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fabrizio_t

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Posts posted by fabrizio_t

  1. Posted

    Will have to look again, will I see the reason? It's that "Arma3.exe has stopped working" message box. Will also run process explorer then. 8 GB RAM here. And indeed, c:\ where pagefile.sys is located has only 7 GB left.

    Check arma logs (.rpt) for crash info.

    In my case 3,5Gb of page file were not sufficient. Dunno about 7GB, since you have half of my RAM.

  2. Posted

    OMG, I hope new stable branch will not be released. Something has changed... Downloaded dev branch again, just to try. Severe problems for me just as weeks before when I tried dev branch the last time.

    - Lots of mods loaded, same mix as before.

    - Load Tanoa map, place a unit, "Preview"

    - Stuck somewhere in the process

    - Alt+TAB out/in -> arma3.exe is crashed

    - Back to stable

    Crash reason?

    I've  got quite a lot of "Out of memory" crashes on DEV recently.

    The reason was not DEV related, strictly speaking: game crashed because i was "tight" on space on the HD where swap file is located and ArmA3 was allocating many Gigs into pagefile,  causing temporary space exhaustion.

    The real anomaly is the game using  the pagefile so much file, as i have 16Gigs of memory, 4Gigs allocated for Arma ...

     

  3. Posted

    worked thanks :)

     

    btw i'm noticing the smoke use. by the AI.. and i started using it too in campaign/scenarios.. but I'm not sure how well it works, i still get shot at. it doesnt seem that thick (maybe its my graphics settings which i guess shouldn't matter to the AI) so not sure if I should throw 4 at a time or something for it to work 

     

     

    in this test it only seems to be effective when he drops a lot of smoke directly on an enemy a long distance away and tries to get as close as he can but he still gets killed once he gets within 200 meters. not sure how effective this would be in a more realistic situation where you throw smoke closer to yourself and the enemy AI has more than one firing angle on you .. any tweaks in this mod? 

     

    Hi harpred,

    not sure what you're willing to achieve there.

    Smoke grenades are normally used as light smokescreens or signalling devices.

    In the former case they usually serve as temporary concealment for withdrawal or flanking.

    Being simple smoke they're not intended to block incoming fire, but rather making it less accurate in order to favour a successful movement.

    Heavy smokescreens are not usually achieved by portable smoke devices.

    They're deployed either by artillery or mortars (or CAS) and they grant some concealment in case of the need for a frontal attack across a wide and barren field ( infact they were quite commonly used in WWI after the Somme).

    In this case the main advantage of the smokescreen is that enemy longer range weapons such as  machineguns and artillery have visibilty hindered, hence they lose effectiveness.

     

    Though there's still a high chance to be spotted through blowing smoke and enemy is very likely to blind fire through it as well.

    So you can't expect to get 100% concealment across the field.

    At about 200m. i think you should be ready for fighting already.

     

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    Currently when you garrison units of the same group into buildings, they all rotate according to formation direction. We can fiddle around with doWatch, but I want to simply set the direction of the unit via script and not have them twist back to formation direction.

    DoStop each of them and set their direction.

  5. Posted

    I think that the real problem is that AI doesn't have a concept of "disengage". If they see the enemy, they've got to fight, period. They practically stop following other orders, too, which is annoying. It'd be a great leap for ArmA to introduce a "turn tail and run" combat mode that could be ordered by the player. The "stealth" mode could place more emphasis on actively avoiding combat, as well.

     

    What ArmA needs is more reliable ways of ordering the AIs around. This includes disengaging, exact waypoint following (for example, if you send an AI somewhere, he will engage, but won't move from that spot unless ordered to stop holding it), fine stance adjustment (a great feature that the AI seems to have no concept of) and better behavior in confined spaces. I think the latter would be best achieved by detecting when the AI is entering a "confined space" and switching to a completely new "behavior model" more suited to urban combat. Old Rainbow Six games and the first three Ghost Recons (the latter were not too shabby, either) are a great example of AI behavior done right.

     

    I've ranted so many times about AI non being able to properly withdraw / flee over years :)

    It's amusing AI units still flee in formation.

     

    I agree that "stealth" mode should make AI more "stealthy", meaning avoid sprinting and idle standing / crouching when enemy is in sight.

     

    Not sure at all about the need of further / tight orders, i think micro-managing is already too much.

  6. Posted

    AI definetely improved across time.

     

    2 years ago you needed mods in order to get suppressive fire / suppression, morale penalties impacting behaviour and accuracy, consistent use of frag / smoke grenades.

    Now vanilla AI provides these features.

    Moreover targets detection has been revised and now works better, as well as pathfinding.

    Sure, there are still issues, such as problems with convoy driving, firing accuracy glitches, occasional hiccups, problems with rearming and healing, etc.

     

    Yes steps were done in the right direction.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted

    HI, i just have two questions.

     

      1. Is this truly force AI to use Grenade Launchers and Frag Grenades on Infantry.

     

    2. Is it compatible with TPWCAS - AI suppreesion mod ?

    1. AI units will aggressively use frag grenades as well as smoke grenades (configurable via config.sqf). They use grenade launchers already in vanilla.

    2. no, bCombat handles suppression already on its own.

  11. Posted

    Hi, I recently bought our own server with my friends and I would like to use this mod, I know it´s possible because we were in clan which was using it.

    Other mods are insttaling, that you add them through ftp on server, copy bikey of that mod to folder keys and add name of that mod to boot commands. But this mod has no bikey.. so..

    Can someone please describe how to install it? I already downloaded that rar, unziped it placed it on server,rename it too @bcombat add -mod=@bcombat and --filepatching to boot comands. But still when I want to join my server. Its saying you have to install authoriated keys for this mod(bikey) and kicked it me out. What am I doing wrong please? :D

     

    Here are some screenshots how I seted It.(I hope I can post here some of them as url..): http://prntscr.com/bz7hsc, http://prntscr.com/bz7j2c, http://prntscr.com/bz7jrd

    Thanks for responding.

     

    Can't answer , but many people are running bCombat on a MP environment, pretty sure they will help.

  12. Posted

    Hi Folks,

    I've used a few different AI mods but I haven't tried this one - one thing mentioned on the first page is surrender/fleeing - I don't think I've ever observed an AI opponent fleeing or surrendering - does this actually happen in Arma ?

    Thanks...

    Regards,

    Scott

    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

     

    It's optional. Should be enabled via config.sqf ( bcombat_allow_surrender = true ).

    May break missions / campaign mechanics  of course.

  13. Posted

     Sorry I dont mean to argue with it but i've been re-running this test hiding blocks and blocks away and every time -100% at some point the AI just turns on some ESP and finds player with bcombat.. Ive been replaying exact scenario in Vanilla and this doesnt happen at all. I noticed this all the way back with the old campaign and its still present, I cant keep making videos because sometimes it takes a long time to kick in but I encourage you to run realtime tests with zeus -just shoot and run far away with zero possibility of visibility and hide out in a building.

     

    Well i wrote already about vanilla having  the exact same positional information as bCombat, but not happening to actively  to use it ( = static AI ).

     

    However the detection scenario is something i've tested many times.

    Here is a sample video showing what i see:

     

    • Player shoots while an enemy AI group sits about 80-100 meters away.
    • Some AI units are detached to investigate.
    • They move into general area of player while failing to pinpoint it.
    • They move back to group.
    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    Finished first testing phase on v0.20.
    Lots of cleanup involved, including bDetect removal and morale system tied to BIS native logic.
    Different visibility checks too, in order to accounf for massive foliage.

    A few small issues should still be ironed out, some fine-tuning should be done on balancing of features.

    All in all it works well on Tanoa, which is a completely different environment if compared to Altis.

     

    I'd like to rework a bit a few features.  For instance i'd like to further expand the "investigate" behaviour.
    It does work already in v0.18, but i think some gaps may be filled between "close threat" and "far threat" behaviour patterns.

     

    No ETA as usual,  work in progress.

    • Like 11

  15. Posted

    AFAIK, Its arma related bug. I cannot hide in house, beacuse ai know i'm here, same if i come in town and hear reports from my squad members Enemy - 100M - i'm looking at the map, and see enemy in building, even if he is covered/invisible from our side. You can report it on Arma feedback tracker.

    No, you can definitely hide into houses in ArmA 3.

    There's 2 ways an AI unit will detect you there:

     

    1) it has some line-of-sight on you, even just on some inches of your body through a window

    2) it can hear you, meaning it's close and you're moving / making noise

     

    The potential issue imho is AI is very sensitive and accurate in its detection, probably a tad too much.

    This especially applies to subsequent re-detection.

    EDIT:

    To clarify my impressions: i've run first mission of Apex campaign a few weeks ago.

    Vanilla.

    I did move to some crest, was detected by AI enemies about 100 meters away and fired upon.

    I crawled back.

    Then i moved to their flank by keeping concealed behind the crest.

    I kept some distance too.

    As soon as i popped out of vegetation / crest  almost at their back and at about 100 meters they opened fire on me.

    I was still crawling.

     

    • Like 1

  16. Posted

     This mod still suffers from a huge cheat/bug in which Ive brought up before -that being enemy AI retain too high a knowsabout for too long and know exactly wwhere you are hidden when in a building in an unrealistic way: skip to 3:05 if just wanna see the hunt

     

     

     

    bCombat does not rely on knowsabout ( an obsolete command ) except for some quick pre-checking.

     

    bCombat does not cheat either, as it uses perceived enemy position as it's known by the game itself.

    This information is then actively used to make AI move on to investigate, something vanilla doesn't do despite having the needed info.

    So the point is whether perceived position is realistically given out by BIS engine. 

    I've definitely seen issues with detection in plain vanilla ArmA3.

     

  17. Posted

    ^

    Sorry if I say something stupid, but wouldn't it be easier and performance-friendly to simply just ask someone to model these very primitive objects in the same proportions as the original ones - but with correct geometry ofcourse - and then write a replacement cfg for them?

     

    Sure, but not really my cup of tea.

    I dislike the idea of micromanaging "wrong" objects as it's not much feature/future proof.

  18. Posted

    Thanks for the heads-up, much appreciated.

     

    I got the angle wrong about the CQB radar, I used to believe the total viewing angle was twice the amount specified in the config file. My bad, 208° seems pretty good.

    I understand your philosophy about movement being a priority over fire (I myself support aggressive movement tactics).

     

    Yesterday's tests where very good, except for a few instances where the AI simply did not engage an unthreatening enemy at close range. The enemy was definitely spotted, was not moving (neither was the good guy) and was oblivious to the presence of the good guy. See here:

     

    http://imgur.com/a/QlFlr

     

    What could explain this behavior?

     

    Another suggestion: could we improve the AI's behavior at long ranges? ArmA (vanilla / modded) has always been really shitty about this, AIs can be sniped at high ranges (let's say 500 m) and they do little more than falling to the ground. Is it normal that the usual "move to cover / flank" behavior goes out the window at higher ranges?

     

    Thanks again for your fantastic work.

     

    About the AI unit not reacting: it may be the unit is "stuck", as it happens sometimes in vanilla game.

    Not really sure, but it seems to  me (looking at the AI feet area) that another dead AI unit may intersect the alive one, this usually gives targeting problems to AI.

    Otherwise this kind of behaviour may be caused by heavy suppression or by fleeing, but that's hard to tell without debug info / debug balloons active.

     

    • Heavily suppressed units lose courage and they may end pinned.
    • Fleeing units have unpredictable behaviour (vanilla behaviour).

     

    ---

     

    About behaviour at long range: flanking from high distance may be questionable, however the point is that targeted units should not necessarily move or  flank when targeted.

    Think about different situations:

    Are they supposed to be holding the position the moved to?

    Are the cleared to attack that far ?

    Are they able to detect ( hear, see) attacker  from that far ?

    if you wish to experiment, you may try this and check what happens (don't know):

    • give to targeted  AI group a GUARD behaviour
    • set them to  FIRE ENGAGE / AT WILL 

    then within bCombat config.sqf set:

    bcombat_degradation_distance = 2000; // let's exclude features degradation for a bigger range from player position
bcombat_allow_hearing_coef = 1;  // this allows enemy to HEAR shots from a distance equal to muzzle speed, e.g 800-900 mt for long range rifles. Normally it's capped to 400-500. 
bcombat_fire_back_group_max_enemy_distance = 1000;  // allows enemy to react to incoming fire from farther, provided he detects the shooter and weapon range, constrained to his ability, allows him to take some far shots
bcombat_suppressive_fire_distance = [50, 1000];   // Raises max suppressive fire distance to 1000 mt.
bcombat_investigate_max_distance = 1500; // allows units to investigate way farther 
bcombat_targeting_max_distance = [500, 1500];  // clears units to move farther from actual position and assigned waypoint in order to chase enemies

    See what happens, i'm curious.

    All this is only for sake of experimenting as it may have some sensible computational overhead.

    EDIT:

    when targeted from 500 mt. distance and farther enemy units should still be able to move to nearby cover, unless ArmA native close-bullet detection is failing for very far shots. It could well be.

  19. Posted

    I'm just back from tonight's ArmA session. We finally decided to give this mod a go. We didn't test it before since it wasn't expected to work in MP.

     

    The point is, it does!

    Up until tonight we were using ASR AI3 + FFIS. We were kinda fed up with the AI standing up in obviously stupid cover under fire and basically being extremely static. With bCombat, we were very pleased to see dynamic AI movement from cover to cover, real suppressive fire and generally very human-like behavior.

    To my mind, some points are worth improving:

    • CQB radar: I think the AI has a very narrow field of view and sometimes misses very obvious enemies because they're a bit too far on their flanks (while they'd be perfectly able to see them if they kept their head on a swivel). Should I play with bcombat_cqb_radar_params to improve this?
    • More grenade throws! Even when the enemy is known and near, I think the AI still misses a lot of opportunities to throw them 'nades
    • We had a slight problem with an AI group packing around a telephone pole because it was the only available cover...
    • Could we get a status whether this should or shouldn't be used in MP and why?

    With that in mind, this mod is truly a joy to use. We got a much, much increased challenge tonight. Thanks!

     

    CQB radar is a complex feature, technically and balancing-wise.

    It sits on top of many other features, i'll give a glimpse of what's under the hood.

     

    Basically, you don't really want to have foes always identified and targeted at distance on sides or that will end up hindering flanking tactics and overall movement. 
     
    CQB radar fits AI with a wide FOV ( > 200° ), but that's costrained to a low maximum distance ( bcombat_cqb_radar_max_distance = 75 mt ).
    There are many more contraints for an enemy to be "seen" by CQB radar: 
    • enemy should be visible (ehm ... obviously)
    • spotter unit skill should be high enough (a bit of randomization plays here) 
    • spotter unit should not be suppressed already
    • spotter unit should not be busy with higher priority tasks ( e.g. movement to cover, covering leader, returning fire on thtreatening units ). I'm not telling about bCombat tasks here not to giving headache ;)
     
    Please consider that even whenever a unit sucessfully detects some enemy on its side it won't necessarily open fire on it, as any enemy is conceived as target of opportunity unless it's actively threatenting.

    bCombat AI units won't necessarily pull the trigger on any targets, rather they consistently return fire if attacked (unless heavily suppressed) and possibily return fire on enemies threatening their leader or other squaddies.

    The reason being AI units have a destination to be reached (current waypoint) as well as rules of engagements ( combat mode ): fulfilling these is higher priority that brainless skirmishing.

     
    Targets evaluation is peculiar of bCombat, units are expected not to shoot non-threatening enemies in many circumstances, for example:
    • if a unit is flanking enemies and moving at good speed it's very likely it will avoid opening fire on non-threatening enemies on sides till reaching an advantage position (or being pinned down)
    • other enemy targets may be in sight and better preferred targets ( eg. assigned targets, enemies threatenting group leader or current waypoint ).
    • unit may be busy with special actions (e.g. move to cover, move to heal, embark / disembark, ...)
    The main difference between bCombat against vanilla AI / other mods is the the balancing of movement vs. fire, whereas vanilla is "move > detect > shoot" ending up bland and static.

    Movement is central in bCombat as suppressive effects on morale are way higher for attacking from side / back and higher ground and this encourages playing more tactically.

     
     
    About grenades, they're usually overkill in bCombat. Deadly, as units may lob them over roofs for instance.

    However you may want to add some "virtual" grenades to units ( increase bcombat_grenades_additional_number ) and / or increase frequency by reducng timeouts ( bcombat_grenades_timeout ).

    You may play with distances as well ( bcombat_grenades_distance ).

    Keep in mind that bCombat units won't usually lob grenades at visible enemies, for obvious reasons.

     
    About the good old "pole" ( and it's brother, the bulletproof iron fence ) they're a couple problematic objects sitting there since ArmA 2.

    Vanilla considers them valid "cover" too. The issue is they have a large bounding box and this tricks the cover checking routines of bCombat as well.

    Only way around would be blacklisting of them, not really sure if worth it.

     
    About MP: it works as you noticed except for minor issues, as long as AI in local to server.

  21. Posted

    I've just begun testing bCombat v0.20 - "Apex", in combination with Unsung 3.0 mod.
    Great fun in the jungle, except for some minor issues.

     

    New version will bring re-balancing of features as well as cleanup / removal of deprecated components ( e.g. bDetect ).
    It will also take advantage from a handful of recently introduced scripting commands.

    No ETA for now, more info will follow depending on the outcome of testing.

    • Like 15

  22. Posted

    Hi everyone! I'm new to Arma and I love the idea of bCombat. But I'm having the weird problem where my stamina bar disappears when bComabt is active.

     

    I tried finding a solution, but none of the ones I found worked, including "disable/enable stamina bar". I couldn't find any bcombat.sqf file to edit using the suggestion much earlier in this thread, either.

     

    Suggestions?

    Open config.sqf, set:

    bcombat_allow_fatigue = true;
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