and my character kept up at 18kph the whole way, which is roughly a 5:21 minute mile pace. Once the stamina bar was empty my character kept at a consistent 14kph, which is a 6:53 mile pace and is a very fast jogging pace for that amount of kit. He covered 100m in roughly 20 seconds, which is only 10.42 seconds slower than Usain Bolt's world record 9.58 second 100m sprint. That's a good effort, especially in boots and holding your weapon in the low ready the whole way, and it lets you cover a lot of ground at a fast pace. If people think that's an over exagerated system then I'd be keen to see some real life run times in similar kit that can better it. The two things I would fault the system on are the sway and the loss of longer term fatigue. With an empty stamina bar my character can't keep his aim on a man sized target at 50m which does seem pretty over the top and the sway increase when you max out the hold-breath button is just plain overdone. I also think its a bad move to take away longer term fatigue when it could easily have been kept and simply ran down the size of the stamina bar over time. I'm against making it easy to turn off because if you make every new feature added to the game optional people will simply turn off every new addition. These kinds of limits on encumberance are long overdue and coupled with the new damage model the benefits to gameplay are obvious. It would be a real shame to see it all thrown away by custom server settings designed to let people continue ramboing.

Wups wrong thread sorry

I've said the same thing in 3 seperate posts, not sure how much clearer I can be. I'll admit its not the most realistic or detailed way of fixing the problem but its worked well for games like Red Orchestra 2 and the end result is people use these weapons in a support role to put down suppressive fire rather than as CQB bullet hoses with scopes on for sniping. Currently all primary weapons just act like assault rifles with different magazine sizes and sway which isn't very nuanced. I agree that changing recoil and sway would get us 90% of the way there but there needs to be some other kind of limitation to make different weapon types handle in a noticeably different way that forces players to make a choice between weapon types instead of just going for whatever has the biggest magazine. I'm open to any ideas as long as we don't go back to the bad old days of A2's decelerated turning and getting stuck on building geometry as I really don't think that the inertia system has made any real changes here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a5GblouASE&feature=youtu.be This is a quick test I did with the Navid and DMS. From standing unsupported at 500m with full stamina I hit 4 out of 6 shots and the first was a headshot. I'll admit I've never played with a GPMG for any meaningful amount of time in the real world but I'm not convinced that what happens in that video is something that could reliably be done with a real weapon and it doesn't make much sense balance wise either. I think the easiest way to fix this is to just make it so that you can't sight in MGs while moving and you can't sight them in from standing unsupported. You can still hipfire in combat pace for close range and for longer ranges you can either crouch, go prone or deploy it on an object. I don't think that balance issues like this should be left to modders as there's got to be some kind of consistent basic gameplay and I don't think how it is now is how it should be.

While that video is impressive, its probably not something that anyone would do regularly in real combat for a whole bunch of reasons and what Navy SEALs can supposedly do is not what the majority of normal infantry can or would do, which is A3's general baseline for how it represents infantry combat. As RobertHammer's video shows, there is a real limit to what you can do firing an MG while standing, regardless of how strong or ninja you are. The other issue is that its clearly a very highly skilled stunt shot, whereas currently people are taking shots like that regularly with both the high powered sniper rifles and with GPMGs that would almost never be fired in real life without being supported in some way. This is pushing out engagement ranges in the game far further than they should be while making GPMGs the go to weapon for everyone rather than a support weapon that is good for suppression at medium to long range but weak in close quarters and on the move. This is only made worse by the lack of noticeable recoil when hip firing MGs at close range that actually makes GPMGs the preffered weapon for room clearing, which is obviously just plain wrong for both realism and game balance. You can't just base the game's "realism" on a bunch of youtube videos, you need to think about how people actually use these weapons in real life and what constraints there are to using them. The question you've got to ask is, is this really the kind of realistic gameplay that A3 is trying to create? I don't think it is.

This is a good idea, but I'd consider going further and just not allow people to aim down the sights of MGs while standing if they aren't supported.

Tried this for an hour or so and its a real improvement over the way the AFM collective currently works. You can do precise but meaningful adjustments by tapping the key and you can make major adjustments much more quickly. Its amazing how much more responsive and fun flying the choppers is with this. It almost seems easier flying a Mohawk with it on than flying a Littlebird with it off. If at all possible it would be really good if this could be the normal behaviour for the collective from now on.