dmitri

True. It's ironic though that if they owe us nothing, they still take the time to tell us why they're focusing on consoles. If we're a minority, why bother? I know there are many factors, and this might be naive on my part, but I feel this has something to do with them lacking the will to innovate for a more demanding audience (pc gamers). Or perhaps we're not demanding. Mainstream titles are aimed at hormonal, penniless youth, the least likely to purchase their game, the most likely to have zero taste, instead of at adults who actually possess the finances to purchase their games. But it's a bell curve isn't it. They keep dumbing down, and gamer's "gamer intelligence" will dull along with the games.

Not a bug but a feature. It is intented to be like that. I've seen people list this as a bug many a time. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I've always enjoyed the occasional RPG winging past my head or into the ground near my position.

OFP conversions are always welcome. Just some minor comments on the texturing. Perhaps too much black in the sat map texture. Black is a shadow and should generally not be painted onto a texture. Let objects casting shadows and bump map effects create black. Also not really sure you need a highres sat map at all. If it's the view from the ground that's a priority, you could probably get away with a lower resolution sat image and simply increase the noDetailDist, fullDetailDist in the island's config. You'll get the same tiled effect with a single far smaller detail texture, your mask will do all the placement work. A high resolution sat image works when you're painting specific detail such as the change in terrain at the edge of a runway, or using it to determine topology and object placement. Looking forward to the next release

I've seen this "piracy is to blame" argument appearing often over the past few weeks. Conveniently after a few high profile developers complained about PC gamers not buying their games due to it. I can remember many of my teen peers pirating Doom, or whatever game was popular, over a decade ago. Yet PC gaming was doing just fine. I'm not saying piracy isn't a problem, just that I'm not buying into the line that developers are feeding us. That we as gamers, who paid their salaries for years and put them into the position to make millions off console gamers, are suddenly now the sole reason for the lack sales in PC gaming. I buy my games. I don't buy them when they're bad though, or appear boring. Where are the new intellectual properties? I've looked real hard at buying a console lately. But I cannot justify it when there are maybe 2 games I actually want to play, and when the majority of "top" games are also available on the PC.

Good points Architect Continual extreme shifts in elevation are something I'm working to avoid. Partly why I never play on Northern Sahrani. Not using any clutter at the moment. Only slowed performance down with no effect on gameplay. Might change later. Already heading in that direction. Still very much WIP (the nasty blocky mask map). Indistinct placeholder texture, but each hut is surrounded by footprints. A central priority.

Right, but the "2007 Google" watermarks still look the same on both sides nice catch. BTW, is there anyway to get the images from google without watermark or do you have to use photoshop/edit the sat pictures? Endless rubber stamp tool.

It's the details that motivate island makers to spend hours and hours on their maps. Cool things that'll surprise people.

Thanks for the encouragement GranQ. I have enjoyed your mods Yeah, it would be nice to have someone to test the map and give feedback. This sort of thing eats into my limited time though, packaging maps and uploading etc. I know what I need to do, just need to make time to do it. First release will need to perform better than it does now, and be at least twice the area currently completed. At least two medium sized bases planned. Airstrip isn't a priority right now due to the low viewdistance and AI driver issues. Small to medium rural villages, yes. A small one is just visible on the left of the first shot. I have no large urban areas planned since I think there are enough maps focusing on this. It isn't something that is personally important to me. I'd rather see a complicated network of rice paddies.

I think so, yes. It'd have to take things a little further than the Low Plants mod though. I'm thinking purely gameplay here. I like the idea of having very dense grass\bush areas. To get that without a huge drop in performance, I'd be happy suffering compromised plant complexity.. Plants consisting of only a few poly planes with high res grass images with alpha channels mapped on. VTE's amazing catalog of Islands are a good example. In the current alpha it's all converted from OFP, so in parts it looks a little dated, but the objects are very efficient performance wise, and awesome to play on when the AI decides to engage. Yup, if you skip the "import sat + mask" or move your layers folder out of the project directory. It'll show completely white in game. Not all that practical for actually discerning finer terrain features, but there you have it. edit: Did some tests, it's the sat map causing the crashes at 700m. Without it, I can increase the viewdistance to a poor performing 2000m before..the crash again occurs, likely due to the cell count. Cell count is set in stone, need to focus my attention on the sat map and the object density.

Yeah, sorry, I need to amend my language. I meant "low" as in 6 cells as opposed to 10. Of course that would actually be a high cell count, as you've pointed out. Hmm. That kinda goes against everything I've read\experienced. Does your island have a lot of objects? Now that I think about it though..when I initially created the terrain for my island without any sat map, I could achieve a high viewdistance (2000), though performance was obviously quite poor. The minute I included a sat map\objects, the crashes above 600m occurred. I just wrote it off as the cell count causing it, and headed back into photoshop. Will do a simple test (remove sat map) and see if that has an effect. Thank's for the feedback, Fitzee. My map's performance is at about 50fps on a fairly good machine. It is lower on average than Northern Sahrani. Seems to be BIS's bush objects as much as the cell count effecting performance (long as viewdistance is at 500m, above that the cell count effects performance exponentially. Which is fine, I don't need it any higher than 500).

I have my X-fi connected to a 5.1 receiver\amp (which is set to DD 5.1). Surround works wonderfully for me. The front, rear and sub channels work perfectly. I don't have a center speaker, so I suppose it's actually 4.1. The center channel probably shares the front sounds.

Thanks Fiz Glad you like it, since it's partly your idea to begin with. Yup, that's the medium distance detail texture kicking in. Will look into to it. Haven't noticed the tree size issue while playing on it, but I can see what you mean from looking at the shots. Some of it might also be down to using triplehead to take the screens, perspective distorts things big time. Easy to correct in Visitor anyhow. My sorta-kinda-solution has been to set the initial fog in the islands config to about 500m distance.

Fast roping is such a specialised thing..surely there must be other more common place military disciplines worth simulating? With the different mod versions we'd have over the years, we all know how they'd implement it anyhow.

Roughly the area completed so far, left of the river: Replying to the comments from the WIP thread.. Thanks for the positive feedback Nice thing 'bout posting pics is you can leave out all the bad bits. I've played your mission on LAN. The island is directly inspired by the awesome VTE mod. I don't think there is a standalone Vietnam game out there that can match the OFP version of VTE (and soon the ArmA version ). I'll try this. Though I think Opteryx is right that most of the performance issues are terrain resolution related. I would like to replace BIS's good looking but performance draining bush objects with ones similar to VTE's simplistic but very efficient sprite\poly plane bushes. Haven't had the time to create new objects though, complete noob regarding O2. Partly why the island is at best "Vietnam inspired", since I have to get by with BIS's European vegetation. It isn't an overly complicated map, but the cell size does kill the engine. Runs smooth at 500m with optimised graphics settings on my system (8800gtx, amd 4400).

South East Asia Map Preview Seam12.jpg Seam05.jpg Seam01.jpg Seam02.jpg Seam09.jpg Seam10.jpg Low viewdistance, infantry\helicopter only map. Roughly based on Vietnam. Intention was to have an OGR style map for ArmA. Many small terrain features for small to medium sized infantry engagements\PvP. Worked on this for part of January, but haven't had time to resume it since then. Have completed about 700 square meters, aiming for detail rather than size. Original plan was a 5km by 5km map. Sat map has been painted for about 60% of it. I'd like to release a preview version of the map sometime soon though I'm not sure if it'll see another release after that, due to RL and various performance\AI issues with low cell maps. Dmitri

Did you solve placing sounds in Visitor?

If these are screenshots, the viewdistance is lower than Turok64. Ten meters and then fog?

Using TIR slows me down while playing infantry. Can't really get any clearer than that. I don't want what I'm saying to be interpreted as a flame of TIR. I think it adds immeasurably to the immersion factor of ArmA, I love it.

It reduces the twitch factor all fps (even ArmA) possess.

Don't want to use environmental sounds. Figured that it'd be impossible without a model. Perhaps an invisible dummy object that emits a sound? Barely have enough time to work on an island, let alone researching stuff like this. @Brewster Defining the objects in the config isn't the problem, it's placing them in Visitor. Could leave it up to the mission maker, but I like the idea of hardcoding the objects into the map.

I've had my TrackIR only a few days. It does add to the immersion in ArmA. Very intuitive, quick to get the hang of. Very happy with it. I play other sims too. EECH, car games such as GTR2, GTL. TrackIR truly shines in these games. Far as ArmA, I'm only using yaw and pitch (looking around), find leaning or zooming with it too cumbersome. I've increased the deadzones to make ironsights easier to use (the slightest head movement will throw one's aim out). Flying with it is great. I disable it during MP deathmatch\CTF. Physically turning your head simply isn't as fast as using the alt key. It might actually be a disadvantage during competitive play, where speed is everything. Though in PvP I rarely use the alt look around either. So perhaps this has to do with my play style. I wouldn't dream of starting ArmA up without it though...

An option to save combinations of video settings as presets. I'm always changing the settings based on the mission I'm about to play. It'd be nice to be able to save different combos, and perhaps be able to bind a key to specific presets.

I can think of many features BIS should rather spend time on. And many of those don't require near as much time to implement, or are as worthless as ragdoll.

Finally, new AI abilities! I'm sold. WIP. My guess is missing medium distance detail maps.

On the whole, I think it was positive. But then I have always tried to be realistic about OFP\ArmA's direction.. I was expecting it to be far more negative after reading certain comments here. Good interview, thanks Suma, and Jerryhopper. Inspires me to plow back into Visitor.. I'm pleased that the improved AI was mentioned, that's top of my wishlist. At times it has a Disappointed Community vs BIS developer feel, but I suppose that's to be expected. BIS sound like a nice group of guys. I can relate to the "keep your head down and work on what you like" siege mentality. It's a work ethic required when you're in a medium\small business competing against large companies, many in countries that are seen as the "centre of everything", where having high expectations are the norm. OFP is worthy of it's pedestal, but it was also helluva quirky, had it's fair share of problems and was patched numerous times. With ArmA, the expectation factor seems to have swayed the community from tolerance and an understanding that the game was always about a bigger picture, not the finer details - to endlessly nitpicking..finer details. Perhaps we've tired of what made the game good, even if there still isn't a game out there that compares to it. I'm not against criticism and the community being proactive, it's good. Most of those labelled negative are still playing the game. Take the tactical shooters available currently. Any disappointment I might have had with BIS games cannot compare to the disappointment felt over the current Rainbow 6 and GWAR titles.