xxbbcc

Seriously dude, you better check what is worth reporting or not... You deliver a general: Even then he wouldn't have any right to dismiss it. I do agree that it was a general line, but I did find several bugs in QG (at least a few of them are definitely not ArmA related.) I wanted to descrbed them here, but couldn't figure out how do hidden text. I don't think they can be reported in the bugtracker, since QG is not a BIS product. And BTW, he was already using the same attitude towards others in several other topics. If the mods don't think it's worth a PM for, that's fine. I agree with others: there were better addons released for ArmA and even for (the supposedly much more limited) OFP. Abandoned Armies, anyone? All in all, it's a reasonable try, nothing special - I do like the new islands and the units and it's a nice thing to have some more SP missions. And I believe the file version difference might be because of the 1.08-1.08Hotfix differences. There IS a patch after 1.08, but maybe not many know about it. I knew that it's there but don't have it installed.

Shadow NX: I wasn't whining, but making a statement. I also reported you to the mods - no one asked your advice, especially not in the way you <s>barfed it up</s> gave it. BTW, Royal Flush is somewhat better than the original campaign, but it's nothing special. It's very, very short - took me ~6 hours to play through the whole thing with several reloads. The arms dealer is a novel idea, but the implementation quickly wears out and I started to find it a boring chore. I'd write more but I don't know how to create hidden text and don't want to spoil it for others. The characters are ok, but I never felt any attachment that I did with the characters in OFP, but that might be just me. Because of the reloads, cutscenes are more of a punishment than fun as there is no way to skip most of them. I really, really hate watching the same thing over and over and over and over... you get the point. (At least these are cutscenes, not the cardboard cutouts from the original campaign.) I also had at least 5-6 bugs in this campaign, but nothing that would prevent playing it. All in all, someone here said it was reviewed at ~77% and that's about right. Unless you really want it ASAP, wait until the price drops or get it from the cheapest place.

<s>One has to wonder if this thing was tested even once before they slapped the price tag on it.</s>

The United Sahrani map has different buildings in a number of places. (Ruined camps, mines, etc. I don't remember seeing any of it before.) I already found several bugs in the Royal Flush campaign.

There are really no words to even to begin to describe how FUBAR'd the ArmA UI is. OFP's UI sucked big time but ArmA ****ed up "default icon" UI is just worthless. I don't know who ever thought that this piece of **** is good to have, but it's not. I couldn't find a single occasion when I thought this piece of ***** was even remotely useful, but it's unbelievably annoying when some of the menu options just jump into the center of the screen in the middle of a fight. <s>Thanks BIS for another well done piece of work!</s> Edit: Is there a way to turn off this cr@p for good? I keep getting killed because of it. I really cannot imagine a worse "improvement". Edit 2: added a feature request to have this thing removed. Anyone who has similar feelings about it, can vote for it here.

I got mine, too. The Atari DL version works fine with the DL from Metaboli. (I did get a few error messages while the 1.08 patch was running, but since I already had it, I just clicked on Ignore and it went through.) Performance seems to be somewhat better (I guess the island is optimized better?) and the missions are ok so far. I wouldn't go as far as "superb", but definitely better than the original campaign. (To be fair, that's not hard at all, since the original campaign sucked without end.) I'll see what I think once I'm done with it.

Thanks for this nice mission!

Thank God for that! Having "Microsoft" and "trusted" in the same sentence would be a joke. And as for mission makers craving "control": don't release your missions, then no one will be able to take anything from it. But I for sure like the ability to change things if I need to. I've seen mission makers being less than helpful when asked about changing some aspects of their mission, because they thought it was perfect and everyone liked it that way.

I'm most definitely against encrypting missions, even though I can imagine that some use the freedom to rip off others. I'm not a scripter (have no time for it), but on rare occasions it's still good to have the ability to tweak missions here and there if I really don't like something. For example, there was a mission which used some extra menu items in the Actions menu that were really annoying (to me at least), so I opened it up and got rid of it. It made the mission immediately a lot better and the author was not willing to do it in the real one because he was convinced that everyone liked it. Of course, distributing a ripped mission is wrong if you don't credit the people who did the original, but locking it down would be a lot worse. (Not to mention it helps others with learning how to script something.)

LCD, Thanks for the mission, it's pretty good, I enjoyed playing it. I didn't really understand the role of the sniper - why was he even there? It didn't make sense to me. I agree with Heatseeker about the intro breaking up - for long periods in the intro I only saw very blocky graphics, so you should probably think about using graphics preloading. Thanks for the mission again - looking forward to part 2.

I'd still be able to use it. And I guess MP people would be happy about it, too.

MrN, thanks for the update. Trying it out... Edit: here's an update. The ambush job now works fine, it ends properly. I still have the same problem with the kill the officer job. I don't know if this helps, but when I shoot the officer, he's immediately removed from the map (the body immediately disappears) - I saw this through the scope. The same thing happens then - when I get transported back to base, the officer doesn't have the end mission menu item. This happened with 0.92c, and the kill the officer job was the 4th in the chain. When I reloaded to the autosave and got a different mission, it ended properly (defend the base.) Thank you very much for your update, though - it's a good mission and it gets better every time you post something. Edit 2: it seems that the savegames are getting excessively big, even when there is no job in progress. I'm at a point where after the 9th mission, the autosave is ~7 MB and the game started crashing when I reload it. I noticed that there are quite a few dead enemy soldiers lying just around the base - the ones that gout out of vehicles and then got shot. Although all other enemy units are removed from the map, these always stay around, even after the job is done. I have ~25 around my base, but I'm sure I have at least another ~25 around other locations (where I had jobs before.) Is there a way to get rid of these when a job is finished? I'm sure it'd help with the savegame size.

It happened to me, in other places, too and it was quite suprising (in a good way.) Even though I got shot, it was because of my own carelessness. But I still get shot very frequently by enemy AI that just go directly through walls (happens in almost every mission where I enter buildings and wait inside), so it still has major, major problems, too.

The Perpetua campaign is pretty good, you might want to try it. Fedain is good, too. And there was a third one (PMC First something - I cannot recall right now the name, not at gaming machine), that's good.

I'm sorry if this has been asnwered before - couldn't find it. Does anyone know if this will be released in the US?

Yes, I agree - many thanks for your work.

I'd say keep the metabugs - they're very useful in seeing which issues are related, without adding such relationships to every single issue in a set of related ones. I also agree with Suma, that votes on metabugs should be ignored, as metabugs are not bugs - they're simply helper tools to collect a set of actual bugs under one umbrella. One thought on reproduction steps: while I consider them very important (I'm an engineer, too), with the scale of Arma and the unpredictability of the AI (which is of course a basic property of any AI to an external observer), it's sometimes extremely hard to reproduce a problem, especially for a user. For example, when I report AI problems, I know very well that something is wrong, but it's extremely hard to reproduce the steps that led to the problem. I cannot reproduce a situation, when I get shot through a building, for example (although it did happen multiple times), but it's not an overly common situation. So the only thing I can do is to report the location/environment and generic conditions in the game, but nothing more. So the expectiation to receive as clear repro steps as one would get with a piece of business software is a bit extreme, in my opinion.

Suma, Thanks for this info. Do you guys have a roadmap for patches down the road? (Approx. dates, what fixes are in the works, etc.) I'm asking because Arma still has several issues that I'd like to see fixed before I'd consider buying expansions or future versions and it'd be nice to see an official long-term plan/commitment to these fixes.

I voted no, for multiple reasons: 1. What's the guarantee that this central BIS database will be running 2 years from now? I've seen countless sevices that promised long term service go down one way or another and the customers were left in the water. 2. Don't play online with unknown people. 3. Just like someone else said, I don't like to register for something I don't need. 4. There are enough other things to fix in Arma so doing this is a waste of time. Fix the game first.

Well, if you had taken the time to look through the bugtracker, you would've seen that that list is pretty much it. No fixes to a bunch of major bugs, which you might personally think of as eye candy crap. To me, getting shot in the head through a set of concrete buildings or getting spotted through entire forests in the middle of the night by an enemy unit without NVGoggles or watching AI units enter buildings through the walls but not being able to do so through doors doesn't seem all that realistic in this "most realistic military simulation ever". Or how about the totally realistic inability to move while looking through a... <gasp> binoculars? Or all those women in Arma, right? Wait, there are none. Not that I want to shoot women characters, but they certainly added to the atmosphere in OFP, even though you'd probably classify them as eye candy crap. (To be fair, even I don't consider this last one a high priority fix, with all the other thousand holes in the game.) It'd be nice to have those fixed and looking through the bugtracker it seems that those issues will stay with us for a long time. Who knows, with a bit of luck, you might see them again when you pay for Arma2. I applaud their efforts to patch the game, but right now BIS doesn't have a whole lot of credit with me. If they come through, I might reconsider.

I got 7 or 8 UAZs on one of the patrol missions. And the base ambush had 4 BMPs and at least 6 UAZs. My entire team got wiped out. But it was still a fun job. One suggestion: can you please add a "Force End Job" menu/radio item? I know it could be used to cheat in the mission, but even if someone does that, it's still a single player mission, so no one is hurt. It'd also help me with the jobs not finishing problem. I'm beginning to think that it's not a problem with the individual jobs, but an overall mission bug somewhere, that is, once the mission gets into a certain invalid state, no matter what mission I select, it won't finish correctly. It might even be related to save games - in the last run, I saved/loaded the game back a lot less than before andt he mission went on without errors longer. This might also be fixed when finally the 1.09 patch comes out, but having a way of terminating the job would make it easier to play the mission. Edit: MrN, here is the autosave file, just before selecting a new mission. It seems that no matter what job I get at this point, that job will not finish. Hopefully, this autosave will help you track down the problem. (This is after 4 or 5 missions - this is the first job, where there is no cutscene when the job is assigned or when boarding the chopper.) http://rapidshare.com/files/54323849/autosave.rar.html Also, some tweaking of the helo landing script would be nice - the helicopter killed several of my men on multiple occasions when it drops just after taking off. (This happens only when getting out of the chopper.)

Thanks for the upload, I'll try and sort it tomorrow. Anyone else had this? Cheers MrN, Thanks a lot. For now, I just reloaded the last autosave and got a different mission. It's somewhat good, too - I made a mess in that ambush. Let me know if you need earlier savegames, too. I have one that's just before the job is done (a few enemies need to be killed.) Thank you very much! I like your mission a lot - nowadays it's the only mission I play. PS: I found the same problem with the Raid mission (kill the officer.) After I shot the officer, I got the "Officer is down" message, but at this point, I was still fairly far away from the red target marker - I used an M107 for the shot. The Raid mission in the notebook had a green checkmark. Since the enemy was still strong I decided to retreat (I didn't go closer to the red mark) and call for extraction. I noticed during the walk that the red marker was gone after a while. When I got back to the base, the officer didn't have the End Mission menu again. Note, that in both ambush missions, I was almost exactly on the mark location.

MrN, I tried it again, "Ambush" most definitely seems to be broken. I got Ambush as the 5th job in this mission and it happened exactly the same way as before (but at a different location.) Finished the mission, got the objective done message, called extraction and the officer doesn't have the End Mission menu item. Others (the medic tent, the ammo tent) do but they say I have to finish the mission first. I uploaded the save game here: http://rapidshare.com/files/54153012/save.rar.html This is already back at the base. If you open the map, you can see that the mission markers are already gone (I marked the mission location and the enemy source position.) I'm playing in easy mode with no effects and no addons. The mission version is 0.92b (file size is 7409921 bytes.) Can you please take a look? Thanks, xxbbcc

Could you put the savegame up for download so I can have a peak at it? Don't know if it'll help but I've run out of ideas. Unfortunately, no; I deleted all savegames, since they took up a lot of space (not just from your mission, from others, too.) I might try again, as I like your mission, but ArmA is just waaay too frustrating. But anyway, thank you for your work - someday when BIS finally fixes it, I might be able to play it through.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! If this was something physical I'd built like lego I'd smash into little pieces. I honestly don't know what's going on with your game xxbbcc. I'll double check everything but I can't think of a reason why if the objective gets ticked you don't get the action. MrN, thank you, don't worry about it - eventually the game crashed on me; I reloaded from the last autosave, got a different job, but now it seems no matter how many times I try, the game crashes when I try to reload later. (The job type doesn't seem to matter anymore, although I was able to reload during the ambush mission several times.) I think I'll stop playing ArmA again until at least the savegame patch comes out for this pathetic "game". I feel sorry for you (and other mission makers), since you did a good job with your mission and your new version was pretty much the only reason for me to run ArmA after a while.