n0bby

Ahh... I feel your pain. If only someone could mash together the brilliance of BI's vision with the slick stability of Codie's OpF:DR, we'd have the perfect game. Well, something with less of the flaws both games currently have, anyway..!

Well, after persevering through partial and complete run-throughs of the game with varying degrees of success/bugginess, my copy is now going on the shelf, as it's decided to completely refuse to recognise the DVD. The DVD won't auto-run, either. I thought at first that my drive had died, but all other CD/DVDs work fine in it. I reckon that in amongst all the pain I just about got my money's worth - and as nothing it threw at me was a surprise (i.e., it's OpF, so what do you expect!) I suppose I can't really complain. ;)

I totally agree. In fact, for pretty much all the campaign, I spend my time doing everything myself having tried to order the rest of Razor to a position where they can't get themselves killed - which usually means well out of any combat zone or inside an APC. As a team, they're hopeless - and if you attempt to assign them targets during a firefight, you just end up getting shot yourself.My most successful completion of Badlands was when I left Razor team in the Hills with the rebels, and then drove into the town on my own in the technical, jumping out and using its heavy gun every time I spotted the enemy.

You don't need to worry about the evidence or the weapons smugglers - they're 'optional' tasks. So long as you've destroyed the main base and recovered the documents from the dead guy there, you'll be recalled back to base and the game will progress to the next mission. However, you seem to have encountered a bug, as what you're seeing back at Manhattan is the Team Leader in his scripted wounded state which should be accompanied by a cutscene that ends the mission. If you've patched to 1.03 whilst playing Manhattan, then it looks like you'll probably have to revert to the start of the mission again to get all the script triggers to work.

Weapons smugglers and find evidence aren't required. I've completed Manhattan without these. I've always found the sentry camps, so I couldn't say whether they're required or not. You certainly don't have to find them all though - when you've found 4 out of the 5, you'll be informed that the task is complete.

Well, I just finally finished the SP Campaign - at long last! I had lots and lots of CTDs playing DoW, always when I tried to revert to a save game. Anyhoo, my DoW fun ended when I mopped up all resistance in Msta. Shortly thereafter I checked my map, and the Msta base/strongpoints had turned green. It all seemed to go bad from the point where I refused to meet with the guy who contacted me over the radio after Badlands... Having turned in the arms cache earlier in the game, I ended up not allied to anyone - and this approach seems to end badly. I'm not sure if I have the patience or energy to try and play through again from an earlier point!

Thanks for the map Archamedes! I'm on my third full playthrough of the Campaign (although this doesn't begin to describe the hours spent replaying missions that failed to work due to scripting bugs!), but I've still not managed to commit the location of the sentry camps to memory..! Previously I stumbled upon them (without ever getting the red zone markers on my map), this time I found the three in the red zones and destroyed the main camp but I got fed up driving round and round looking for the other sentry camps, so I came here and found your post. I've not encountered any mission-stopping bugs on this campaign run through yet - but I think that's more to do with knowing what I'm meant to be doing and avoiding behaviour that messes up the scripting, than BI actually having fixed anything... I'm still encountering a LOT of "minor weirdness..!"

Once you've all boarded, bring up the map and then left click on the map where you want to be dropped off.

Thanks NUFAN - I'll give it a try. I have DiskKeeper installed and it runs all the time my Screen Saver is active, but it's not necessarily defragged my C: drive fully since the patch. I'll see how things are after I've done a specific defrag.

Speaking to Ltn. Marny, I was unable to trigger the mission-specific conversation with him. So I went back to Dressler, and clicked to talk with him - whereupon I got the Marny conversation and speech options.

And there's the rub. Because unfortunately this is exactly what BI have been unable to achieve, throughout the history of the OpF games. It just seems to me that fundamentally they haven't got their AI right. As you mentioned in your post, the marker that the AI puts on you means that once one bad guy spots you, everyone spots you - and it's nigh-on impossible to get 'un-spotted'. So that's wrong for starters. Also, every AI enemy is blessed with superhuman accuracy, no matter what weapon they're using, no matter how far away you are from them, or whether you're moving or not. The only way BI can respond to this AI behaviour is to make them "stupider" by inhibiting their awareness - but that has the undesirable effects mentioned here. If they could make them less able to locate your position accurately so fast, and less deadly accurate once they have, and not telepathically connected to all their buddies so that once one of them spots you, they all do, then perhaps it would be possible to get something closer to a 'realistic' looking in-game response from them.

Thanks for the tip - I hadn't looked at the graphics options menu since the patch. I wonder if I'll be able to improve performance - the game seems to have got horribly stuttery and jerky since the 1.03 patch, with what seems to be almost continuous disk thrashing... this is a new one for me, before I was just plagued by SP campaign scripting horrors - now the game's performance has taken a dive too.

Cheers guys - did a search for "PSTreeAToC:0" here after my patched (non-Steam) version failed to start, and I can confirm that removing the noBlur mod from my startup switches worked for me too.

Yeah, all my problems with this videogame I've basically narrowed down to the fact I needed a 2kw+ PSU. I've been so stupid, thinking that 650w is enough to run my PC - what with its graphics card and hard disks and all and expecting a game to run on it too...

Well, good luck with that...

Yep, agree - yet another one!

I think that is a bug Archamedes - because I tried this myself the second time I had to re-start Manhattan, and when I said "no" he skipped straight to the "outstanding, you just saved me some time" statement.

You have both got in the trunk of the car, yes? The only way the script will work is if your team gets in the passenger seats, then you go round to the back of the car and get in the trunk.

I love the OpF series to bits, but it's always been a one-way masochistic relationship where the plethora of bugs means I suffer mental abuse and my PC suffers physical abuse. However, the game runs acceptably for me in high detail on my couple-of-years-old rig (Intel Core2 6600 @ 2.4ghz, 4Gb RAM, 9800GTX+).

Me too.I'm completely new to this whole aspect of the games. I never read the manual and so I had no idea any of this RTS/asset management stuff was even in ARMA! Now I've found it, I also have an interesting new bug in Stary Nobor, the first place I've built anything. Basically, I built 3 machinegun nests and stuck each of my squad members in them. I also built one of the twin AA guns, and had that for myself. Once the action kicks off between us and the Russians, everything is going fine until I get the autosave sequence consisting of a radio message. Directly after the autosave, all the machinegun nests and my AA gun disappear. And once this happens, my squad guys are (once again) glued to the spot and ignoring my commands. Which means that inevitably they get killed and I have to try again. I've tried numerous times with different tactics to take Stary Nobor, but I'm clearly not getting it right because one or more members of my squad gets killed every single time, even when they are responsive to my commands! I'm thinking I need to leave them behind and do things alone anyway...

You have to follow the NAPA guys, who run off down the hill, through the woods to where a civilian is waiting in a red hatchback car. Your team get in and you have to go to the back of the car, which will then allow you to enter it and hide in the trunk/boot.

Thanks for the tip Jezuro. I must admit I'm guilty of not being the 'sharpest' mind when it comes to the OFP series. So I can easily miss an option by just seeing what the next waypoint is, and blundering off towards it with my team...

The problem I had with the start of the Bitter Chill mission was the "cry wolf" effect caused by my assuming what looked like a bug, actually wasn't. When the mission starts at Manhattan base, it's been under attack and your mission is to get away. The first thing I saw was a line of dangerous looking soldiers that have spawned nearby. My first reaction was to kill them, but I got shot after I'd capped a couple. Then, I spent the next hour jumping into a truck and heading for the rally point, via a whole series of long, fruitless routes that always ended up with the truck being hit or me getting insta-killed if I got out of it. Often I'd get soldiers spawning near me when I exited the truck, and not shooting at me for ages, which further made me believe the guys at Manhattan were enemies that hadn't been 'triggered'. Eventually I realised that this 'auto kill' was always going to happen, and it only then occurred to me that the guys in the camp might be friendlies. So I restarted the mission and approached them, and then the scenario played out as it should. It made me feel a bit dumb for wasting all that time, but also highlighted the problem I often get with the game, which is knowing when something's meant to be happening, or if it's just the scripting gone wrong again. In the original game, I seem to remember it as relying far less on these sort of specific triggers within missions to get it to work. This meant that the player could exploit the sprawling landscape and make endless choices for themselves about how to complete a mission. I may be recalling it through rose tinted specs... But I think in those days the missions were simpler, meaning that the OFP scripts had less chance of failing, and it also meant that I got the feeling of satisfaction and therapeutic sense of accomplishment from completing each mission, which has been lacking from this game so far.

You just have to walk around the car, and you'll get the 'get in' symbol when you're at the rear of the car. Click, and you're crammed into the boot/trunk.

I had the same problem in the same places. The 'board truck' mission is easy to complete without their support. And I managed to complete the first section of the 'clear the towns' mission (where you have to secure the first small town) on my own too, by driving a technical down to the town and capping all the bad guys all by myself. Once the first town was secure and I'd got through a bunch of lousy cutscenes, my team awoke from their zombie states and joined me. And now we're all pinned down in the next town, being repeatedly killed by a far-distant jeep with mounted grenade gun which seems to be invincible... Ahh, the wonderful world of ARMA bugs.