roshnak

Nobody would have said that about ragdoll or inverse kinematics because they are both obvious and visible effects. Nobody in history has said, "I can't tell if this is ragdoll or a death animation" and HL2's dynamic leg positioning was designed to solve obvious clipping issues when standing on uneven surfaces. I was referring specifically to the idea that weapon handling characteristics will be determined by dynamic physics calculations done on individual muscles in the arms and that those muscles will be able to be damaged, impeding weapon handling. This same effect can be achieved by specifying that when the left forearm hitbox is damaged, aim stability is decreased by 0.5 and aiming speed is reduced by .7 or whatever. The differences between predefined penalties for damage and dynamically computed muscles are so miniscule as to be unrecognizable by the player. I'm sure someone will eventually create this kind of system, but I very much doubt if it will ever be anything more than a tech demo. The technology and computing power required to do this would be better spent in a number of other places that provide a far more obvious impact on gameplay. I'm really not sure why you couldn't just say, "I hope that they improve weapon handling in the future." Either way, all it requires is different animations. managed to pull it off in UT99 without any kind of physics based animation system.

That's great and all but in video game modding it can very easily turn into people charging for third party content or locking all their downloads behind ad.fly links. I mean, it's gotten so prevalent in the flight sim community that the BMS team specifically banned people from charging for mods for BMS.

I very much doubt this will ever happen in a commercial video game. It's a whole lot of work for a system in which the results just aren't that different from significantly less complex systems. You could just as easily define set values for accuracy decreases/speed decreases for each hitbox. The player would never know the difference unless you told them. The problem, like a lot of things with the series, was that it was poorly implemented. It would be reasonable to expect sight misalignment while moving with the sights up, but that's not what happened. The sights stayed aligned but the player's head acted like it was glued to the weapon. This caused your whole view to bounce around like you were looking through a camera glued to the gun, which you were. So your sights didn't jostle, your eyes did.

A few of things: First, while it's possible to make a 180 degree turn in a tenth of a second (I still think your sensitivity is too high), spinning around as quickly as you can and turning and accurately engaging a target are two very different things. Fortunately, BIS appears to be working on implementing a weapon inertia system. It is, however, likely to be similar to the system used in DayZ, which you didn't seem to be too fond of when I suggested it. Either way, of the guy Ckauslo posted about earlier turning 180 degrees (with a rifle) and engaging targets in just over 0.6 seconds, which is a more likely timeframe for doing the same thing in Arma 3.Second, broadband internet has been widely available in the parts of the world where online gaming is prevalent for over a decade. These days, if you're experiencing lag, it's usually either your connection or you're playing in a server located on another continent. I'm not sure why you are comparing your connection today to a time when ISDN was considered blazing fast. Framerate was always considered important in shooters, but as early as 2003-2004, players, or at least the people I played with, commonly expected framerates of 70-100 (CRT monitors!) and pings of less than 120ms. To answer your question about listen servers: They're not that common. Listen servers are mostly used to play with a small group of friends (less than 10-12 people, probably). Finally, your PC is midrange at worst. Quad cores may be old, but it doesn't matter all that much, since Arma 3 isn't multi-threaded. Your 16-gigs of RAM are largely irrelevant, since Arma can only use ~5 gigs, as it isn't a 64-bit application. Your GPUs are a little out of date, but overall your PC is pretty decent.

This point is kind of undermined by the fact that Oculus themselves are saying, "Don't buy this one! It's not ready yet, the next one will be way better!"

I wasn't aware of the change, because, like I said, I couldn't play the game for more than a few hours. I just tried it though, and it's great and pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. The old DayZ system wasn't dampened, though. There was a hard limit on turn speed, and the higher your sensitivity was or the faster you moved your mouse the quicker you hit a wall locking your turn speed. It didn't apply to vertical look sensitivity, either, which was incredibly disorienting.

Do you really look down at your hands that often when playing games, though? Navigating the command menu can be rough, sometimes, but I can usually feel may way to where I need to be. Also, for all you people who are preordering the dev kits, are you planning on buying the commercial release, too? As much as I'd love to try out the Rift now, I can't help but feel like it would be better to wait for the commercial version so I don't get stuck with a $300 piece of obsolete hardware laying around that I'll never use again.

I can't overstate how much I hope this is the way it's implemented, although I think BF3's version was just cosmetic. A functional version of this system really seems like the best of both worlds. Another decent alternative is to just dampen sensitivity based on weapon weight. Please no. This is the absolute worst way to do it. I literally could not play DayZ Standalone for more than like 2 hours because of the way mouse movement worked in that game. It was so much worse than it was in previous games.

This is where the subjective nature of performance concerns comes into play. I, and a lot of other people, don't consider 30 FPS to be good or even mediocre performance. I'd prefer that my frame rate never dip below 40. Subpar performance in a vast and ambitious game isn't any better than subpar performance in a small and simple game. Again, the sprinting mechanics are unchanged from previous titles. You could always strafe diagonally while sprinting. All they did was add the "Turbo" button back. All I can say is that I encourage you to play the game more in multiplayer and see if anything you're concerned about actually happens. First of all, my suggestion for weapon inertia isn't anything like blooming crosshairs or expanding cones of fire. At all. In fact, it's almost exactly like the free-aim system implemented in previous games, except instead of turning with your torso before the rest of your body, you would be turning with your head before the rest of your body. Second, are you referring to Trespasser, the Jurrassic Park game where you literally had to manually line up the iron sights on your gun by manually rotating your wrist and manually moving your arm into the middle of the screen? Because that mechanic, while an interesting novelty, was needlessly complex, not even close to an approximation of what it's actually like to use a firearm, and generally terrible. While the limitations on movement and aiming in the previous versions of the game may have arguably been a more strictly realistic representation, there is a strong argument to be made that a keyboard and mouse cannot accuately reflect the range of finesse and control we have over our bodies, and concessions should be made in realism should be made to account for the wide range of options that we have in real life. I believe that the changes in movement and aiming in Arma 3 are largely a step in the right direction. Did they perhaps go a little too far? Maybe, but I feel like I have much more control over my actions in Arma 3 than I have in any of the previous titles. He's almost certainly referring to the action menu. I have to say, your initial review was pretty reasonable, but your follow-on posts have taken on an increasingly elitest and dismissive tone. You should really stop assuming that everyone here is some dumb newbie who doesn't how video games were done in the old days. You aren't the only person on these forums who has been playing video games for a long time. OFP contained a few pretty questionable design decisions even for the time, and the series stuck with a lot of those decisions for a lot longer than was reasonable. The action menu was awful in 2001 and its continued inclusion in the series has only gotten less forgivable. It doesn't make the game better in any way, shape, or form. Edit: You guys understand that turn speed is limited on consoles, right? Like, it has to be, because you are aiming with an analogue stick.

I'm not sure where you think anyone in this thread said or implied that. Aside from almost everything in your post being subjective and the laughable implication that 30 FPS is good performance, nowhere in the OP does it say that he is a fan "now," although his registration date implies that he has been a fan for quite a long time. At best, the OP is stating that the game is not as bad as he initially thought it would be. That's hardly a glowing recommendation. The OP also isn't "late to the game," since waiting for a promotion to try the game doesn't invalidate his opinion, and is, in fact, a financially responsible decision to make. It seems entirely reasonable to have a place for people who are trying the game for the first time due to the free weekend to have a place to discuss their thoughts and impressions.

Please keep in mind that performance is somewhat subjective. Since you didn't give any hard numbers regarding your performance, we have no idea how the game is actually performing for you. For all we know, you could be getting 15 FPS and saying, "It seems smooth to me!" As far as optimization concerns being "unfounded," that's just not the case. The game is objectively not taking full advantage of modern hardware. There are still numerous uses of the CPU-intensive low quality shadows even when players have their shadows set to "high." This is especially a problem in an already heavily CPU-bottlenecked game, in which as many tasks should be offloaded to other hardware as possible. I'm also unaware of a fix for the issue wherein destroying buildings causes the undestroyed model to be moved underground and then placing a second, destroyed model, in its place (although there could very well have been a fix for this -- I don't follow the changelogs that closely). These are concrete problems that really should be addressed. The problem with the old sprint system was that it was often needlessly awkward and clunky. It was also (as far as I am aware) unique to Arma 2. There were numerous occasions when I was either unable to sprint when I wanted to because the game failed to recognize a double tap, or I unintentionally sprinted forward when I just wanted to edge forward a bit. A modifier key is just better from a game design standpoint. Unless I'm mistaken, your mobility while sprinting is exactly the same as it was in previous titles. There are numerous reasons that your concerns of players flicking their wrist and shooting someone behind them aren't something you need to be that worried about. First of all, this is a game that largely takes place at ranges far enough that it would be virtually impossible to accurately spin and shoot someone with a flick of the wrist. Basically, it's much harder to "twitch shoot" a target that appears as small as a person does when they are 50-150 meters away. In the relatively rare circumstances that players are in such close quarters that this kind of shooting might become viable, it would be akin to rapidly spinning on your heel or at your waist and squeezing off a bunch of bullets (and probably about as effective). Games like Quake and UT take place in much closer quarters, and players rely mostly on muscle memory and map memorization to be able to pull off the kind of shooting that you are worried about happening in Arma. This is essentially a non-issue in this game. Setting your mouse sensitivity high enough to be able to rapidly spin your character around with a flick of the wrist will significantly impede your ability to aim precisely at range. If you use a mouse with DPI-settings, it will take long enough to swtich your DPI and then move your mouse that it is functionally the same as if you had turned at the lower speed in the first place. Weapons in the game have a fairly high degree of lethality, characters have relatively low movement speeds, and movement isn't particularly audible to other players. In what situation are you going to have snuck up on someone's flank and begun firing at them, but they still have time to turn and shoot you before they die? If this happens, it is because you didn't aim well enough, not because they have the ability to turn to quickly. If you want weapon weight to be a factor in aim speed, I would recommend disconnecting the weapon from the aim point and having it lag behind at a speed based on the size or weight of the weapon. That way turning with the mouse still feels snappy and smooth, but you still have to wait for your weapon to catch up before actually engaging. Dispersion is the same as it has always been. There are a couple of things you could be experiencing. The first is that the body armor is calculated per body part, so the helmet covers the entire head, the vest covers the entire torso, etc. The second is that CSAT uniforms are supposed to be somewhat bullet resistant, so CSAT soldiers are (sort of) protected over their entire bodies. They don't have plate carriers though, so their total bullet resistence is lower than that of the other factions. Either way, the implementation of body armor wasn't ideal, and created real problems with the balance of the game against the AI at the very least.

It doesn't take much to be more realistic than the vast majority of space games, so probably in that context.

That's definitely the biggest problem, but a close second is probably the current display limitations.

More time than to figure out the engine they're already using? (This is a joke) First of all, there is stuff that has been a problem since OFP. You second statement, however, is a bit exaggerated. There are plenty of more broken games than Arma. There are fewer broken games at Arma's price point, but anything that uses the trash heap that is Gamebryo comes to mind. The issue with moving to a new engine is that Arma is most desperately in need of polish and features at this point, and I can't see switching to a new engine as acting as anything other than a reset button. The biggest upside I can see with moving to a new engine is that it might finally force BIS to move away from SQF, which I'm still hoping they decide to do anyway. I'd really rather that BIS concentrates on updating Arma's feature set, implementing a few features which have been the most requested of the series, and at the very least implement an alternative to SQF, since they almost certainly won't replace it altogether, and that's probably the thing that would require the biggest rewrite. Overall, despite the fact that it has the most chance of getting my most wanted change implemented, I feel like an engine change would largely be a step backwards for the series.

It's just generally best for the community as a whole to not get money involved in custom content creation.

Quake, Unreal Tournament, Painkiller, Day of Defeat, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Team Fortress Classic, Warcraft 3, AvP2, and, to a lesser degree, early Halo and Call of Duty games. Those were just some of the games featured in The CPL, which had total prize values of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The CPL eventually tried to scam its way out of paying prize money, but I would still hardly call it "basement stuff." There were also plenty of other league, some of which are still around, like the OGL, CAL, TGP, IGL, ESL, EAS and WCG. Remember when there was a Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel edition of basically every type of peripheral or hardware? He wasn't famous for playing CS or StarCraft. He made most of his money playing arena shooters like Quake and Painkiller. You may not personally have been aware that these games were big, but people into competitive video games definitely were. E-sports were definitely bigger a few years ago. There are fewer studios willing to design games that require such high degrees of skill, and with good reason. People who play games more casually find it off-putting to get beaten over and over again by people who take games more seriously. It can feel hopeless in the same way as playing chess against a Grand Master (or a computer). It's not fun to lose all the time, so developers started putting more equalizers in their games. Movement speeds were lowered, so aiming became easier. Advanced movement virtually disappeared. More random elements started being introduced into games like bullet spread and critical hits. These features serve to limit the effectiveness of high skill players, which prevents newer players from getting frustrated and losing all the time, but obviously makes those games less suited to serious competition. This has the effect of drawing new players to games which offer less opportunities for real advancement. There was a time when Counter-Strike was the most popular multiplayer video game in the world, and it was immensely more deep and complex, and had a significantly higher skill ceiling, than any of the Call of Duty games. E-sports aren't something that is particularly common to the "younger generation." They were probably at their peak in the early 2000s when games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, and StarCraft were a big deal. Also, no, I wouldn't really call anything played in Arma or OFP e-sports, which typically feature large, tournament style competitions and cash prizes. The Arma series really isn't suited to e-sports. It has a relavtively low skill ceiling and doesn't have a lot of advanced game mechanics. In typical e-sports games you can put thousands of hours into learning the game and never fully master it. There are typically advanced game mechanics that players can learn like bunny hopping, Tribes' skiing, countering recoil and walling in CS 1.6, or micro in RTS games like StarCraft. Arma doesn't really have anything like that. There's nothing that players can really sink a ton of hours into getting really, really good at that will grant them an edge in competition. Arma also features a lot of opportunities for players to get into situations in which it is impossible to succeed. Because of Arma's combination of high lethatity and low movement speeds, the player who sees someone first or is already aiming usually wins. The best e-sports games aren't like this. In those games, the better player will win the vast majority of the time, and if they lose it's because they made a mistake.Even the most teamplay oriented e-sports games allow for a high degree of individual skill. These traits aren't specific to video games, either. Every sport or popular competitive board or card game has the same requirements. When it really comes down to it, I don't think anyone really wants Arma to be an e-sport, because it means a totally different set of design principles. E-sports are incredibly "gamey." They have specific and fixed rules. Arma is a sandbox. Turning Arma into an e-sport would compromise its very design philosophy, and it still wouldn't be as good at it as games that were designed with that kind of gameplay in mind. So, in the end, what's the point? There are games out there that are good at being e-sports, while Arma is good at being something else. Why would you want to water down the strenghts of those different types of games by trying to combine them? I'm not trying to diminish the value of Arma in a PvP setting. It's arguably more interesting in PvP than it is PvE, but I don't think people should try to force it to fit into the e-sports mold. Groups like Shacktac do lots of cool, fun stuff with Arma. Play to the game's strengths. E-sports style competition isn't one of them. Boy, that sure was a lot of words about taking video games seriously, huh?

I understand you are doing this with good intentions, but this seems like a really bad idea with the potential to set a bad precedent. I really, really wish you wouldn't do this.

To make Arma 3 work as an esport (i.e. a game where people take competition seriously) you would have to make it a different game.

So this is based on the pre-alien stuff from that webseries they did, right? That could be pretty cool, since it was by far the most interesting Halo related thing that has been done since the first game. Either way, though, you might want to give a little more information about the backstory and setting of the mod for people less familiar with the Halo universe (like me).

You might be interested to know that nearly every weapon and vehicle in Arma 3 is based on a real life counterpart, even though the names may be different. The MX series rifle that everyone is so up in arms about was designed by the real life company CMMG. This thread can provide further information on Arma 3 Future Stuff and how it's actually a bunch of stuff that exists right now. A couple of things -- I was with you on improving the wounding system, but there is almost no reason to have a built in sims style needs system. That's the exact sort of thing that is only useful for a handful of scenarios or gamemodes and can be fully implemented through scripting. Again, I'm all for more accurate weapons handling (a lot of this would just be more detailed animations for various states of the weapon), but I would really like you to clarify what you mean by "manually inserting/ejecting magazines, emptying/ refilling magazines" because, combined with the whole sleep/hunger system thing above, it really sounds like you are getting dangerously close to suggesting a parody of a realistic game. Could you expand on "Better inventory management?" Because that could mean almost anything Aside from performance, I don't think there's a ton of work to be done in the graphics department. Although, completely ditching the cpu driven shadows would be a nice step. I also think it's important to give BIS credit where it's due, and acknowlege that they have made significant improvements in the editor. And I more or less agree with everything else.

I feel like this method would be more practical if the reverse area was rendered via RTT and then blurred, since you want the area within the scope to be higher resolution and everything outside it is significantly less important. Or, more practically, swap the quality settings when scoped in.

No. It's all just "guided."

What advantage do things like the Nostromo and Orbweaver confer over a traditional keyboard? It seems to me that you still need a keyboard for typing, and the keys aren't arranged any more conveniently on the Orbweaver, so it's just one more thing you have sitting on your desk. Are you just paying for the microstick on the side?

Yes. "Held back a little" is far from a strong statement. Arma 3 has failed to address some of the longest running feature requests and issues with the series. The development team has failed to implement a number of promised features. Either BIS is being held back, or they don't care. Even if they weren't being held back, are you saying that you don't want BIS to have a larger development department -- to have more time and resources to devote to improving Arma 3? Think about what you are arguing against here.

It's just a high poly to bake a normal map from. That isn't the model that will be used in game.