nomdeplume

Yeah I liked Anno 1404 until I played a skirmish and discovered how fast you have to expand and build, and how the naval conflict was handled really irked me too (so many times I lost ships because I didn't realise they were in danger until they'd already been attacked - and by then they're too damaged/slow to be able to evade the enemy). Not really a fan of fast-paced RTS at all, but it seems really weird to have that kind of fast-paced gameplay in a game that's mostly economy-based. I liked the sedate feeling of earlier Annos and Settlers much better. Also I really really wish they'd made the trade routes more flexible so you didn't have to channel all your resources to one place. Oh wow, I'm off-topic in an off-topic thread!

Agreed... very disappointing. I stopped tracking the series when they tried to make them more like standard RTS games, but this looks to be a return to form. Just a shame they decided to use such a ridiculous DRM scheme. I really think it's in even worse than StarForce. Hopefully it won't last very long. Really sad for the developers to be hurt by their publishers like this.

I think it's more a matter of how they're used. There's pretty complex user-created scenarios that don't seem to give the same performance hit as the campaigns. But I haven't analysed the campaigns to see what they're doing and how they're doing it. So it's just speculation that it's scripting, but it doesn't really seem like the scenarios themselves are all that different to what I might make in the editor, for example.

I think the main bottleneck is scripting actually, at least on fast systems. Disk access only really comes into it when flying. More to the point: there's a bunch of components to the game (scripts, AI, graphics, audio, physics, data streaming, etc.) and each one only scales across CPU cores to a limited degree. The overall speed of the game is then determined by which of those things is slowest. Outside of the campaign I think this is usually graphics or data streaming, but within the campaign the scripting seems to hobble the rest of the engine. All this is just speculation, of course. YMMV. But I have a reasonable system (i7, GTX 295, solid-state drive) and the campaign runs noticeably worse than other missions.

Hmm okay I'm a filthy liar. It's pretty straightforward: Give helo a move waypoint with on act: (vehicle this) land "GET IN" This will cause the helo to land but keep its engine on. Give it another move waypoint close by (essentially "on top of" its landing location, but the AI completes its helo waypoints at 500m or something so it doesn't have to be all that close). Do something to this waypoint to cause it to not complete. I synchronised it with a "GET IN" waypoint for my own group (I'm on foot) but you should be able to use a condition script or anything else. Then give the helo another waypoint some distance off. When it completes the second move waypoint (i.e. the one that's so close it doesn't actually need to move to satisfy it) it should take off and continue on its merry way. Example mission: http://mirror.quex.org/arma/HeloPickup.utes.7z Or just make a new mission folder on Utes and paste in the mission.sqm:

It's tricky, I haven't been able to get them to actually land and keep their engines on. Been a long time so I don't really remember everything I've tried, but here's a few things... 1: you're using 'land' wrong. Read here: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/land 2: waypoint "on activation" scripts are run when the waypoint completes; it won't complete until the timeout expires, which is why you see it hovering until the time is up, at which point the script is run. I think it might be worthwhile seeing if you can get the helo to land and keep the engines on as its last waypoint, then see what happens if you give it additional waypoints afterwards. I have a vague feeling the behaviour changes a bit if it has more things to do.

The flight model isn't particularly accurate so a small change in attitude seems to have an excessive affect on airspeed; and being constrained to only half of the throttle's range makes it hard to compensate. Is there still no way to allow a control to be mapped to the entire range (+ and -) of an analog input? As it is now it seems much easier to fly using the digital throttle and let the plane maintain airspeed itself.

I think the so-called "rant" would be useless to me, if I was a developer. What does this mean? I assumed it was a lead-in to the following statements, i.e. what followed were some of the "modern gaming conventions" the poster wants. But the next statements don't seem to bring any clarity, so I'm left playing clairvoyant. This contains the only actually useful information: a better LOD switching system. At least from this I can infer that the poster finds the jumps between detail levels quite noticeable/distracting/otherwise not good. However, this information is nothing new and adds nothing; it would be more useful as a "I too experience the problems with LOD you're discussing" in another thread that provided more information on the topic or in a bug report on the community issue tracker. Here it's no more than a "me too!" post under an opaque subject line. They added a grass layer in the last beta cycle. So either the poster hasn't played the game for quite some time, or they actually mean they want it improved/fixed somehow, or maybe they mean something else when they say "grass layer" and again I have to get out my crystal ball. I have no idea what to make of this. More details? Serial numbers on the textures? Ability to inspect the guns to see if they have religious references inscribed on them? A more complicated procedure for employing weapons? This might be an interesting topic, but again there's no actual information here. What details are being suggested? I'd have to be some kind of mystic to actually derive any useful information from this sentence. So, the post completely fails to be at all useful or constructive. I think it also fails as a "rant": I read it because I was expecting/hoping for an amusing and passionate venting of frustration about the poster twitching and gasping on the ground in their death throes while their medic ran back and forth beside them scanning for non-existent enemies; or being pinned down by enemy fire and desperately hanging on while the support gunship flies in... only to have it miss with all its rockets and crash into the trees. No offense to Rayers12, but I found this thread very disappointing. :(

crew returns cargo as well. The "thing in another thing" thing construct is used to check whether or not the thing is contained within an array (another thing). It doesn't directly have anything to do with a unit being inside of a vehicle or not. That is, crew rusTruck returns an array of all units that are the crew of the unit named rusTruck. Then it checks if the player object is part of that list. For this particular problem, I would use an event handler. You can attach event handlers to objects and have them run script for you when particular events occur, such as a unit getting in or getting out of a vehicle. In this manner, all you need to do is attach a "get in" event handler to the truck that makes whoever just got in setCaptive=true, and a "get out" event handler which does setCaptive=false. This (to me) is a bit simpler, and also should perform better since it's not having to continually check who is or isn't inside the truck. I'm not actually sure whether you need to make the people inside the vehicle captive though; I have a feeling the AI will only consider whether the vehicle itself is captive.

DirectX and OpenGL aren't directly comparable, as DirectX includes audio and input handling as well as graphics. "You need to get people to adopt Linux on it's own merits and then people will make software for it." reveals the circular nature of the beast: until your average user can run their games and whatnot on Linux, almost nobody's going to release games that can run on Linux. Look at how few games run on Mac, which has a much higher market share than Linux, is designed for and suits commercial proprietary software, and is used by people other than geeks. So if nobody cares about the Mac, why is anybody going to care about Linux? The "freedom" issue matters to you even if it doesn't matter to you. Think of it like the freedom of the press: if you're not a reporter, you couldn't care less if they have restrictions on what they can report on or not. But if being held accountable by reporters prevents the government from becoming an oppressive totalitarian regime that will make your life miserable, then it actually does matter rather a lot.

Ah yes, well the AI helos won't land under fire. It would be really nice if BIS would add some kind of micro-AI for them to do so, but I don't know if that will ever happen. The best you can do is set the chopper to CARELESS behaviour and NEVER FIRE mode, but I'm not sure even that works. Plus if it's at night, careless causes them to turn their lights on which kills the atmosphere a bit.

Are these threads of any help? http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?p=1577232 http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?p=1580725

I think he's usually on the money. He just has high standards, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's also an interesting take on reviews: highlighting the bad things about the game. Most reviews talk up the good things and don't focus much on where the game lets down the player's expectations. Also I suspect he tends to avoid reviewing games he actually likes.

Here's the Zero Punctuation review of the new AvP.

My usual method is to set a TRANSPORT UNLOAD waypoint near the H, and synchronise it with the transported squad's MOVE waypoint. This will prevent the helicopter from proceeding to the next waypoint until the squad has reached its move waypoint. For your first one, who did you give the MOVE waypoint to (chopper or squad)? The only quirk I've noticed is that the waypoint types that instruct the heli to land will cause it to land at the nearest H, not the H which is nearest the waypoint. So if you have two landing near each other, coming from the same direction, it's very likely they'll both pick the same H to land at. The second helo won't notice the H is already in use until it reaches it and is about to begin landing, at which point it will look for an alternate location. Mostly this works okay but looks inelegant, sometimes they'll crash into each other if the timing's unfortunate (particularly if the first one is taking off at the time the second one arrives).

Maybe it would be possible for the AI to know where they're "supposed" to be? Then they can leg it if they find themselves somewhere else. For most cases, they're supposed to be in formation, so once the squad leader gets far enough away, they'll make it their life's goal to catch up to them. Alternatively, they could base their "supposed to be" location off of whoever they're next to in the formation, so if you move off, the guys who are meant to be near you will notice and start moving first, then the guys next to them will decide they're too far away from their position and start moving, and so on. This could effectively mimic a bounding overwatch type of movement, especially if the leader moves in bounds. When ordered to get in a vehicle or heal someone or move somewhere, the location of their target would become their "supposed to be" location and they'll hustle to get there. But I think there still needs to be a way to determine when you want them to move cautiously and when not, and this needs to be independent of whether they've detected enemies. Assuming the "automatic danger mode" is in fact tracked separately to a leader-ordered "danger" mode, then that shouldn't be a problem: if an AI is supposed to be somewhere else, it'll ignore its automatic danger mode and run straight there, then resume "danger" behaviour once it's where it's meant to be. If it's been explicitly ordered into danger mode, it'll use bounding overwatch/hide under the bushes movement.

That was a pretty different situation though. The massive amount of civilian casualties caused by the nuclear bombs could be justified after the millions of people that had already died in the war - and the many people that would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland, which was the alternative. Plus, where would you actually drop a nuke (or perform an intensive conventional bombing campaign) to defeat the Taliban and other extremists? It worked on Japan because even they couldn't tolerate the massive loss of lives and suffering; but I doubt it's going to deter many extremists. More likely to create them.

No, but they are fighting for something. We may see it as a misguided something, bordering on insanity, but it is what they believe in; and they equally see our beliefs as something not worth fighting for. It is also interesting how they can commit atrocities with pride - as if they are merely implementing their laws (which they are). When the "isolated incidents" occur on our side, the people involved cover it up. The commanders cover it up. Everyone knows it's wrong and shameful - and yet it happened anyway. I'm not sure which is better. Those doing things because they believe it to be the right thing to do can, at least in theory, be reasoned with and have their minds changed. Those who know what they're doing is shameful and wrong/illegal and do it anyway..? It truly is a terrible situation. We arguably have a moral duty to those who are being subjected to "laws" and punishments we see as unjust; yet, any attempt to impose our own beliefs on a radically different culture seem completely doomed to failure, and arguably in a way that is much worse than the injustices that would occur if we left well enough alone. But then, sitting back and letting bad things happening without intervening seems somehow worse than trying to help and messing things up even more. Finally, let's not forget that history is told by the winner. It seems clear that the extremists cannot win, yet they fight anyway. Imagine if they did win: what an amazing tale of valor and bravery it would become, AK-47s, RPGs and IEDs defeating the might of the Western armies. Australia holds the debacle at Gallipoli as an event of national pride; had the war gone the other way, I'm sure the Turkish would look back and laugh at the bumbling and inept attempt by the Allies to best their mighty defences. Just as we laugh at the Taliban's efforts today.

What evidence is there that the insurgents being referred to in this thread (the people in the video in the first post, the guy attacking a tank with a pistol) are in any way associated with those who perform the beheadings? Do you not think that those who take up arms against our troops take the same moral shortcuts when thinking about our soldiers: each individual incident is used to show that all of us are evil. If you had the chance to discuss with them their views on the barbaric behaviour of our soldiers, would you expect them to understand that they're "isolated incidents" and not representative of how you yourself behave, or how we in general behave? Is it not highly likely then, that most of those fighting us have never participated in such acts and do not condone them? Why not give them the same benefit of doubt that you'd urge them to afford our troops. Or is it easier to just say they're all the same? After all, it worked in WWII when we assumed all German soldiers were Nazis.

Sure, then someone can post videos of US soldiers torturing and raping prisoners and innocent civilians in the country they're supposed to be helping, or even raping their own soldiers.

This would be like saying "the bombers missed the orphanage" -- although technically correct, there's an inherent implication here that they were actually trying to damage or destroy the orphanage. So this phrase wouldn't be used; instead it would be something like "the bombers did not do any damage to the orphanage" - which implies the actual target was near the orphanage but that their delivery was accurate enough that no damage was done to this other building. "Missing someone" implies you wish to be in their presence. "Missing the target" implies you wanted to hit the target. Your "missed the train" version is implying that the speaker intended to catch the train. Therefore, for the phrase "make me miss you" to be interpreted in this way would require that the speaker wanted to encounter the person. However, then it wouldn't make any sense to be telling them to stay out of their way. So this interpretation of the phrase "Make me miss you" is internally inconsistent: you can't "miss" something that you didn't want in the first place. Simply put, a native English speaker wouldn't use the phrase in the way you're describing, as it's a non-obvious interpretation. Occam's Razor applies: the simplest interpretation tends to be the correct one.

If it was about protecting release-time sales, then why don't the companies publicly state they'll be releasing a patch 1 or 2 or 3 months after release, that removes the DRM (and then follow through on that promise)? That way the people who want to have it right away can get it, and those that want to make sure their investment is protected will have that assurance. Personally, I think it's more about maximising profits by destroying both the second-hand market, and the long-term market. Since people playing a game for years and years after release doesn't help the bottom line (only retail sales do) it's not something the companies are actually going to care about. If they do think about it, then it will probably be seen as a negative: people that are playing old games have no need to buy new games, so by releasing a really good game that'll be fun to play for years to come you're actually sabotaging your future market (competing with yourself, effectively). At least, that's how I think it's seen - many many games these days seem designed to be good enough that people will buy them, and then be forgotten and replaced by the newest one. Having the ability to switch off the authentication servers and kill an old game outright must be very appealing to the moneycounters. But there also seems to be a lot of hostility amongst customers when developers/publishers try to monetise the long-term success of a game (expansion packs, subscription-based services, etc.). I for one would be happy to pay much more than normal "game" prices for a good sim, on the understanding that much more than the normal amount of work goes into making them and they provide much more than the regular amount of gameplay; but when such things are suggested on forums, it's often met with a lot of anger from customers who seem to feel entitled to getting a perfect, vast, detailed, bug-free game for their $50. Much like the big publishers seem to feel entitled to put whatever ridiculous restrictions they like around the games they publish. I fear the final solution will be the effective death of PC gaming, and everything will be on consoles with fearsome DRM baked into the hardware.

I think the DRM kills this for me, too. I really wish the Silent Hunter team would do a somewhat more modern subsim, I have really fond memories of 688 Attack Sub... maybe something set in the cold war period. The main problem is they did SH3 so well, it's hard to see how they could top that in the same era. SH4 wasn't bad but it just seemed like more of the same really, and for the life of me I can't think of how they could possibly do another game in the same era that'd have the same "wow factor" as SH3 did. Shame because it's such a niche market and a lack of success will make developers even less interested, but they're just not doing anything interesting enough to make me willing to buy in and invest the time (and as above, I'm not sure they could do anything in this era to achieve that). Certainly nothing amazing enough that I'd be willing to support their ridiculous DRM.

I bought AvP off Steam on Saturday and played it for a few hours... I was surprised at the graphics, they didn't seem very current-gen. In particular, the way the aliens sink into the ground with the particle acid effects around them looks really, really dated. I'm not usually very concerned with graphics (I'm still playing Falcon 4, after all) but this is the kind of game where I expected to be blown away by the shiny, since there's not all that much substance elsewhere. I played some of the marine campaign first, then got annoyed when I got stuck at the first boss fight. After you die you can restart from the last checkpoint, and they also have an option to change the difficulty. I thought that was thoughtful of them, so after dying a few times decided to drop the difficulty down - and suddenly found myself way back in the level. So then I decided I couldn't be bothered replaying the level - I bought it for the Predator gameplay, after all. The Marine campaign isn't bad, but it's nothing particularly special either. Aliens are fast and tough enough to soak up a few bullets, so you're perpetually low on ammunition which does get a bit tiring. I also found the muzzle flash from the rifle to be annoying as it obscured what I was shooting at ... but maybe that's just me. Played some of the Predator campaign as well, and I'm impressed that it's actually a very different kind of gameplay. As a Marine you're always reacting to attacks while being led by the nose by your friend on the radio. As the Predator you can play much more methodically, surveying the area while cloaked and then picking off the defenders one by one. You have some kind of distraction device, which lets you lure a particular enemy to a location of your choosing. Very helpful for this kind of gameplay, but it's not well explained and so it feels like a cheat. Additionally, it does get a bit repetitive unless you deliberately make things tricky for yourself. The plasma cannon is nice, but your energy is so limited you have to make most kills in hand-to-hand combat, anyway. After I hit a tricky patch in the Predator campaign, I decided to have a go at the Alien side of things. I think it's actually my favourite of the 3, but they might just be because I don't particularly like fighting against Aliens. The start of this campaign is quite well done, and the Alien gameplay is pretty similar to the Predator's in that you stalk your prey and take them out one at a time, but it's different enough to be unique. You spend most of your time upside down on the ceiling, and you can move extremely fast, which does make it difficult to keep track of where you are at times. I haven't finished any of them yet, but the "% complete" goes up awfully quick, especially in the Alien campaign, and since I don't play multiplayer this is probably the main issue. Unless they're going to be releasing DLC or allowing users to create new levels, there's not much life in the game. The campaigns do kind of intertwine, and it's a bit fun to explore the same locations from different perspectives. Overall... if you have no immediate need to play it now, I'd wait for it to hit the bargain bin before picking it up.

Not exactly sure what you mean by you "get debriefings but no message"? Do you mean the briefing (before the mission) is blank? Or are you expecting more out of the debriefing? If it's the latter, I don't think there's any way to get more information into it. If it's the former, briefings are now (in Arma2) created dynamically: see this thread for info. Also if you haven't seen it, the wiki page about briefing.html is informative.