shinRaiden

The BI Simulations development team located in Orlando, FL is growing again, and we have several more openings for designers. Opportunities are currently focused on scripting and content config development at this time. Taskings are generally more interaction/functionality oriented, and less so on mission/scenario design. The current application window for designers extends through mid-August 2011. For more information please visit the position description page here.

:icon_ohmygod: "Of course BB's going to have it, any reputable game's got shelf space at BB. And if they don't, walmart will." So I checked BestBuy. It say's it's back ordered, and not on the shelves in at least two different regions. That's weird, is it a holdup with the distributor? Who's the manufacturer? "Got Game Entertainment". Who are they? Line up here. That explains a few things, I'll look for it instead at the 3-for-$5 pile at the freight salvage liquidators warehouse along with all the other dropped pallets of no-label stuff. Also, Walmart.com doesn't show it either, only ArmA1/CO. More ominous clouds. BestBuy, Walmart, Gamestop, these are the biggest retailers of video game boxes in the United States. They are not distributors or publishers, they just sell games that others put on their shelves. And right now - those boxes aren't making it to the shelves, and it's anyone's guess as to when it's going to sort itself out. For what it's worth, strictly on shelf visibility alone, Atari's packaging of ArmA and CO *always* had prime shelf space right next to EA titles, and maintained upper-tier pricing. That has to account for something.

For a whole lot of reasons - many posted here on the forums and other unposted - I'd finally decided a week or two ago that I was NOT going to get ArmA2 or even bother with it at all. If it is in fact going to be distributed comprehensively, or at least in the US on Steam, then that's sufficient to make me reconsider that decision, because that demonstrates some beginnings of long-overdue policy changes.

Walmart and Kroger's still had high-positioned slots with mid-upper tier pricing long after the BestBuy slots were replaced, all of which lasted much longer than I expected. If Atari felt they could justify the slot distribution and positioning, then obviously ArmA was worth it to them to do so. If you're in need of a private publication with the intent of personal use, think twice about a vanity label. If you're doing a legitimate commercial work, then there's no excuse to vanity label your work.

Been a while since I trolled here, first to reply to walker's points. Now this be my opinions, but I don't see those as significant issues for a number of reasons. No Civilians If the environment isn't built up enough for the civilians to have a reason to be there, should they be there at all? Imho no. Use Fallujah rules, psyops told all the civvies to leave, so all that's left is bad guys and a few refugees hiding. But if you want civvies, then don't make it look like token role-play contractors. The number of buildings in OFP that could be construed as livable, although missing any number of essential furnishings, could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. ArmA, + QG, maybe less than that? That's in reference to a pre-populated 'living' environment. No Flyable Jets The point's been made somewhere prior that approaches alone would effectively use up most of the respective product's virtual airspace, and that many lower-end air defense systems would effectively result in the entire airspace being considered denied. Secondly, neither product has resolved the issue with absurdly artificial altitude transposing to compensate for the view distance culling, mandatory for the ground plane culling systems. So like with BF2, the effectiveness of manuevers transposed lower in altitude and radius by orders of magnitude without altering the performance of the aircraft is crazy-talk. Micro Battles Unless you're sitting back at the command level, everything becomes mano-a-mano micro-battles. You navigate this block, secure that house, and engage enemy pixels one blob at a time. The choreography of the micro-battles is what creates the campaign arc, by linking together objectives, activities, and outcomes. This is why the CoD-piece franchises suck, because if you zerg-nade the spawn points, you win. No thinking or creativity involved, and no way to pwnzor the story-line. Micro Multiplayer Not exactly 'micro', the numbers advertised are pretty much in line with most other non-MMO's. The only way the MMO's are able to support higher player counts is that they use 'probability', rather than precision. WoW, Eve, etc, you lock onto a target and roll virtual dice with coefficients to calculate damage. ArmA/BF2/DragonRetching/etc use 'precision', where everything is a dynamic entity, which results in an absurdly higher amount of data to transmit, over upload limited cable internet. No Wildlife. If you have time and staff to screw around screwing with animals, the rest of your product had better well be completely flawless, 'cause otherwise, imho, it's rather insulting to imply "well we had time to make a whole new mocap anim tree for pigs, but couldn't be bothered to finish the hand anims code that we started back when we were still partners." No Editor for the consoles. Only an external editor in PC. Gonna tie these two together. Sure the consoles don't get an editor, that's because it's not possible to put an external editor on a console, and frankly it's rather impractical to try and cram all the needed editor UI on top of what it is you're trying to edit. Crysis-PC uses that same model, and it's superior for a couple reasons. First, by decoupling the editor from the engine, it removes the need to write all the editor handlers in the engine. This can help team development by trimming the engine back to engine-specific things. Second, there's the UI aspect of usability. With an external editor, it's far easier to monitor or query parameters simultaneously with editing the affected entities. Third, it can - depending on implementation model - allow for editor feature development and optionally plugins to be developed and refined asynchronous to the rest of the development process. Now as for consoles, even if you have some sort of pre-fab or overlay system to design bits of a scenario at a time and merge later, to make an epic mission using only your thumbs is really a bit too much to do, so the natural outcome will be trending towards micro-battles simply from a mission design practicality standpoint. Limited urban environment. True, but that would be more of the same and nobody's innovated there in a really long tim. ========================================================== Now for the rumor-mongering... First things we saw from CM was shopped and rendered videos, that were billed as "visual targets", and that was it for a long while. Then we started getting a trickle of in-game stuff and it didn't exactly match ... at all. What the in-game footage tells me is that they wised up and realized you can't get CoD detail on expansive environments in a timely manner or with cross-platform performance. Given those limitations, I think they've done an excellent job, and while it can always be improved on, they appear to have made the most of their compromises. The pre-renders weren't misleading imho if you know how the games work, but they definitely were setting themselves up for a pile of zerg'ish fanboy disappointment. What's put them in a bind really is their plan for being cross-platform. If they stuck to one platform, either PC or console, it could sort itself out. If they committed to the PC, they could pull a Crysis and insist everyone upgrade to non-existent hardware specs. If they went with just the console, they could throttle it to make it meet M$ performance specs. Facts of the matter is that you can't really run the same content source to both platforms, unless you seriously hobble the PC. CM's marketing BS has been superb, it's even caught BIS up in the fray 'forcing' BIS to respond to CM instead of proactively advertising on their own. Whether it is a house of cards or not, remains to be seen when the product hits the shelves. Soldner was a good example of that, had dynamic character modeling and robust building and environment destruction, but the developers pulled the plug on it and it imploded. There's been plenty of similar allegations on these forums that ArmA was likewise rushed to 'stop the bleeding', but in this case it didn't sink the ship, perhaps due to 'Fortress Mnisek'. If there is grains of truth in the extrapolations of the rumors, like everyone else we'll just have to wait and see if it really does get treated as dead on arrival, or not.

Presentation of dynamic stuff like this typically has to take one of two approaches. First is the 'simulation' approach. This orientation uses of actual scientific models to provide a statistical sampling of the whole effect. For example, it's impractical to simulate the individual effect of n trillion rain drops, but the maths for liquid reactions over time are simpler to project. Similarly it would be impractical to calculate a fully 'natural' environmental spectrum, but it is practical to artificially 'clamp' distinct modes. From another point of view, even wide-spectrum analysis tools have fine-grained filters to focus on the very narrow and specific objectives. There's little need for example to do a full water vapor simulation when you're filtering for RF propagation, simply insert an appropriate approximated coefficient. The other approach, that used by 'serious games', instead bypasses the simulation of the natural phenomena to rather present the observed effect of the phenomena. So instead of trying to simulate it, they skip that whole process to directly replicate the observation. An interesting theory, and in practice can occasionally result in a higher fidelity presentation than a traditional simulation system. It does however have its inherent weaknesses, as they tend to be extremely limited in scalability. For example, in OFP/ArmA rain is presented as a billboard'ed visual effect. Like with other games, it provides an atmospheric presentation effect, even though there is a lack of hydrodynamic or thermal or other environmental effects. Non-visual spectral presentations in the 'serious games' approach are challenged by the typical lack of necessary systems required to accurately replicate the differences in propagation between visual and non-visual emissions. Game models typically use face-based modeling, rather than solid object models for visualization. Pseudo-solid object components such as collision geometry - simply collections of dimensional properties - merely provide static parameters and do not for performance reasons typically provide adaptive materials. Performance optimization methods in computer graphics assume static objects that can be readily replicated and directly rendered. Implementing the various degrees of procedural modeling required to provide a dynamic visualization more accurately reflecting non-visual spectrum emissions requires renderer design outside of traditional hardware optimization capabilities. For thermal imaging in VBS2 a hybrid approach was done. While it was obviously impractical to change the renderer to a procedural solid object model, inspiration from that approach was used to create the texture maps for the objects. The RGBA channels record in separate channels the various emmissive characteristics to provide a range of presented visualization dependent on metabolism/utilization, environment, and other factors. As a result, the texture map generation process is quite complex, but the rendered effect simply uses a different shader modes to present a visualization of the net effect of the object. EM/RF simulation would have similar challenges, that in a gaming world would probably still have to be addressed as a presentation of the observed effect, rather than the direct simulation of the phenomena. Aside from the technical complications, there's also the aspects of business objectives (eg would the investment required to include the expanded spectral presentation realize an appropriate return on investment) as well as propriety (paper-pushers take a dim view of lulz-ware that can be repurposed as an arguably adequate systems trainer). But, opinions on those matters vary widely and are founded on the morass of impatience, jealousy, and covetousness.

Is it fun being stuck in the past? You dont still want software on tapes do you? Hows about having ArmA2 on a nice stack of ~6970 floppy disks? I don’t like purchasing "AIR" and that’s what you get from itunes exc.  Give me a tangible hard copy.  If the costs were significantly lower, due to the lack of print and product,  I would consider it.  But they are NOT.  As for a NA publisher,  I believe this is what’s holding them back from Console disclosure. That is misleading, inaccurate, and uninformed. itunes does have a policy of not allowing re-downloads, but there is no restriction prohibiting you the user of maintaining your own backups and copying them to another authorized machine for immediate playback, or sharing them from a centralized library. steam on the other hand does allow you to redownload any content at any time, without disk scratches. yeah we can tell your not here to help How about when stem goes down and you cant play your games. Or how about if your isp id down and you cant log into stem and play your games. Got to love people that cant live without their tec. Its funny to watch people after a big storm hits and they dont know what to do. I really dont understand whats the big deal, why not have it on both? I just hope all countries get it at the same time. Also misleading, inaccurate, and uninformed. Search steampowered.com support Company of Heros has some difficulty with offline mode, but that's Relic's problem, not Steam's and not Valve's. I just migrated 35gb of steam content from 2 machines to a 3rd, the only games that gave me any hassle were the valve titles as valve requires a cache validation step not required by the other developers who distribute via steam.

Wow! Never thought I'd see it. Do you know if it is done with heavy scripting and is therefore a bit demanding in terms of performance, or not? I agree it'd be great if it was officially implemented, but if it isn't (since Arma II is at a late stage in development,) maybe a mod that includes it for all vehicles is possible? In fact which member did it and does he have a thread? That's model + model.cfg stuff. Typically, the normal practice is to put the gunner proxy fixed in the _traverse selection in both view and gunner LOD's. If you put the gunner proxy in the _elevation selection in the gunner LOD, you can move it around with the hands matching the handles implicitly. You don't want to view that in view LOD though as it would look hideous externally. What I'm guessing happened here is the gunner proxy's in a selection branched to _elevation, but with some nice offset/inverted coef's to move the gunner around. + Aside from the model-specific maths, it's simple to implement in models and model.cfg files. - Can't be done in a mod, requires specific model/model.cfg work.

Adumb loves you long time too. I'm as much a lawyer of interwebs as Oh (Fishysticks): Dead Rats is a sequel without equal.

Nah, sadly CM's not really in a whole lot of trouble really. Worst case scenario they have to rebrand their product, but our esteemed colleague Mr. Kegetys has provided a working tool demonstrating how easy it is to generate new product names. Now if CM happens to use that tool, then that's a commercial usage violation of Finnish copyright statutes, I'm sure that the attorney's representing Rare Exports, LLC would be more than suitable to represent the plaintiff in that potential proceeding. So once they got a new brand name, they just have some slaves, er I mean artists, drool over it for a couple days, then run it down to kinkos and run off a few dozen copies, and presto, history's rewritten, His Most Glorious and Exalted Emminency Clive of the Lindops (pbuh) has a fine new wardrobe worthy of most magnanimous praise, and we have world peace, end to hunger, disease, and global warming.

In for the win: http://pc.ign.com/articles/135/135449p1.html April 14, 1999 on part 3 at the bottom.

My google'd contributions: Link's invalid, and Prague Post seems to have not put their July-Dec 2005 archives online, yet. It's a shame, it's an excellent article with useful info. http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2005/08/03/virtual-victory.php Gamasutra post-mortum for BI's development and delivery of the product labeled OFP: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011219/spanel_01.htm Epic tail of publisher fail - "Bohemian Crapsody": http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=102189 Various other bits, duplicates some parts from the Prague Post article, and ties in factoids available from Czech Ministry of Justice publicly available online business records: http://www.cbw.cz/en/bis%92-armed-assault-on-pc-gaming-/2918.html

0 - No context is given, so I presume aggregate stats across entire product family. 1 - Fair argument there, peak and avg active stats are nebulous due to multiple concurrent games. Additionally, your point stands about validity of 'uniqueness' of accounts. 2 - No source is given for what source is 'official', and what constitutes a download. 42 million downloads, along with a Fileplanet most-downloaded sticker though has to account for something, even if it is franchise-wide. At this point though, since everything has bots, you kinda have to average in the bots as an indicator of market popularity, eg because if it wasn't popular it wouldn't be botted, particularly where there's little RMT potential other than leveling honor for a yuan or two. 3 - There is a data center with a fair bit of stored replays somewhere that Army Research Lab's got their hands on that gives interesting research. It's possible to build statistical overlays from thousands of played scenarios to determine statistically optimal routes, and in theory that could then be injected back into the game as guidance or real-time performance/deviation analysis. The record title also is fairly specific, and there's not likely anything else that would come close. There's three qualifiers: Free, Online, and Shooter. Online and Shooter, there's competition. Free and Online, plenty of those too. Free Shooter, those justifiably have crappy stats. Aggregate all three though, and nothing else comes close. It's a bit unfair though because as a non-commercial title they're the odd man out in a predominantly commercial market. 4 - Well yeah, but that's kind of a non-record isn't it? When there's nothing else to compare to or measure against, how do you gauge the significance? It's one of those retrospective things I guess. Now it's serious business, but back then, it was a wild gamble adventure. 5 - Look at the title. VAE's not exactly run out of the back of a single HMMWV, it's a mammoth setup. Anything remotely that size tends to be fixed site operations, eg mall arcade / hobbyist type stuff. It also doesn't specify whether that includes the lite version, which puts four dismounts and a driver in an expanded snowmobile trailer and is typically used by National Guard Recruiting. It takes a lot of real estate space to park even part of VAE, not to mention the infrastructure staff. I very highly doubt there's anyone else that's doing anything anywhere close in terms of scale. Then again, anyone else would be focused more on revenue returns, while VAE has predominately non-revenue objectives which helps justify the scale. The pics here give some sense as to the scale.

I see... * clone anims coming up the beach * low counts of high-poly vegetation * endless waves of billboarded grass (q: why are the camera angles so much lower than eye level?)