oktane

Its the mission mate. You are probably playing domination right? By default, JIP players don't have their time synced I don't think, its up to the mission maker to do it. It's not xeno's fault, setdate command is broken and if it's used the FPS drops for 2 seconds. :(

If you edit Arma stuff a lot, such as addons and the like, you may find it irritating that steam does not allow you to choose where to install Arma2. So you've probably made a shortcut to the buried folder by now. I just found a nicer way to revert to how I had it in Arma1 and OFP. In vista and windows 7 you can now make directory symlinks. These are not shortcuts, but real filesystem symlinks. Back in the day, my OFP was in d:\OperationFlashpoint Arma1 was in D:\Arma Now Arma2 steam edition is in D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2, this will not do! So I ran the command from a cmd prompt: mklink /d d:\ArmA2 "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2" symbolic link created for d:\ArmA2 <<===>> D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2 This makes a fake Arma2 'folder' on my D drive that isn't really there, but no app can tell the difference. When I go into it, it is exactly the same as going into "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 2". The filesystem translates it. If you've used a *nix, you are probably familiar with this. You can read about the command here http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-symlinks-in-windows-vista/ There is also a freeware GUI app if you don't want to use the command line. http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm Here's what mine looked like after I had already made the link: I don't know if you can do it on Windows XP. You may be able to make a junction point instead. But if you have Vista/7, a directory hard link is best. If you are annoyed with the placement of the 'user profiles' in Arma/Arma2, you can always specify them on the command line. See here. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/-profiles BIG RED LETTERS These tweaks can be dangerous if you don't understand how they work. Don't accidentally delete your arma folder! If you want to delete the link, delete the 'fake' folder.

YES, kinda! :) But you would have to recopy it every time you rebooted unless the ramdisk software does that for you. If you used a fake link, it would still load from the original location though! Did you know you can move some of the games stock addons from the addons folder to another drive too? You don't even need to have a junction for that, you can just do -mod=d:\otherarmaaddons where d is your other drive that arma isn't installed on. I tried it with a fast USB stick but it didn't work as well as I'd have liked. I dont think it could make enough concurrent reads and it would make the game crash. But on a hard drive it should work, or a real ram disk. ---------- Post added at 07:00 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:58 AM ---------- Yes for the longest time I was using the 'Libraries' which is useful for collecting folders together like that. But it does get a little confusing when there are 2 MPMissions directories and such. Now I can just put Arma2 in the library, and hard link the profile folder into there, along with the appdata folder. I think that will be a pretty fast explorer workflow.

Nobody wants to mirror this or add it to the audio troubleshooting sticky? ---------- Post added at 12:11 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 AM ---------- Look in this thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=77880 If my app crashes, AND the game has no audio, I think thats pointing a fat finger to your directx even if you have updated it.

Bump!

Hi Mandoble Looking forward to your release. Remember that issue we talked about on OFPEC about some scripts only storing variables on the client side? (I was making PvP warfare with mando and that was one of the issues.) I had tried to make vehicles purchased have both AI and player controlled mando functions on them, but the scripts did not share the same variables such as ammo count and stuff. (You recall that the AI attachment was a dumbed down version of a launcher without all the gui and stuff, just some nice LOS checks and such) Now that BIS has let us set network synced variables to vehicles, do you think that the AI and Player modes could share information? It would really help for PvP when there are AI teams involved.

For whatever reason, Bis decided to change their 'build numbers' or whatever they are. If you compare 946 to 932, the numbers are different for identical items.. are these not 'issues' or build numbers? I don't know why they changed them but I'll just ignore that. It does mess up that build #'s diffs but whatever. :bounce3:

Here is a zipped version for those having issues with the unzipped version. psycho, can you update the url to this one and also provide a link to the RSS feed thread in case errors happen you don't want them blaming you :) Also don't pass out the rapidshare one if thats the old one with the 5 minute timer and / after the url, not that it matters much. http://www.506th-pir.org/scripts/a2betafeed/Arma2Gadget.zip

Haw, its ok, MS can come after me. I don't mind hosting your version, but if you need me to update it or remove it because of a new version, just pm me. Yeah for mine and possibly yours I want to add a sound when a new version comes in (like ding) and maybe a highlight on the new item until it is clicked. For the flyout, you can download the file in there. ---------- Post added at 08:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:03 PM ---------- Something is still going amiss.. If you notice, 58932 has a changelog with two dates in it, that is wrong. Then the next build 58946 has the full changelog, when it should just have the comparison from the previous one. sigh. Also the dates aren't GMT maybe, they are BIS time?.. So I think I might have to convert them. I don't know how an RSS feed reader handles that.

Anyone noticing any pausing in the new versions (1.03)? I am trying to figure out if it is the time sync code I reused from 1.01 or what. (since everyone started at 5am on the new one.. setdate being broken or whatever) Yes my version is modified a little, I was just wondering if anyone had experienced 2 second freezes once and a while.. it happens to all clients. I'm sure its a script looping somewhere. Argh.

Hardlocks are not caused by the game, you need to make sure your hardware is 100% stable (including in SLI mode) before testing a beta patch! Read this thread for more info http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=84156

It works now after some changes with the chaching code, which was killing it for whatever reason. I'm now sending proper headers and buffering output. It works like this: Is page modified since last run or 10 minutes old? If yes: Check if BIS page scrape is older than 10 minutes If yes, grab new version and send to curl If no, serve cached version to curl For each entry, check if log file exists locally (no, if new entry) If no: fetch from BIS's FTP via hackass server transfer because of godaddy If yes, serve up log since they don't change, no caching needed. Now generate XML If no: Tell browser its already got the right version via headers or send it cached ver if it insists. So as you can see there are two levels of caching, one for me executing the xml generation code, one for BIS. Both set to 10 minutes. here is your gadget http://www.506th-pir.org/scripts/a2betafeed/Arma2.gadget I am actually working on a different gadget, it might not be as fancy as yours but it is based on the default windows 7 rss feed one with the side flyout for the changelog. I just need to make the flyout bigger to accommodate the size and fix the links. I will update the first post.

There's still some bugs to work out. Today in my work Outlook i had an error 'item' from the feed... i need to make some error checking and send a previous version if there is a error or something. (while also notifying me) If you knew how this thing worked you'd laugh! See godaddy is very stringent on what you can and can't do with PHP, they don't let your scripts communicated with anything external unless its port 80 or SSL. This means that I cannot run a game server query script on the web host. It also means I cannot actually get the log files from BIS's FTP from the PHP script, it fails to connect! So, get this. I end up using another HTTP server (with unmolested PHP) as a go between for FTP traffic, sigh. I had to do this for my sig image server query too. :( To begin, the Godaddy script scrapes the beta page on BIS's site and parses it with curl. It gets all the URL's and such. Next the chaos starts, The GoDaddy host (the script the client connects to) query's the unfettered host for the file, it sends the FTP location on the URI too. The unfettered host sees if it has a cached copy, and if not, it gets it via FTP. In either case, it feeds back the changelog along with the file modified date back to godaddy. Lame godaddy server now has the info it needs and bless the godaddy lords, they allow me to write files out so I cache that result (the changelog and timestamp) to a local file. After that, some array_diff's take place to determine the differences in all the changelogs and generate the XML. And then the whole script output is send to a cache file, which only allows the whole script to run every 10 minutes. I've tried to make this as simple as possible! (laugh) Damn you godaddy for forcing me to make so many points of failure! I am forced to use them because it is the only 'high capacity' web service available to me. I don't want to use a game server or something, web stealing the bandwidth from the game server would be bad. I'm also having problems doing my 'continual beta' development method (I didn't learn formally or anything) specifically with RSS. If I make mistakes or some error happens, all the RSS clients querying the feed may get an item (entry) which has errors in it. And even after I fix them, it may not get the updated item. So sorry if that happens anyone. :( ---------- Post added at 10:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:51 PM ---------- Hey thats cool, I'll use that.. I have a sidebar gadget that I made for myself that monitors our 506th Arma2 servers, so it can go right next to it. :) No i don't do any throttling, you can refresh it as much as you like. 5 minutes is reasonable, although you won't get a change since I cache the output every 10 minutes. So i'd set it to 10 minutes. You have to figure once every 10 minutes, times the number of people that install it (who knows, couple hundred?) Its not that much traffic. If you go to http://www.506th-pir.org/scripts/a2betafeed/feed.xml in your firefox, you can easily see that the feed appears to be working. In your gadget, i noticed that the url oXml.open( "GET", "http://www.506th-pir.org/scripts/a2betafeed/feed.xml/", true ); should be oXml.open( "GET", "http://www.506th-pir.org/scripts/a2betafeed/feed.xml", true ); but that still didn't make it work... hmm. I bet it is javascript pooping out on some character that needs to be escaped. Because it works fine with say Wired Magazine's RSS feed. I ran my feed into the XML/RSS validator and it said it was ok, I don't get it. Debugging gadgets is a pain, Visual studio can attach to them (with IE script debugging on) but for some reason never displays the correct code location even if you have the source files loaded. ---------- Post added at 11:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:39 PM ---------- Okay I think I found out what the problem is. I'll clean up the caching function so it doesn't break the gadget (something about headers I think) and make the gadget a nice net citizen by looking at the last modified date if I can.

Give me a few hours to work the bugs out and implement a caching routine.. I think i'm only going to scrape the page 1/2 or once an hour at max and cache the result in the meantime. Right now its scraping bis's page every time so its really slow. (any calls to an external http host are normally slow in php) Edit OK, might want to delete your old messages and resubscribe if you had a bunch of dupes. First time writing an app that generates RSS. A friend said that his reader Thunderbird was making a lot of copies, I think the GUID tag I added should fix that. Also the changelog detection works again, if it doesn't have a changelog, that is noted. And dates are added. The dates represent the file modified date from the log on the ftp server. (which logically will be stamped when the automated build system generates that build) Also, the page's final output is cached locally and only refreshed every 10 minutes.

Wow, snarky aren't you! I was trying not to pound bis's servers when I was coding the part that scrapes BIS's page, so i saved a local cache of the file, which I forgot to remove late last night. I suspected something was going on with BIS's page because after so many refreshes, it would serve blank on me. I will have to implement a caching mechanism tonight after work. (the log files are already cached of course, since they are ftp'd) I put it back to the proper url now to scrape the data from. Also i'll work on getting the datestamp from the ftp and put it on the XML item. Edit: the blank pages were caused by me having too short of a timeout value on the curl fetch.

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Control_Structures#for-from-to-Loop Use the biki to find a command that makes sense and then you can search the forums for a usage example. Also theres a site called OFPEC http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Category:Scripting_Commands_ArmA http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/selectWeapon http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/doFire http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/fire smokeman fire ["SmokeShellMuzzle","SmokeShellMuzzle","Smokeshell"]; found via simple search: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=74428&highlight=throw+grenade

Try explaining again. Also, being demanding will get you nowhere. Hence you did not get a response 'asap'. I don't really understand what you are trying to say but maybe you want this: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/selectPlayer

Guys the lag bursts appear even on the LAN(as a local game, not internet), doesn't matter which you use it seems. It seems the host computer is not prioritizing the networking thread enough and the AI processing or some kind of campaign only script just snuffs it out. I don't know but I bet it has something to do with their scheduling. I have 2 gigabit computers connected over cat 5 in the same room, still get the lagging occasionally. It is exactly how you describe, the non-host computer everything freezes and people walk in place. Then it jumps back eventually. Prehaps it is possible to use the mp bandwidth settings in the profile\arma.cfg file. I bet it works. MaxMsgSend=1024; //(512) MinErrorToSend=0.0025; //(11 for linux box) MaxSizeGuaranteed=1024; //(512) MaxSizeNonguaranteed=1400; //(384) MinBandwidth=10240000; MaxBandwidth=20480000;

Heres a stressing app i just tried out on a system i'm OC'ing for a friend (i7 to 4ghz!) http://www.ocbase.com/perestroika_en/index.php?Download Pretty awesome!

Sorry, again, not possible. The dump file you posted says your video card driver is causing the crash. Make sure your fan is operating correctly and if needed use a 3rd party app to crank it to 100 and monitor the temperature. Arma2 and other games push the video card very hard. You may try something to really test out the card like FurMark and I bet it will crash. Edit, glad to see you got a temp.. There are some apps like RivaTuner which can display an overlay in game, to tell you your temp too. Also if you have 2 monitors you can just put the monitoring app on the other one while you play, you'll be surprised how fast it goes down when you stop playing. I bet it was higher than that! Heres a cool app for simple stats http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ ---------- Post added at 10:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:48 PM ---------- You need to run the dump file analyzer and post that, this paste doesn't mean much, the analyze will be much more detailed.. FurMark is the only app I use to find faulty video hardware, I'm sure there are others though that really stress the video hardware. But most people want to blame the games or 3d apps. Again, games can't cause BSOD's. If a game sends invalid data to the video card driver, it should handle it, not shit the bed and crash your system. And in most cases it does handle it, except in the case of bugged video drivers or malfunctioning hardware. GPU's and Ram on video cards goes bad all the time guys. I have a pile of cards as high as a small child at work, all burned out. Symptoms, crashes of applications, corrupted video and artifacting, BSOD's, you name it. It isn't the applications fault. We have RMA'd quite a few 8800 and 200 series cards lately. If Arma2 truly had a BSOD causing problem, a ton more people would get it. Since only a handful of people get them, its incredibly unlikely. It's hard being a PC game developer when you can't control the end users hardware environment, they like to blame all kinds of things on you. Also Ziip, at home I have the same card and don't have any problems. I modified my fan curve on my card though, and when that didn't help, I installed an aftermarket cooler.. the 4850's get ridiculously hot, and they get up there or if you try to OC them, they will crash the system. That's my experience at least. Edit: My temp when running the game and the GPU is at 98% load is 52C max. 44C idle. Sapphire 4850 with aftermarket cooler. Bios was modded to lock memory clocks to the same level so when it clocks down to save power, it doesn't glitch the secondary display. (damn ATI) I noticed something very strange.. If you turn up the view distance, the GPU load goes DOWN. As if theres a CPU bottleneck and can't get the data to the GFX card fast enough. 5000VD will give me 98% load, 10000 will give me 60~ Ignore the fan speed because the aftermarket one doesn't plug into the card.

VOTE to have your issues addressed!: http://dev-heaven.net/issues/show/3718

VOTE to have your issues addressed!: http://dev-heaven.net/issues/show/3718

VOTE to have your issues addressed!: http://dev-heaven.net/issues/show/3718

As others have said more or less, software doesn't cause bluescreens. The only thing that can cause bluescreens are kernel drivers (like video and audio drivers), faulty hardware, and in really screwed up cases, a hosed OS. (I personally do not think your os is hosed) Arma does not have kernel drivers. If a crash happens during an Arma game, it is a faulty driver or malfunctioning hardware. There is no maybe's about that, Arma cannot cause bluescreens at all, it's impossible. Please read this and find out what is crashing, by debugging the dump file that windows makes. Usually it will point you to a driver that malfunctioned, or if it is very vauge, likely something else like memory corruption (use windows memory diagnostic) or a dying power supply. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35246

Is there planned support for AmbX in Arma2? Basically they give you an API (you can also request they send you some hardware to test with, since you are a game developer) and you tie it into your game in a few points. (turn on fans if you are near a chopper with the engine on, etc) It can be as simple or as complicated as you like. Personally I just like the lighting immersion it gives you. Also: :mad: http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,691636/Operation-Flashpoint-2-Dragon-Rising-supports-Philips-amBX/News/ I realize its niche and all, but it is the kind of game where the immersion can be great to begin with, and having native support would be epic. Otherwise the only support is a generic framebuffer color averaging effects. (which are less accurate but work without native support.) Cheers