rocket

Does your model have a RoadWay lod? I find that any model I try to preview with a RoadWay LOD crashes. I just set it to an Edit lod for previewing.

Yes, it does anything that is placed in a line, it can handle up to two objects making the line (for example, power_line and power_pole) or single objects (wall)

Yes, it will.

That's starting to sound like a BIG feature request... Changing the rendering... UI changes for the option... Function/Setting creation for use in the mission Multiplayer/JIP function use/syncronization That's not a walk in the park...

Any new rig will have a new set of animations. If you have the source rig you might be able to skin a new model to that and rebake some RTM's off it. But you'll still need new RTM's. You get your modeller to make the model, and either them or the animator then "rigs" it to a skeleton. Then you apply your animations to the skeleton. I'm not sure whether BIS/BIA use Max or Maya for their animations, but somehow they bake their animations out to linear RTM files that are then called by the engine. This saves alot of CPU time from, say, Havoc type "rag doll" animations and such. BIA made VBS2, not BIS. I imagine they used similar tools. The animation tools they use, for Max/Maya, will be quite significant. Also - purchasing or motion capturing the required animations is a good way to kick start the animation building proces, followed by much cleanup. I've had involvement in this area, motioncapturing animation, or getting it from stock libraries - is in the tens of thousands of dollars. Then you need to clean it up and make it work for your rig, and your movements. Remember: Militaries, such as the NZDF which I am familiar with, spend hundreds of thousands - if not millions - in developing and tailoring the implementation to suit their specific requirements. I believe you can do many wonderous things with ArmA/VBS - but you are limited severely by the time required to achieve them. Tools are your route to cutting down time requirements (hence MaskMapper and LineMapper), but these take a great deal of thinking and understanding. It took me two years, and much research - to pull together the concept of both tools in such a way they were useful. This topic is a source of annoyance to me, not because of the moral implications - but because a massive moral debate is occuring over something that nobody is going to be making any time soon... when we have plenty of other issues our community should be dealing with... like making ourselves tools to better support our activities, creating tutorials, supporting addon sites like armaholic and armedassault.info with donations, opening our source files and joining our projects. And less "Discussion" posts with WIP's that never happen, more "Completed" posts with addons :)

Twin GPU's can actually reduce performance due to their operation by your mobo and by software/driver issue. Your GPU output is entirely based on what the CPU/Motherboard combination can supply the cards. Sometimes throwing more hardware into the mix is just more overhead... SLi causes some CPU overhead, so if your CPU is already being taxed and you enable SLi you can actually loose some FPS

I'm making a 30km x 30km Aoraki/Mount Cook Island, based extremely closely around real-world data (including roads, pylons, vegetation, even fencelines - matched to the real-world co-ordinates. I had originally intended (and have the data for) 60km x 60km however I found performance extremely prohibitive, and also you are limited to a maximum of 4096 for the heightmap - thus the larger it is the lower your resolution must be. Another thing to note... you have difficulty placing and rotating objects on a 4096 heightmap.

He alternated the use of two leg selections with raw movement of a single bone (one leg = one bone). The animation of such animals is extremely simply compared to that of a biped human. If you look at the animation of the scorpion ColonelWell made, you'll see that its just moving position with little deformation. If you try to do that with a human (many animation bones), it will look extremely odd. You need to have the vertices in the right positions and relation to each other to achieve the correct deformation for human-like movement. I tried to achieve the use of decent deforming animations (with results similar in quality to the BI models) for a dog with ArmA1, and failed miserably despite enlisting two workmates. The main area of difficulty is lack of adequate tools, followed by lack of usable and complete source animation data.

How would that affect multiplayer though? Having it as a mod, means that servers can prevent people using this as an exploit. If its an option in the game menu, then it will mean people have different viewing ability in multiplayer games...

The answer is: Maybe "Lag" in game, I assume you mean texture loading, delay etc... stuttering. I'd be more inclined to think you need a better Hard Disc / SSD. Have you defragged your HD? What RPM is your HD? A better CPU will only help you if that is the limiting factor for your system.

Whenever someone says something "should" be someway, I instantly get cautious. There are many factors at play regarding tracking support. I like opensource projects as much as the next person, and happily give out my code. BUT. I've worked with TrackIR before, and I'd work with them again. They have excellent, on call, engineers available to assist your project instantly. You can also SUE them if they screw up. These are important things to developers. Also, hardly any developer has the luxuary of chosing several different input mechanisms to support... Ultimately someone has to make a decsion (and it's often the Producer) which input mechanism to support. If it were me, based on what i know and can guess. I would choose TrackIR now, today, and probably tomorrow. The single most important factor to a Producer, is knowing that he can depend on a component being done and delivered. Opensource does not offer the same dependibility as having someone like TrackIR, whom you can sign a contract with, whom is prepared to put their engineers on planes and fly over to fix bugs, whom you can threaten and sue if it all goes horribly wrong. I'm not saying your argument isn't sound, but I'm just saying that commercial and project realities rarely line up with what customers think "should" happen. What may seem incredulous to you, actually has extremely sound and sensible decisions behind them, often which cannot be made public.

What about having an AI voice giving directions when enabled, rather than a camera view.

I think its important not too loose sense of what this really is: A major achievement by oktane in discovering how the shaders are applied and identifying that they can be modified. Personally, I love the blur. But that doesn't remove the fact that this is an excellent achievement by oktane and a really intriguing discovery... who knows WHAT this may enable us to do in future! Good job!

Animations in ArmA/ArmA2 are baked out as vertex selection movements, with each selection a "bone" of sorts. You would have to "rebake" out all animations from the animation source (which would never be released, nor should it!) to the bones for an entirely new skeleton of a child, as NodUnit stated. Lacking the ArmA source animation files for Max/Maya etc... you would not only have to rebake them out, but actually recreate them from scratch. It's also possible that adult animations wouldn't work on a child. In fact, not only would you have to do that - but you'd have to make the tools in order to do such a thing! So, you have to: Make the model and texture them Skin the model to a skeleton in Max/Maya Make the animations (over 100 seperate animations) Write a tool to fully bake animations (we have some tools, but they're too limited for what you need) Put it all together Now, the animation work alone is enough for two good professional animators over three/six months. I know that because I worked at Sidhe Interactive as a Producer (we made the rugby league games, lots of animations in that). The tools work requires a very good tech-artist, for probably one month, assuming he has access to the documentation for the RTM standards, etc... If you managed to achieve the above, it would be a first in the entire series of OFP games. An entirely new model, with an entirely new set of animations. I apply the Fermi Paradox here; as you said - they'res been plenty of useless addons made over the years... so if its possible for such an addon to be made... where are they? I mean, this entire thing is completely ridiculous, moral arguments aside. It's just so complex and difficult you may as well be suggesting a complete rework of the game. Even our best and brightest modders can't even get existing models with similar structure (such as the women in ArmA2) to work with all the current animations.

As I said above, the game has shipped. You're a programmer bushlurker... as I'm sure you know mate - adding features is a dangerous business! As a producer, it would be over my dead, rotting, smoking, body that I would ever have let a programmer add such a feature to a shipped game. For someone to have suggested it at a morning scrum meeting within the weeks before release, they would have been laughed out of the room. It's incredibly dangerous to add support for new controllers and input mechanisms, adding a new API to the code base, close to a release... let alone after a game has shipped. While its good to get your voice heard - be realistic. No sensible developer would add such features after release due to the inherent dangers (and nor would we, as consumers, want developers to take such risks).

I've said it once, and I'll say it again... EULA's are hardly ever worth the paper they are printed on. I wouldn't loose any sleep over them. Often, they're designed by the Publisher for ass-covering and contain many things that are unenforceable. That said... I think the BIS MLOD use agreement is fine. Personally, I give any source out to almost anyone who asks (except that idiot acer1961 who seems to insist every single thing I have ever made is directly ported from FSX; he gets nothing except my laughter when sends me PMs). The only time I don't release something is when I've purchased it, and that license doesn't allow me to give it away. Or, when its too big to upload somewhere. I think the status quo is fine, works well. More people just need to make their stuff open source, and things get much easier.

Power is everything. The game studio I used to work at, we did huge amounts of testing as we had our own test lab. Psu's and lack of/spiking voltage was the single biggest source of issues we ever encountered. I personally spend the biggest dollars of my entire system on the psu. Hardware is extremely sensitive to voltage and it is THE source of instability and poor performance. If i were you, I'd upgrade your psu. ~600W is really low for your system. I only EVER run a silverstone 1000W powersupply as a minimum

Take out some of that RAM, it will be chewing up voltage and it can't be used because you bought a 32bit OS. Given this and the random instability, I'd place a high likelihood that you have some issues associated with voltage sensitivity or powerpack issues. Many raw crashes are caused by voltage problems or hardware conflicts. Most software/driver issues are able to be handled by the PC and don't result in unhandled crashes. What type of powerpack do you have? Oh, and stop being a dickhead.

From my perspective (as a former video game producer, who has now left the industry because I am sick of the BS)... The time to be adding features for ArmA2 has long gone. The title has SHIPPED. Now the BIS team focus purely on correcting bugs. I would be very disapointed if they add any features to the game, as that could potentially create bugs. Making changes to the TrackIR input system, to support another, is a MAJOR departure from the existing code base. That is not how any sensible developer makes games and developers spend much of their time prior to release fighting with the publisher to not have any features added. While anyone can see the merit in adding support for something like this. I have to say, get real - and do some research on the game development industry before making some of these bold calls. For every feature that is added, the risk of causing bugs skyrockets. Save FreeTrack for ArmA3.

http://www.linz.govt.nz/ Land Information New Zealand holds vast quantities of GIS data for New Zealand and it is all freely available. Oh wait, you probably meant bushlurker... my bad... but LINZ is great for those making NZ maps. Or maybe, that's just me LOL

Here's my current WIP code (yes, I know... its horrible VB!) The trigonometry hurt my brain... If it wasn't for listening to Carl Sagan audiotapes as I was working it all out, I'm quite sure I would have gone insane. Function Deg2Rad(Deg) As Double ' ' Function converts degrees to radians ' Passed Values: ' Deg [in, numeric] value in degrees to be converted ' Deg2Rad = Deg / 57.2957795130823 End Function Function Rad2Deg(Rad) As Double ' ' Function converts radians to degrees ' Passed Values: ' Rad [in, numeric] value in radians to be converted ' Rad2Deg = 57.2957795130823 * Rad End Function Sub ProcessLineMapperShapefileExport() Dim pi As Double pi = Atn(1) * 4 Dim iRow As Long Dim Fname As Variant Dim Record As String Dim LineP As Variant Dim iCol As Integer Dim WS As Worksheet userD_objectType1 = "fence_post_usec" userD_objectType2 = "fence_line_usec" userD_Offset = True userD_objectSize = 4 userD_objectAngle = 90 userD_MaxXY = 30720 SkipLastObj = False Fname = Application.GetOpenFilename("Text Files (*.txt),*.txt", , _ "Select Text Data File") If Fname = False Then Exit Sub Open Fname For Input As #1 iRow = 1 iGroup = 2 Do Until EOF(1) 'Get First Line, Group ID Line Input #1, Record iGroup = Val(Record) If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, Record LineP = Split(Record, ";") xStart = Val(LineP(0)) yStart = Val(LineP(1)) 'Start Collection Do Until Record = "END" Line Input #1, Record If Not Record = "END" Then ' **** 'Get Next End LineP = Split(Record, ";") xEnd = Val(LineP(0)) yEnd = Val(LineP(1)) 'get starting positions xLength = xEnd - xStart yLength = yEnd - yStart 'Workout length angle and length legLength = Sqr((xLength ^ 2) + (yLength ^ 2)) legAngle = Atn(yLength / xLength) If xLength < 0 Then legAngle = legAngle + 3.14159265 'workout length for each step in leg legStepX = Cos(legAngle) * userD_objectSize legStepY = Sin(legAngle) * userD_objectSize 'Set initial leg positions xPosObj = xStart yPosObj = yStart 'loop through object placement till end While legLength > 0 'Place next object If yPosObj > 0 Then 'If yPosObj > 0 Then '### 'Only Place object if within map Cells(iRow, 1) = """" & userD_objectType1 & """;" & xPosObj & ";" & yPosObj & ";0;" & (userD_objectAngle - Rad2Deg(legAngle) + userD_objectAngle) & ";" 'Change to next row iRow = iRow + 1 If iRow > 1048576 Then Set WS = Sheets.Add iRow = 1 End If 'Place second object if required (used for Pylons) If userD_Offset Then Cells(iRow, 1) = """" & userD_objectType2 & """;" & (xPosObj + (legStepX)) & ";" & (yPosObj + (legStepY)) & ";0;" & (userD_objectAngle - Rad2Deg(legAngle) + userD_objectAngle) & ";" 'Change to next row iRow = iRow + 1 If iRow > 1048576 Then Set WS = Sheets.Add iRow = 1 End If End If '### 'End If SkipLastObj = False Else SkipLastObj = True End If 'Adjust Length Travelled legLength = legLength - userD_objectSize 'Set new object position xPosObj = xPosObj + legStepX yPosObj = yPosObj + legStepY Wend 'set new start location xStart = xPosObj yStart = yPosObj ' **** End If Loop 'Delete last object if double object If Not SkipLastObj Then iRow = iRow - 1 Cells(iRow, 1) = "" End If End If Loop Close 1 End Sub

You can get a shapefile, then open it in Global Mapper. A shapefile will have an extension *.shp typically. Then you go 'Export Raster > BMP" and you have your image :)

I think 200k is a good limit of objects to import per time. On that note, does the overall amount of objects affect map performance, or is it the amount streamed in at that time that does (ie, the density)? On my 30km x 30km map, I'm trying to decide on a sensible tree budget. Any thoughts or experiences?

Really? I've been able to import 1.2 million objects as my maximum in a single import before visitor crashed - with the file size about 32mb. Mind you, Visitor ballooned to nearly 4GB in ram used... I'm running Vista 64bit here, with 6GB of ram. I'm able to import more than that, if I import five hundred thousand at a time. Perhaps the limit is RAM related.

Is anyone making a children mod? No! Why? Because its really fucking hard, and almost completely pointless for what most people use ArmA2 for. So what hell is the point of this topic?