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so... did Reforger finally introduce manual transmission/gear shifting? I always thought driving could be way more fun (and skill based, and thus way more fun...) this way, especially if there's an advanced flight model for the helicopters... Either way, and other than AI (AI, AI, convoys, which coincidentally also got something to do with driving, and some more AI... ), I sure as fuck hope that this is something for Arma 4. And it probably should be a no-brainer for Reforger too, considering its focus on multiplayer (and human drivers).

I think state of the art text-to-speech synthesis absolutely would be a really big win for the whole family. Speech and radio chatter is immersive as fuck (to say the least), but a huge hassle to get right. Meanwhile the vocabulary of the radio protocols is limited and not very accessible anyways. The idea of such radio protocol is still excellent, just needs an overhaul, that is a switch from fixed sentences/vocabulary to deeply learned/trained text-to-speech synthesis. I'd suggest a hybrid approach, where you still have voice actors doing it old school for perfectly dramatic cut scenes in the campaign or what not. You still need them to train the text-to-speech thing anyways. State of the art is amazing, BIS could totally pull this off, and once trained that stuff would easily run in pretty much realtime on core 11. Getting the emotions of such speech right can be easily switched by combat-mode (given it's all nicely parametrized and trained by voice actors). Stealth for calm and quite talk. Normal. And combat for shouting. Perfect. What else would you need? Add usual pitch modifier, (or something more clever). Add effects on top, reverb depending on the environment, or some distortion and bandpassing for radio, and that would kick so much ass. Mission makers could put speech and talk dynamically together with ease(!) and it would integrate perfectly with the radio protocols, because it's the same model/voice. I'm convinced, the quality of missions would skyrocket dramatically. Because it's not just about immersion. Communication is god damn critical to convey intent (duh). Ever tried to make a single player mission where the player is not the leader of the pack? You need to make your AI leader talk, or chances are the player will simply goof off and do whatever. You like sneaky missions? You need to make the enemy officer talk and reveal his plans. And don't even get me started on generated/randomized missions, civilians/NPCs, and so many other things that has never been done justice to, because nobody got time to record all that. Assembling a team of hobby voice actors for your mission (or module) is a huge burden, requires good connections, proper organization, and then your mission is "frozen" because you can't record it all over again, and chances are it will turn out meh, no matter how hard you try, because voice acting is hard, nothing is consistent, Alice used a shitty microphone with terrible noise level - best she can do, Bob was high as fuck, it sounds like noodles, and now he refuses to record it all over again since he's high as fuck, again, bless Bob, and so much work for this? I say: no! We must put an end to this madness. Imagine a world where you can just _dude tell format["hit that %1, at %2 and %3 already! Go, go, go!", _this, _and, _that] and the unit would yell that shit in your face because he's in the danger zone right now. ...but yeah, terrain features (all of them, including seasons and mountains and climbing and rivers and underground and flora and fauna) and brand new, super flexible killer AI that could drive a car and actually live a day in that amazing environment with rivers and bridges and snow and bears and tanks... That's also important.

You what. Well, that depends on how things then are further structured. You could have the very same mechanics in place. Just because it would be a campaign, doesn't mean it would have to work like the typical hub/select mission thingy. I was just thinking that progressing in such a campaign would allow for more robustness, since the whole thing would be setup again from scratch from time to time, only restoring the essential progress. Maybe the savegame issue wouldn't be fixed by this, but chances are you could reset a broken smart phone interface and hanging FSMs and what not, I don't know. I'm also not trying to be a smartass here, just genuinely curious. I also had a quick look at the unpacked pbo, and from what I can tell all the individual pieces/locations have been prepared in their own missions so multiple people can work at those (and maybe also so that they can be tested individually?), and the main mission then imports and merges those as needed somehow. Pretty interesting. Again, I'm pretty curious what thoughts went into this, while building it. How to deal with arma's engine limitations, and how those things will be all fixed in enfusion. Such stuff. 🙂

I wonder why you guys went for a single mission format instead of a (recursive) mini-campaign. Care to share some thoughts on this?

We all know it's really just all those duplicated radios. 😫😂

It's a classic setup of an empty tank and a race between you and the tank crew. I just wish this would have been set up a bit more intelligently. Don't have the crew standing out in the open just like that. That's ridiculous. Move them into the building. Put them to sleep, or have them sit at a table and play cards and drink schnaps a lot. Meanwhile some regular units are on duty outside, guarding the place. Something like that.

Same (just with an ERCO which is absolutely efficient for silent kills. A quick brrrt and all is fine; so much more reliable than a silenced pistol). Incredibly OP, given how silence kill/alarms work in this mission. I think it's hilarious how you can show up with the whole Viper equipment to a Syndikat gig and they don't shoot you on sight. They most definitely should do so. Anything can happen with mixed equipment, until they properly recognize you. Many edge cases, I can see why they dropped this for Arma3 - hopefully not forever. A proper system, maybe with easily tweakable rules, could be splendid. But yeah, Viper gear is super nice. I went for the NATO Stealth uniform + Helmet with regular NV goggles for the final act. And then I took a tank. The end. ohhh. And I thought any of the armed vehicles (e.g. MSE-3 Marid, or a BTR-K) was already as OP as it gets. Not sure if that's a good thing, or some really heavy response forces should show up and rape your ass as soon as you operate such heavier equipment? Basically making it a pointless suicide mission. And not something that is so easily tricked like the jets that show up sometimes. Yes. It's mine now. Btw. should a service car/van be able to repair itself? E.g. a front window with some "speed holes"? Do you guys always steal two of them? Just in case? Sucks. This one each time worked well for me. But I also ran into the bug where you can't upload the virus for some reason (thanksfuly reverting a bit and trying again worked). But yes, some of this stuff is very buggy and tends to fall apart. The Syndikat "distraction" calls stopped working for me at some point all together. I got angry with them, so I called again to talk with the boss. He just sent beeper message as always. Rude. So I tried to click a location on the map, and I couldn't accept: no man available. Checked the logs. 0/10 available. Probably all dead because there was some stupid Syndikat gig every half hour. Good job Samjo. Well, screw them anyways, especially in the end. See who laughs last. Shortly after that, my "smart phone" interface on the map also fell apart for some reason. I think that Miller jackass uploaded Virus to it, as a joke. Again, see who laughs last. Right, Miller? I also would wish that "taking a side" wouldn't just lead to a slightly different tale. It's kind of a tease. Here's what should have happened: force the player to make a decision half-way through, maybe a bit earlier even. Team Miller will offer NATO gear and fun in the sun. CTGR flavored extra dirty missions. Syndikat doesn't like you any longer. So better not show up. Doc/Civilians don't care. Or, you go with Syndikat to be real guerillo hero. Miller doesn't like that. No NATO toys for you. He might also wanna murder you next time he's around. Who knows. Also you get guerilla flavored missions with good old russian toys from last word war. Many fun. Not sure if a Doc/civilian route makes sense, why not. Maybe even go and join the IDAP, go out on medical emergency adventures and save many lives. Maybe not. The point is to make "taking a side" count for something. Don't just tease with it. And then let events unfold accordingly. Sure, sure, out of scope for Old man. And that's fine. But maybe for another time? Anyways, ideas are cheap. And it's always good if something leaves you wanting for more, isn't it.

I've been also looking for one. I did finally get a set of them over at Momea (103133). Just murder the few CSAT boys in town, and if the Gendarmerie shows up, you murder them as well. Chances are some CSAT recon team will show up too, sooner or later (I guess certain locations have a different pool of quick response forces; up north seems to be great). Then again, my game was kind of crapping out at this point for some reason: the calling for Syndikat "distraction" thing broke with one such attack being stuck and never removed again, and then a new call was immediately answered with "distraction successful" and nothing happened (chances are it broke while I tried to give sniper support from a distance while distracting them with Syndikat boys. Too much of a distance, I think, since I had trouble with things spawning/despawning. Bummer.), so I quick traveled to Momea, which did not quick travel me there, instead it marked the save house there as target for the Syndikat attack/distraction. So I try to travel there again, this time it works, and as I arrive guys were already shooting. And all of a sudden such a CSAT recon team walks in as well. I tried to check the RPT, and the first thing I've noticed was that it gets spammed with: 2:38:14 Join to another group up to 50(!) times a minute. Nonstop. What's that about? Anyways, other than the occasional: 3:09:33 Error: Failed to open file a3\dubbing_f_oldman\barks\awareness\csat_awareness_wt_36_chinese04_processed.wav 3:09:33 Sound: Error: File: a3\dubbing_f_oldman\barks\awareness\csat_awareness_wt_36_chinese04_processed.wav not found !!! for various such sound files, this one here might be related to the thing that broke my Syndikat support: 3:43:54 File a3\Missions_F_Oldman\Systems\UI\SyndikatTeam\RscDatetimeSlider.inc, line 73: '/RscDatetimeSelector/Controls/ButtonConfirm.action': Missing ';' at the end of line 3:43:54 File a3\Missions_F_Oldman\Systems\UI\SyndikatTeam\RscDatetimeSlider.inc, line 92: '/RscDatetimeSelector/Controls/MySlider.onSliderPosChanged': Missing ';' prior '}' 3:43:54 File a3\Missions_F_Oldman\Systems\UI\Rsc_OM_Slider.inc, line 181: '/RscRestUI/Controls/TitleDescription.text': Missing ';' at the end of line 3:43:54 File a3\Missions_F_Oldman\Systems\UI\Rsc_OM_Slider.inc, line 220: '/RscRestUI/Controls/numberTitle.text': Missing ';' at the end of line 3:43:54 File A3\Missions_F_Oldman\Campaign\Missions\cfgQuests_Syndikat.inc, line 18: '/cfgQuests/SupportQuestTemplate_SyndikatAgent/StateModifiers/Assigned.code': Missing ';' at the end of line 3:43:54 File A3\Missions_F_Oldman\Campaign\Missions\cfgQuests_Syndikat.inc, line 23: '/cfgQuests/SupportQuestTemplate_SyndikatAgent/StateModifiers/Progressing.code': Missing ';' at the end of line Maybe @Dedmen want to have a look a this some time? Also the save files are still growing huge (I'm back to ~200mb). I wonder if it's all the radio's that keep piling up. 😅

Every voiced character/radio protocol should directly train a text-to-speech synthesis box. Then offer offline and online speech synthesis, depending on the requirements of the mission designer. Now that would be something! 😬

What are the chances of Oldman being secretly just a test-run for something similar, even bigger in the next installment of Arma? Open world cartel wars, or something. 😊 Even if so, tasks should not just fail silently and then the player is silently screwed and out of luck. Bad design. Especially with the very first introduction mission (Arthur).

Here's another thing about "no bad things should ever happen if the player decides to do nothing". I wanted to see what happens when you just ignore Arthur, settle down first, maybe murder some CSAT and steal their stuff, I don't know. Then I skipped some time as I was tired. Skipped it to the max what's allowed. Then some jackass came and knocked at my door loudly, early in the morning. Rude. Hey, it's the doctor, who I didn't meet yet, because fuck Arthur, so I never went to his village, where also the doctor hangs around. Did I already mention that I don't like the doctor very much? As for Arthur, it probably wasn't that important after all. Dude just disappeared (and with him the task) and never called again. Good for him, I guess? See, I think this is simply a design mistake for an open world approach. Let the player decide the pacing. Here's what should have happened instead: Arthur is a cool dude. He doesn't mind if I come visit the next day to solve his problem. Or next week. Maybe next year. It's all good. It's also cool if he goes to sleep, so the player isn't able to visit him a first time at night. But the next day, he'll be around again. For whenever the player feels like to start off, or progress, the story. Similarly, the doctor doesn't just show up at my door. Rude. Make sure I talk to him at the end of the Arthur quest, and then, and only then proceed with infecting them all in their village. Then, once the player has done that, some next day the Doctor may, maybe, show up early in the morning over at yours. Still rude. But whatever. People are dying now. And so on, same with other such story beats. The Syndikat stuff is similarly rude for no reason. If the Syndikat wants to do a night mission so badly, they can go collect those NVGs by themselves. Otherwise they have to wait for the player, and maybe postpone their little surprise party at night. The task should be open every day, and once you deliver them, the next task to take part in that operation should again be at the pace of the player. Tonight? Nah, I got already plans with the sexy ladies in Valalahalala. 😍 Maybe tomorrow? Cool. I mean, sure, it's a bit cheating, because things tend to happen without you. Still, suspension of disbelief is never really broken, since things might as well *not* happen without you. In short: tasks should generally remain open, it doesn't hurt anything. One player will witness a faster virus outbreak, another one a much slower one. The story unfolds either way. Sure, there can be "chapters" that close/disable a set of tasks. But that's different, and usually happens at the player's decision and pace again. Some more things: Meeting miller: And again, I expect better of Miller. Last time I played this, I was maybe a minute or two late, so he was all butthurt about it. So this time I went there early. No miller there. And then he simply spawns in your face. Not cool. Miller should spawn a bit away and walk up to you, so you can make a dumb remark about him being too late this time. 😙 Finding intel/evidence at the abandoned CSAT camp: Miller is confusing if you find minor/not important evidence after you've already found the good stuff that leads you to the next location. He tells you to keep looking for more evidence/something better. He should just tell you that it's alright now and to move on already, or something. It's a bit unfortunate that the geo caches aren't randomized (at least partially). I understand that's a bit hard to do if you want to show off the cool locations (caves in particular), but maybe that could have been achieved in a different manner, using them for something else. Randomizing them hard would obviously offer way more replay value. Similarly it would be nice if almost everything else would be cleverly randomized too: distribute save houses randomly, but use some tricks (voronoi triangulation or what not) so they're nicely distributed anyways. Same for black markets, syndikat camps, minor missions such as houses to blow up, or things to steal from. Even road blocks: find a random road segment between two locations, even if it's always between the same locations, a slightly different position might make all the difference with respect to driving around them. Road blocks could even be moved after some time. Granted, it's really tricky to randomize nice set pieces that nicely integrate into the environment 100% of the time. So I perfectly understand why many of these things are rather not (intelligently) randomized. 🤤 Also I still haven't figured out the rules of disguise, that is, when you wear the enemy's uniform and all perfectly. Shouldn't I be able to drive enemy cars like this (police car, IDAP, and CSAT respectively)? I think I'm not. Can I move around in restricted areas (guess there would be at least two layers required, with an outer layer that is fine if disguised and an inner layer/area where it's absolutely not either way because of stricter protocols, or something)? Not really? Does it simply raise some threshold/timers? What exactly is the idea here? I think some "plot beat(s)" would be really needed here, that a) make you have to use some disguise, and b) that also explains the rules to you. Have an early mission make you disguise as a worker (mines/harbor), or IDAP dude, another one disguised as police, pass a road block in disguise and with enemy vehicle, maybe this time you might have to first get the disguise someway or another too, and then also have one for the CSAT boys and infiltrate some CSAT base (is simple soldier uniform good enough, or do you need an officer uniform, or would that be even more dangerous, since people tend to know their officers?). Would changing cloths affect (i.e. lower) your wanted status? And from here on out, the player knows how he can use this to his advantage.

I could have sworn I saw a ticket for this already. Am I imagining things now? Anyways, it's basically like that one Spongebob episode: This is from a game where free saving wasn't disabled. Might be related to that, but I don't really know, or how to reproduce it. Not really sure how it happens. The result are more and ever more radios at your home, and they all keep blasting the radio, which basically rapes the games audio mixer, which gets even more funny with the echoing and phasing and stuff going on while walking around/outside the house. I think I've also seen at least one other save house with a radio that showed the same problem.

Excellent. I hope the radio duplication bug is also going to be fixed (bonus points if we'll be able to turn it off altogether). You just can't relax at home like this. 😣

@Eric_the_Red and @dmaziuk: corrupted savefiles should be fixed soon enough. I wouldn't recommend starting a new game until then. see: https://feedback.bistudio.com/T150427

Thanks for this. I've been enjoying this amazing mission for the last couple of days and it's been a real blast so far (Tanoa is such a beauty, 😍). Some food for thought: All save houses (or the sheds right next to them) should have an ammo box. The big/bottomless ones. Using vehicles as stash tends to get ridiculous. Weapon dealers are next to useless. Are they working as intended? They barely got any ammo. It's okay if only certain special dealers have certain special weapons/ammo, but if all they have is 1 to 4 mags, that just sucks. Do they even get new stuff (that isn't from me)? Ever? Some dealers seem to be running out of things really quickly. And then that's that. Kind of a bummer if you've got a fancy Type 115, but no more caseless 6.5mm mags - and when is the next time you accidentally run into a Viper team? Exactly. There should be some car dealers around where you can sell and buy cars and trucks. Maybe also a ship dealer somewhere. Not sure if customization (repaint jobs, etc.) make much sense, but could be totally awesome for Syndikat car dealers that can equip your jeep with an mg/at, or something like that. I expect better from Miller. He's all talk but doesn't give you the (recon) info. For bigger tasks, e.g. take out AA/Radar, I expect at least a small briefing with what's to be expected and how these places are guarded (how about some satellite photos), maybe some info on counterstrike possibilities, etc. Can't be arsed to do the recon all by myself. I'm an old man, okay? What the hell are his fancy analysts even doing all day long? Cleared/raided places should remain clear and save. At least until you go sleep, if not permanently. Raiding the mobile AA site and cleaning it for good (incl. backups/counterstrikes until nothing else came), should stay like that for the time being. It's way too awkward to drive away from there in a vehicle, park it somewhere, and return to steal another vehicle you'd like, only to realize the whole place has been repopulated already as if nothing ever happened at all. The awkward solution here is to drive multiple cars bit for bit, alternating, until you're at a save distance, so you can temp. park one for good and drive the other somewhere else and return to pick up the other... silly stuff. IMHO even the state of dead bodies (incl. their inventory) should be saved and restored upon returning. Is this too tricky to achieve? To give another example, checkpoints you've cleared an hour earlier that day should remain clear and save to travel now. But it would be totally fine if the next day the checkpoint will be manned by fresh troops again. Maybe depending on what surrounding places are still there or not, such as main bases, which probably should remain cleared for good, or at least for a bit longer. Alternatively a more dynamic territory/warefare thing could work nice, with places being in the hands of certain factions, clearer frontlines, etc. Maybe another time in Arma4. Reinforcements/counterstrikes upon sounding the alarm leaves much to be desired. They spawn and appear on scene way too fast. But the problem is deeper. The route where they're coming from should be comprehensible/traceable. Don't spawn them out of thin air at some random distance. Use their bases, airports, even checkpoints are fine (for gendarmerie and smaller units, maybe a truck). At sounding an alarm the next (as in smallest distance) appropriate location should be used to spawn the counterstrike. Combine this with raided places being cleared for good, and you get the effect of having more and more time to loot and disappear into the night, the more such places you've cleared/destroyed already. Sound good? Next this would allow some tactical planning for the player, who may calculate with such a counterstrike. Player does the smallest distance to whatever he knows where enemy bases are in his head, there's some margin of error obviously depending on intel (which just got even more valuable to gather) and depending on what the enemy decides to send out as reinforcements. Anyways, chances of mines, explosives and other ambush techniques just skyrocketed. Which is the best kind of fun. When plans work. Random, fun anecdote: exploring the southern island, I ran across a parked armored car and a single dude on a small bridge. Looked suspicious. Upon taking a closer look, I realized his team buddies where going for a swim in the lake right next to it. Lovely scene. Naturally I decide to murder them all, and take their stuff. But before I know it, a counterstrike squad is already here (far away from any civilization, or anything). Naturally I decide to murder them all as well, but that's not the point. The point is that it really sucks to have them appear so soon already, if at all. Who even made the call? The one standing guard was the first to go, so nothing should probably have happened. And while I still got my loot, the whole thing kind of sucked because of this. It was supposed to be a nice and quick murdering party with nobody ever being alerted. And all of a sudden it's vietnam all over again. Just ruined the mood for me. The doctor is a pain in the ass, and I don't like it one bit. His patients in need of medicament are not my (sole) responsibility. Fuck that. His problem. Not mine. What are even the stakes here for me? What happens if those five civilians die? I don't know. What does it matter? I figure there are plenty of other old men around that can hook him up with meds as well. I suspect there probably are, and it's all a scheme and the meds on the black market are actually coming from the doc himself. I buy from black market, give them away to the doc for free, and buy the very same meds all over again. Repeat. I don't know. I don't like that guy. His constant calls or updated descriptions are annoying, and the urgency with the countdown is totally out of place. Don't do that. Simply make it an option for me to provide him with meds at my pace. And maybe offer some kind of incentive, such as better civilian reputation, which offers you more free beds and places to crash at for free, or just straight info/intel revealing such places and other nice things. Generally nothing too bad should ever happen if I decide to skip a day, or a week and wait for better weather. I do like the Syndikat and their boss, Samjo (great voice actor! You just know he is best amigo forever - until you make a tiny mistake and he'll feed you to his pigs, no hard feelings), but the generic support assault missions and constant calls about it, no matter what, are rather on the annoying side of things. At some point there's always one of those things going on, yet the player participates only in a few, if he doesn't stop altogether at some point. This should really be an opt-in thing. You go see your Syndikat buddies at their base, and sign up for a gig. This would also allow for some proper squad action. At first you get assigned to a squad as low-rank noob and follow your AI leader into almost certain death. Later on you get to be responsible for a few men. All just temporarily for this one mission you've signed up for. Maybe offer some random choice out of a pool of targets. And offer the option to fast travel there with your buddies and at the right time, or if you meet them there later on your own. Much better. Also this would allow for a variety of missions. E.g. ambush some convoy, smuggling equipment, whatever. I really miss not having at least a few AI buddies in my own squad. Why can't I hire some, train and raise them like my kids? Not just to operate some of the heavier machinery, but also for missions, to keep overwatch for me, help loot, or at least use them as pack-mules and drivers and so on. Maybe not too many, say 3 buddies max. (Remember Chernarus? Those were the days!) that you get to keep as long as you pay them daily. I mean, it's obvious how much more fun this would be, so I wonder if this has technical/performance reasons (because you can send them all over the map individually so stuff has to spawn there as well?) for not being done? Or is it just like that because that's just the Old Man for you, i.e. by design? Kind of a bummer, either way. Calling Syndikat guys for a "distraction" is nice, but it's just not the same. Having your own little team would open up the way for a bit harder missions too, as opposed to be expected to lonewolfing everything and balance things around that. Of course, there are always plenty of things that would be nice to have too in such open world games/missions. Can't have it all. Either way, this is really great as is. And I'll surely play this all over again, once the corrupt savefile bug has been fixed.

No way! You guys. You guys! 😍🤗😁

My bad, I'm not on dev. branch these days any longer, and don't plan to. Not really. The question basically boils down to whether this: got fixed or not. And what we see here, are useless bounding boxes (red one is "real") blown up by things defined in the memory lod. "ClipVisual" or "ClipGeometry" sounded like it could, maybe, achieve such a thing. Probably not? Nevermind. We'll see soon enough.

Wait, so what exactly is it? Are we finally able to retrieve exact bounding boxes (in particular without the memory lod, which doesn't make any sense) in a reliable way, or is this just another hack/approximation? More precise? In some cases? I don't like the sound of this...🤒 @R3vo See: https://feedback.bistudio.com/T81462

Is this really what I think it is? Holy cow! 😬

See: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/knowsAbout (and maybe: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/targetKnowledge). Units of the same side (i.e. allies), but not in the same group, still nead to "learn" about each other. The side of a newly spotted object starts with side "unknown", hence the unknown contact, which might be friend or foo at this point.

Not exactly, but you can just do a switch(true) and have your cases evaluate to boolean, which should be nice enough anyways: switch (true) do { case ((_var select 0) isEqualTo "String"): { if ((_var select 1) isEqualTo 123) then { diag_log text "match both"; } else { diag_log text "match string"; }; }; case ((_var select 1) isEqualTo 123): { diag_log text "match number"; }; default { diag_log text "no match"; }; };

@Dedmen I see, backwards compatibility is the actual problem here. Yeah, that's always nasty, and now is certainly not the time to do anything about this.

@.kju sounds like fun times.

@Tankbuster yep. unironically. If you're going to streamline array syntax, give us the usual C syntax already. array[i] Anyone is comfortable with this (and don't tell me the parser couldn't be improved to handle this, it's really no big deal). But this cryptic hashtag? Just because it's shorter than writing select? No, thanks.

So... what's the point?