spongbo

Please post the details from the error message.

Some details about your computer might be helpful. My bet: You're running Windows Vista and haven't yet installed DirectX 9. http://www.microsoft.com/downloa....lang=en Alternatively, you can start working through these possible causes: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_Troubleshooting

Sure, some problems. There was an extended beta. The problems don't appear to be OS-specific (as they occur under XP as well). Don't be dense. This isn't an OS thing, it's a QA thing.

Mere seconds into the first Mission in 1.08 (and is it just me, or is it now a heap harder? - the old red truck used to have some extra mines in it, but the new tan truck is empty. Misers.) --------------------------- ArmA --------------------------- Cannot create system memory surface DXT5,2048x2048 (size 5592416 B) Error code 8007000e --------------------------- OK Â --------------------------- I tried resetting the video settings to Default... same problem. The time after that, it survived a little longer, but then crashed with a "The program has stopped working" message mid mission. Plus, there's now a new "pulsing framerate" - every second or so, it slows down noticeably, then returns to normal (or a little faster than normal), then slows down again... I am truly disheartened and unhappy with ArmA. Nothing about it has gone well for me, from the Sprocket system being broken through to the bugs in the game. I think I'm going to give up on it for 6 months. The wait for 1.08 was forever, and now we're faced with the same old problems plus this weird heartbeat framerate, well, I've just lost interest. I can't even be bothered trying -maxmem this time. If anyone asks, I'll tell them to avoid ArmA until BIS start testing it better on a wider variety of systems. Not since the third patch for BF2 have I had such a poor experience. System, in case anyone's interested: AMD X2 4400+ on Nforce 4 board Vista x64 2GB ATI X1950 Pro Other Games Work Fine..

I get much the same thing. MaxMem sorts out the Surface error, but I get a different crash less frequently. Vista X64, 2GB RAM, ATI X1950 512, Athlon X2 4400+

Everyone chill; let's recap: The problem has been seen with: - Windows Vista and both ATI and Nvidia cards - Windows XP with Nvidia 8800 This indicates to me that it's not exclusively a Vista problem, and as such, there should be no problem in fixing it. A fix for non-Vista systems probably fixes the issue on Vista systems too. As this is not an official support forum, I do not expect BiS to comment on a patch for this issue or otherwise. The box probably says to contact 505/publisher for support. Unfortunately, that's all well and good for "reinstall it" type issues and the odd video driver problem, but not for code bugs. There are probably more than a few outstanding. Which brings us to the next point: Are BiS actually saying that you can't run ArmA on Vista? Not that I've seen. Are they saying that ArmA will never be Vista compatible? Again, not that I've seen. Have they announced a timeframe? Who knows... There is a difference between supported, untested, unsupported and unworkable. If popular rumour is to be believed, ArmA on Vista is untested at best (meaning a fix for Vista-specific issues is possible), unsupported at worst (meaning no fix will ever be produced that applies to a problem exclusively affecting Windows Vista). Given that there's no official support for Vista, and that we're in an unofficial support forum, it would seem that this is the correct place to discuss workarounds and problems with Vista. On the flip side, it's not appropriate to demand fixes for untested/unsupported setups. But it would be nice for the boxes (or at least the website) to be explicit about Windows Vista users not buying the game.

Okay, but what we're *actually* talking about here is Armed Assault crashing when more than a certain amount of memory is available or specified. Other games seem to work under Windows Vista without issue. So Armed Assault is doing something differently. And those of us that play Armed Assault and [[[ would rather use  Vista, a no-years-old version of Windows than a four-year-old-with-a-bump-pack version and are actually quite happy to have 512MB extra RAM set aside for a better OS with better features and security and performance yes-don't-laugh-performance-it's-actually-faster-for-day-to-day-stuff-with-more-memory-because-of-stuff-like-superfetc h ]]] would eventually like to see this issue fixed. Your opinion notwithstanding, Vista was designed to run on existing hardware, not just the future stuff. -maxmem seems to be a most-of-the-time workaround, so once BiS figure out what the problem is, I'm sure they'll be able to fix it. And then, it makes no difference whether you're running Vista or Windows 2000 (or Windows 2001 in the case of XP), you can just get on with *playing it*.

(Way to go quoting the Inquirer there, liberty, but imnsho they're far from a reliable technical source when frothing at the mouth about some sort of alleged drm thingo. I'm using vista x64 just fine, thanks for asking. If you don't want it, use something else. Have you tried it at all yet?) Back to the topic at hand, I just scored an error even with maxmem=512, just after the "clear out the village" mission (which was bloody difficult I might add), so it's not a fix, just seems to reduce the chance of it happening ?significantly?

Maxmem=512 good, have played two (possibly more) campaign missions in a row without issue. I just tried 1024, but it crashed in a new and different way (an actual unhandled-type crash, not just a messagebox). I'll just go back to 512... seems fine like that anyway.

I'd like to be able to turn the new iron sights off, or lock them while they're visible - with TrackIR, you end up overcompensating twice - once working out where your head's pointed, and then again with the mouse.

Same problem here, ATI X1950 w/ Catalyst 7.2. Not just an Nvidia problem. --------------------------- ArmA --------------------------- Cannot create system memory surface: 8007000e --------------------------- OK --------------------------- Pretty common occurrence (at least once in 25 minutes). ArmA 1.05, Vista x64, 2GB RAM, TrackIR. Detail at High, mostly.

Yeah, you can't sign up at the moment because of the Country problem. They've been emailed about it.

Ditto. I'm pretty sure it's not a silenced RPG though. Pity, cos in Flashpoint there was a beautiful deep boom (along with the breaking glass sound and an echo?), especially at a distance. Boom...(oom oom)... crashtinkleoom... None of that in ArmA yet - perhaps they figured the BRDMs would be invincible in the demo and explosion noises wouldn't be needed

This isn't a useful critique. It runs fine on my system, which - horror of horrors - has an IDE hard drive. It will not run at the same FPS as BF2, and that's fine. It does a thousand times more than BF2 does in any given second, with AI, practically unlimited terrain, scripting, and all the other things that make this engine unique. The Xbox had a particularly slow IDE hard drive. All the "Xbox Engine" posters seem to conveniently forget that. The hard drives in most PCs built even at the same time as the Xbox (2001, mind) were faster. Until someone that's seen the code chirps up with some actual facts, I'd suggest that everyone *not* rush out and buy a faster hard drive based on this post alone. Spend the money on an X19xx instead, and watch the framerate jump...

Weeeellll... if it's just a matter of removing the corpses, I'm sure people wouldn't complain too much if bodies had a limited lifespan (pun intended). I suspect there's more to it than just a cadaver leak.

Trying to work out if Vsync actually helps here (I don't have the option to disable it yet under Windows vista), but the gunsight view definitely lags 1/2 second behind mouse movement on all the systems I've tried so far, across different video cards. It seems that redraws are prioritized over input adjustments, which is a little odd for a game where reaction speed is a factor. As soon as I get a driver option to disable vsync, I'll try it out.

Any chance BIS can post the specs of the systems they've tested Armed Assault on, and let us know what sort of frame rates and detail settings we can expect on a given rig? I tried ArmA demo on a friend's Vista laptop with Radeon X700 Go, and it ran way smoother than on my Geforce 6600GT system. Does the ArmA engine work better with certain video cards? Is there an inbuilt benchmark that can be used to work this out? (timedemos- if the community could simply benchmark and post hardware details and results were collated and compared, we could work out where the problems are, and what cards, drivers or hardware are better/worse/average etc ) Am I just smoking The Crack asking this stuff?

Yah, I'm saying ArmAMark *should* collect system information, at least more than it does, so that anomalies can be investigated and explained. Perhaps even do it as part of a less-easy-to-fiddle program, rather than asking for input on a web form. For example - the 8800GTXs rip through the other scores, and the systems coincidentally have the best CPUs (there's a flattish line for CPU speed vs score). But other high-end scores (if they're trustable) show that the 7600GS is actually nearly as good. (Score 5000, Flea, *1800Mhz* CPU - I suspect it's not true). Likewise, the Quality setting doesn't seem to prevent cards from scoring high. Visibility doesn't seem to matter either.

ArmAMark data is very interesting. I'm not sure what people are doing to produce better scores (perhaps asking them is worthwhile). The one 8800GTX on the list produced the best score, but it also had the fastest CPU speed. It only had 1GB RAM installed tho. On the subject: RAM numbers are all over the place, and don't seem to affect Normal quality scores. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that RAM doesn't seem to be a factor. Some of the best scores have only 1GB, some less. The third-best Normal score is reported as an Athlon XP 1800 with 768mb and a 7600GS - it might be someone gaming the results, or it could be that they tweaked the engine in some way. I'd like to see ArmAMark expand the data it collects - driver versions, an "interview" on config tweaks (or just harvesting config files), and so on. Fascinating stuff, I might post some graphs to my blog later.

ArmAMark FTW! Doesn't look like it'll work with the demo, but it's damn useful info anyway. Thanks so much for the link, and to whomever came up with it!

So help me out here. Flashpoint Elite for Xbox used a streaming system from its slow hard drive because of RAM constraints. The PC version of Armed Assault inherits some kind of graphical performance problem - despite just about every PC having a faster hard drive than the Xbox 1 - because the Xbox 360 has a faster hard drive? Ignore me, I give up. You win. Obviously an Xbox problem.

I agree - it's funny seeing your squad sticking out as if wrapped in toilet paper while moving through greenery. Because from a distance, they're represented as little white sticks against a (colour) background. The enemy are represented as little brownygreen sticks against a green background. The enemy is less "glanceable". You could argue that this just makes using cover that much more important. Just hypothetically - on a night mission in the game, playing against human opponents, would you rather be wearing ACU or black?

Under Vista, just steer clear of non-Windows Update drivers. Running here under x64 on a 6600GT - doesn't run spectacularly well, but it's at least generally playable when using the Windows Update set. Just steer clear of the Nvidia RC2s. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki....sta_RTM

Wow. As far as I can tell, you just made something up, then started complaining that what you made up was a stupid way to do it. It's not that. How do I know? Well for starters, the xbox hard drive was notoriously slow. It's hardly your ideal "optimize for this" case. Was the Xbox drive an ATA-7 drive? I'd guess not, as the Xbox was out in 2001, the standard was still being baked in 2001, and the top search engine mention of an ATA7 being "newly ratified" is from 2005. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20050106072724.html So stop nutbagging! How about some more scientific testing? Try dropping resolution to 640x480 or below. If that improves frame rate, chances are, it *is* the GPU thing, and is nothing to do with your delusion. I'm not arguing that ArmA couldn't be better optimized, but honestly, I feel dumber just for having read the "it's the xbox" posts here.

I posted this to the Wiki In short: Uninstalling, redetecting and updating from WinUp got me to the 9746 drivers, and it seems to have fixed pretty much all my visual corruption issues in ArmA Demo. It runs way better on ATI cards at present (a friend with an ATI *laptop* gets way better frames than I do under Vista), but this at least gets Nvidia boards back into the game.